‘The Memory Chest’ was my very first novel and believe it or not, it was over sixteen years in the making.
The idea for a novel began when I first pulled together the recordings of Jean Zuvela into the book ‘Glimpses of Jean’. That was my very first attempt at writing a book and I struggled with retaining Jean’s unique ‘voice’ and making it readable. Jean was a voluble conversationalist and often went wildly off onto tangents, eventually finding her way back to the original point. Because I was dealing with transcriptions of tapes it took months and months to get some semblance of sequence and order, but eventually I got there. I gave the manuscript to a couple of people to read and my brother-in-law came back with the comment “who is this actually written for?” Well, that floored me, mainly because I couldn’t adequately answer, and I interpreted the comment as an implied criticism. ‘Glimpses of Jean’ was then shelved for the next sixteen years until I dragged it out in 2020 and reworked it, and finally, published.
Before I shelved it, however, I had become entranced by the story of Jean’s mother, a rather undeveloped character in Jean’s memoir, but nonetheless with an intriguing life story. I didn’t know enough about her to write a biography but felt that I could use her story as the basis of a novel.
And so, I wrote the first two chapters about a child who was born and lived in Zlarin, a small island off the Dalmatian coast. It was terrifying writing a novel for the first time. I really felt as if my creativity was on show, and so I was very hesitant about continuing, completely lacking in confidence with what I had written.
Then I got a new job on the other side of Australia, sold my house and moved into a role which demanded all of my time, so the two chapters were shelved, along with ‘Glimpses of Jean’. Over the years I would revisit them every now and then and eventually decided they were actually quite good and that the story was worth developing. But I lacked both the time and inclination to revive them.
After I retired, I started writing Mum and Dad’s family histories. Dad’s was first and when I came to publishing I had no idea how to start. I decided to self-publish, realising a family history was hardly the sort of manuscript a major publisher would embrace. So, I looked online for a publisher near me, and found the wonderful Jenny Mosher, who lived in the next suburb. Dad’s history, ‘Winton’ was a large tome, and so I decided I needed to start with something small just to test the system, and so I dug out ‘Glimpses of Jean’, did some reworking, and sent it off.
Jenny Mosher was efficient and systematic and soon gave me a great deal of confidence in the self-publishing process, so I continued to use her company for the family histories.
Once they were published, I pulled out those two chapters about Jean’s mother and decided to have another go. Jean’s mother had lived in the now ghost town of Gwalia after she married and had suffered the tragic loss of her husband in a mining accident while she was pregnant with their first child. The mining accident resulted in a protracted court case which was well documented in the Western Australian newspapers, and so for the first time I began to realise what a valuable source those newspapers were, and discovered Trove, that wonderful national repository.
I began to enjoy the writing of this story as well as the research every step seemed to require. The storyline largely followed the events described in Jean’s memoir, but eventually I decided to move away from the original events and made some changes, as I really felt the story needed some happiness and Jean’s mother’s own life was marred by continual tragedy.
I was getting towards the end of the story and was reasonably pleased with what I had written but had the inescapable feeling that it lacked something. The book still didn’t have a name and I had no idea how to end it. The (fictitous) Zlarin bell was a recurring theme throughout the book, and I suspected that somehow I needed some further reworking around that.
The inspiration came to me during a shower one morning – I’ve since discovered that lots of inspiration occurs during a shower! I suddenly realised that I needed both a modern as well as an historical perspective to the book, and that the Zlarin bell could be the thread that brings them together.
Inspired, I created the character of Susan, a Sydney teacher who had inherited a house in Boulder in 2004. The house just happened to be the house that Jean’s mother – now renamed Katja – had lived in, and during the process of demolition a forgotten memory chest was discovered, and this chest contained the Zlarin bell. This enabled me to introduce an element of mystery as Susan tried to find the original owner of the bell, an investigation which became interwoven with Katja’s story. It also gave me a name for the book!
