Whose Story Is It?

At the age of six, I was writing fiction about a willy-wagtail, whose best friend was an ant. (Even then I had a good grasp on relationships!) Several years later, I had moved to human protagonists—mainly young girls living in boarding schools and excelling at ballet. I had no experience of either boarding school or ballet but I had my dreams. By adolescence, I was writing fiction about homelessness and drug addiction—once again, from vicarious experience. And then I went to uni to do a literature degree and realised that great Australian novelists were serious, learned and (then) mostly male. I still wanted to write my novel, but I decided I had to live a bit first.