About Diana

My mother read my sister and me lots of stories when we were small. Her favourites were The Selfish Giant and The Happy Prince by Oscar Wild. She read them with such love we still think of them as jewels. 

My father told us bedtime stories that he made up, and read us Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales.

When I was about seven I began sending contributions to the children's page of the daily newspaper and to the Children's Hour on ABC Radio – or wireless as it was called then. It was a great thrill occasionally to see a poem in print or hear a letter read over the air, and that's when my pleasure in writing began.

Now and then my uncle visited us from his home in Papua New Guinea. Listening to him and my father talk about foreign countries and tribes in tropical jungles took me far beyond Melbourne where I grew up.

I worked as a nurse and midwife in a remote part of the Solomon Islands – a string of almost 1000 islands between New Guinea and Vanuatu.

The hospital spread around a palm-fringed cove. It had no running water and no telephone, and when the generator broke down soon after I arrived it meant no electricity for months either. Apart from occasional faint and crackly broadcasts received on a transistor radio, letters were my link beyond the island shores. It was long before the days of mobile phones.

   
               Sea hunt canoes                            A feast                          Starting a medical trek

At night, if no babies were coming into the world, if the patients had settled, and if I wasn't on duty, I wrote letters by Tilley lamp to my family and friends. Those letters described everything: earth ovens, feasts, village fights with war clubs, medical treks on foot and by boat, patients arriving in dugout canoes or on stretchers their family had carried through the tropical rainforest, and pet parrots that sometimes came with a sick child – and swooped up and down the ward. 

After the Solomon Islands I worked in England where I met my husband. Once again I wrote lots of letters and had to post them because email didn't exist then. Back in Australia I attended writing classes when our children were small. Newspapers and magazines accepted my work, but it wasn't until our son and daughter had grown up that my first book was published.