Finally, I was excited about my novel and finished writing within the next two weeks. I gave the manuscript to a couple of people to read and they came back with positive comments, so I took a deep breath and sent it off for editing. My editor at the time was not very thorough, especially as he used a different program and I hereby apologise to all those readers who have been annoyed by several typos and mistakes.
Once published, I took a deep breath and hoped people would like it. I had no idea how to market a book (still a great weakness!) so my readership was limited to family and a few friends. Initial comments were very positive and although my readership was narrow, my confidence increased and I decided I could write fiction. I also decided that historical fiction was to be my genre in the future and as I loved the research I determined that I would use ghost towns as the basis of my stories.
I couldn’t wait to start writing my next novel…

Public speaking has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. This does not necessarily mean I enjoy it. I’ve always been reasonably introverted and having to get up and speak publicly is not something I willingly volunteer to do. But years of practice have meant I’ve developed the ability to manage presenting without falling into a nervous heap.
Giving book talks is part and parcel of being a writer, and to my surprise I am finding I am quite enjoying them.
My very first book launch was during COVID and like everything else at that time it was on Zoom. This was for ‘Winton, the Swann family history’ and a Zoom launch was quite fitting since I had family all over Australia and my audience came from all over.
Since then, my talks have always been to small groups such as at book launches, libraries, as an invited guest, radio interviews and to book clubs. I usually have a rough idea of what I am going to say but mostly I let the audience dictate where my talk is going to go. This leads to some interesting and very unexpected results.
Usually, I arrive early and try to meet people as they arrive, recording names so that I can use their name – not always successfully since I am woeful at remembering names and quite often end up calling someone the wrong name and then having to apologise profusely. I also try to find out a bit about attendees and what brought them to the talk. This enables me to direct what I say to their interests and make it a bit more personal.
This has led my talks in some very interesting directions! Following are a few examples.
I spoke about ‘The Memory Chest’ to a book club comprised mostly of former and current teachers. One of them asked how I plan my books and the sequencing of the plot. I had to admit that I don’t – especially with ‘The Memory Chest’ where I had completely changed it around half way through! Usually it is the events of the time that dictate my story line, and when I start writing a novel I have no idea where it is going to go, what is going to happen or where it is going to end. This was delivered to a shocked silence, to an audience that spend their life telling students to plan, draft and refine.
Another time I had been invited to do a radio interview and at the time was in the middle of writing ‘Nod to the Admiral’. As part of my research, I had spent several days prior to the interview researching, of all things, the introduction of septic tanks to Kalgoorlie as I had been hoping to incorporate that development into my story. In the middle of the interview the interviewer made the mistake of asking me about how I conduct my research. My eyes sparkled and I began: “Well, let me tell you about septic tanks….” He told me afterwards that was the last place he had expected that interview to go!
Sometimes it is not the subject but the process which ends up being the focus of the conversation. I was talking about ‘Women of Wolfram Camp’ to a group in Mareeba, but the conversation soon turned to the self-publishing process. Many of the audience were aspiring writers and wanted to know how it all worked. However, sometimes letting the audience lead means a talk can get hijacked. At an earlier launch of ‘Women of Wolfram Camp’, one of the audience members was also a local historian and the talk became more about her books than mine!
I will never forget one of the afternoon tea talks arranged by my cousin, Yvette. I gave a brief overview of many of my books, and when I came to ‘As I Remember It’, suddenly one of the women asked if the dentist in the book was Andrew Graebner – it was. Turns out she had worked for him. But then it got weirder. I also talked about ‘Glimpses of Jean’ and shared some of my memories of Jean’s Kalgoorlie home in Addis Street. This same woman looked with astonishment and asked what the house number was. I told her, and it turns out she had lived in the same house in her own childhood! Amazing coincidence.
Recently I launched ‘Last Coach to Quartz Hill’ in Georgetown about 400kms west of Cairns. The conversation turned to many of the historical events of the area and several of my audience turned out to be avid history buffs. We could have talked for hours. What really surprised me though, was that before the talk one of my cousins walked in to say hello, totally unexpectedly. When I was working the joke used to be that I had a relative in every town of Australia – so true!
I launched ‘Cossack Pearl’ in Karratha in 2025. The local library had organised quite a large group to attend. One was a woman who was a descendant of one of the characters in my book, which was a lovely touch. Another member of the audience was a woman I had worked with over twenty years beforehand and hadn’t seen since that time. It was quite a reunion.
‘The Sandalwood Cutter’ was launched at the Kalgoorlie Historical Society, and this was the first time I had returned to Kalgoorlie in over twenty years. Most of my audience turned out to be former friends and colleagues and it was more an evening of sharing memories than being about my book. It was a wonderful night!
So, each speaking event turns out to be quite unique in its own way. I love the interaction with potential readers and others who are interested for other reasons. I’m about to branch out and try a few writer’s festivals and such like so there are some new challenges ahead!
Before ending this, I must mention my ‘roadies’. In most cases my ‘roadies’ are family members who volunteer to help set up, manage sales, take photographs and carry boxes. There is also my friend Anne, who comes for long drives, helps set everything up and is a great companion. I could not do without them all!

Every day I receive upwards of twenty emails offering me marketing services. Usually, they are extremely long tirades of praise for ‘my book’ – rarely actually named – a detailed analysis of the gaps in my marketing, and then an offer to fix those gaps – at a cost.
I have learned to read through them all before deleting, because there have been a few genuine emails mixed into the pile, and this has been a valuable trick because I have learned much about what to expect.
Most of the generic emails are just feelers and instantly recognisable and don’t take too much time before I hit the delete button.
But the ones that do name one of my books take a little longer because at first glance they seem to be from a reader who has actually read the book.
I now recognise that the substance of the email is usually an AI-generated reworking of my blurb and biography. Long, elaborate sentences of praise are designed to make me feel good and respond positively, followed by detailed ‘analysis’ of my Goodreads and/or Amazon ‘followings’. The ‘hook’ is the offer of miraculous services to fix all of this.
The spammers have also discovered my website and are using the contact form in a similar manner. I began with a policy of responding to every contact form, as I felt it was only polite. Usually, I respond with a polite thank you for your comment and a ‘not interested’ for any services offered. They don’t give up though, as my response is often countered with a second attempt, and sometimes even a third.
I no longer respond to contact form emails that are not genuine questions or responses.
So, I was patting myself on the back for being pretty savvy about dealing with spam, until I fell, hook, line and sinker for a publishing fraud.
I received an email ostensibly from a publisher saying she had reviewed one of my books and was interested in having a discussion about publishing. Wow! That was unexpected. I googled the writer and her publishing company and all seemed to be quite genuine. So, I responded.
I received a reply saying that she would prefer to work through an agent and she even helpfully supplied a name. Being self-published, I didn’t have an agent, but as I had already been thinking about going down this route I started putting out some feelers. I even consulted a writers’ Facebook page asking about the process and sought advice about finding an Australian agent. I received several suggestions of helpful advice, mostly asking why I would want an Australian agent if the publisher was in New York. I thought about it, and had to agree, so I wrote to the agent the ‘publisher’ had suggested.
She was lovely. Extremely helpful, read a section of the manuscript and agreed that it should be taken further and re-published with a large publisher. I began to hope that, just maybe, my big break had finally arrived.
At this point, I began to feel that this had all been a bit too easy, and so I decided to do some more checking before proceeding any further. I emailed both the publishing company and the agent’s company, providing the email addresses I had been using and asking them to verify them.
Both were total frauds.
All my hopes and expectations came crashing down and I was grateful that I had not reached the point of signing any contracts or exchanging any money. Lessons learned!
My father used to say to me that if something was almost too good to be believed, then it probably wasn’t genuine. So true! I am now doubly cautious, of course, but still embarrassed at just how easily I was taken in. I still find it difficult to believe that there are people out there who spend their time deliberately trying to defraud people. This had been quite a lengthy process with several exchanges of emails and we weren’t even close to formalising any sort of arrangement, so the fraudsters were obviously in for both the game and the long haul, willing to put time and effort into reeling me in.
So, I remain self-published with obvious gaps in my marketing, still receiving copious emails from spammers who just do not give up.

At the end of every novel, I have written a tribute to the wonderful volunteers who maintain the Trove national database, a collaboration between the National Library of Australia and hundreds of partner organisations around Australia. Trove contains digital copies of newspapers, Government Gazettes, maps, magazines and newsletters. It also hosts books, pictures, photographs, archived websites, music and interviews, as well as information about famous Australians, including copies of letters, diaries and personal archives.
I began using Trove when I wrote my first family history and soon discovered a treasure trove (pardon the pun!) of old newspapers and copious mentions of family members. In the early days, many regional towns had their own newspapers and all of these have been painstakingly copied and keyworded into Trove. From these I was able to find out about births, deaths, social and sporting events, visitors and political events affecting individual towns. They gave substance to family members who until then had been just a series of dates and key life events.
Many of the journalistic constraints of today did not apply in the early days, and often the descriptions of events such as accidents are very graphic and extremely detailed. In particular, attitudes towards Aborigines were such that today would be termed racist, and I often find myself having to tone down the views and descriptions. Court cases and meetings are often transcribed word for word and can go for several pages in a newspaper.
When I turned my hand to historical fiction with my first novel, ‘The Memory Chest’, I used Trove to follow Katja’s court case and started to realise that there was a wealth of information about old Australian towns that no longer exist, all just sitting there on the web. So began the genesis of an idea to set my future novels in old ghost towns. As I said in a previous blog, I have always been fascinated by old towns, wondering what they might have looked like in their heyday, and this inspired the idea behind my second novel, ‘Nod to the Admiral’, set in the now disappeared town of Trafalgar.
I was much more systematic in my approach to this one. I first went back and read every article that referred to Trafalagar in its heyday. This gave me the years across which I was to set the novel, as well as the key events and people I could incorporate. So began my habit of using real events as the basis of my storylines; often I relied on the journalist’s descriptions to add colour and detail. As I develop the genealogies of the real people I wish to incorporate into the novel, I also look for mentions of them in Trove. Obituaries are particularly useful!
This initial research phase often takes months, but even after I start writing I find myself working with Trove open so that I can quickly go back and read about particular events or people. Sometimes I get lost down rabbit holes and spend days reading about something that never appears in a novel. One such case was with a pastoralist who was a minor character in ‘Last Coach to Quartz Hill’. In checking out his background I came across a court case where he was accused of ‘interfering’ with underage girls, and in fact had fathered several children. He was a prominent pastoralist, so I was fascinated to see how this case was treated in the newspaper. As the case progressed over a couple of years, the mentions became fewer and fewer, but I did eventually find out that he was gaoled for a period of time. Interestingly, there was a glowing obituary many years later which made no reference to his misdeeds. All of this occurred outside the time frame of my novel, so I never got to incorporate it, but it was a valuable lesson in the attitudes of the time.
Trove does have its challenges though. In the early days people were often referred to by initials and surname which makes a keyword search frustrating, especially when there are multiple family members living in the same town at the time. Misspellings by the original journalists are also frequent, and I find myself searching under several variations of names. The first names of women are rarely recorded, as they are usually referred to as ‘Mrs so and so’. Despite that, journalists often gave detailed descriptions of what women wore to parties, weddings etc, which is a valuable source of information about clothing.
It’s not just the articles which are valuable, but also the advertisements. These tell me which shops were operating, the types of services available, upcoming social events and much more. I remember trying to find details about Bridget Dutton’s new hotel for ‘Last Coach to Quartz Hill’, and it wasn’t until I found a ‘for sale’ notice written several years later that I was able to find out the number and type of rooms. Another memorable find was when I sent Katja, from ‘The Memory Chest’, off to the pictures at the Palace Theatre (every town had a Palace Theatre!) in Boulder. She was to see a film about Napoleon which was mentioned in the newspaper. I did a search of this film to see what it was about and found the original film on You Tube. It was surreal that I was able to watch the same film over a hundred years later!
Sometimes, the real characters I use are correspondents themselves, writing letters to the editor. One such person was William Shakespeare Hall, from ‘Cossack Pearl’, whose writings gave an insight to his views and opinions. Letters to the editor also give an insight into the burning issues of the time and these are regularly incorporated into the conversations between by characters.
The journalists themselves have often left me wondering. I dabbled with incorporating a character as a journalist in ‘Nod to the Admiral’, and had him reporting on several key events, including the building of the war memorial. It left me curious though, about how they collected and recorded their information and so in my next book, I have made the primary character a journalist. I’m learning a lot about telegraph machines and such like!
So, again I thank the volunteers of Trove. Without this database, my novels would never be written.

In this, my second blog, I decided to write about my other passion – genealogical research.
When my parents died, many years ago, they left behind folders and folders of painstakingly collected family history research. Some older family members had been researching for years and there were many records such as birth and death certificates and so on which had all been collected, rough notes added and then largely forgotten, and all without the benefit of the internet.
I took it all back to Sydney with me and decided I would organise it all, set it up electronically and then decide what to do with it. I joined My Heritage and set up an electronic family tree and began entering in all that Mum and Dad had collected over the years. It took about three days to verify all they had collected, and then I began to add information, curious to see how far back I could go. When I reached Alfred the Great, back in the 800s, I decided there just might be a book to write.
In the meantime I set up a family history Facebook page and began posting interesting bits of information as I discovered new people and soon created quite a following especially from my father’s extremely large extended family. I discovered many family members who had been involved in significant historical events, and so eagerly began indulging my other passion – history – adding historical details as I wrote.
It took about two years to compile ‘Winton’, the Swann family history (my father’s family). When COVID hit, and I was newly retired and confined to my house, I set to pulling the book together and it was published late in 2020. It was eagerly purchased by my family, and I held a Zoom book launch, attended by family members from all over Australia. Much more has been discovered since I published ‘Winton’ and I now know some of my assumptions were wrong, but other family members are now continuing the research. Family history is never ‘finished’!
As I compiled my father’s story, I had also come across a series of pages written by my mother, documenting her own life story. These were especially precious, as she had Parkinson’s Disease and later in life had lost the ability to write and eventually even to talk. So, a second book, detailing my mother’s family history and incorporating her own writing began to develop. She had a much smaller extended family, so when I published ‘They Came to Glengallan’, I expected few sales, but to my surprise there are a few purchases each month, largely I expect, because of the family association with the historic Glengallan homestead near Warwick in southern Queensland.
By now, I really had the ‘bug’ and decided I would tackle the Kroonstuiver family history, mainly as a record for my children and grandchildren. This was going to be far more difficult, firstly because very few living family members had any knowledge of their family – my ex-husband didn’t even know the names of his grandparents! Secondly, I spoke neither Dutch nor Indonesian, and most of the records were in these languages. So, I began a long and painstaking association with Google Translate. I also listened to several webinars about undertaking research of Dutch records and these were invaluable. Gradually I began to piece together the family history, bit by bit. I also made contact with a distant family member in the Netherlands who was researching one branch of the family and he taught me a great deal about genealogical research and interpretation of records. All of this resulted in ‘Crown Penny’. I admit it is an unusual title, but every time I entered ‘Kroonstuiver’ into Google Translate, it came back as ‘Crown Penny’ – at first I thought it hilarious but eventually decided to adopt it as the title of the book. This was an extremely rewarding book to write, because I discovered living family members we didn’t even know about, and copies of this book have gone to the Netherlands, Ireland and several other countries.
Family research published, I turned to writing historical fiction and began incorporating my newly learned genealogical research skills to researching the background of ‘real’ people included in my novels. I usually end up with pages and pages of background information about these people, much of which I summarise at the end of each book.
But there is nothing like the buzz of uncovering a long-forgotten family member, and so I began doing bits and pieces of research for friends. I’ve now researched a further five family histories for other people and the thrill of uncovering new information never dissipates.