I was born in 1966 in Sandringham, Melbourne, and lived with my parents (and later, my sister) in various suburbs until we moved to a fairly permanent home in Upper Ferntree Gully. This house, where my parents still live, overlooks the Ferntree Gully National Park on the eastern outskirts of Melbourne, and when we moved there in 1970, it was deep bush, with unmade roads, no sewerage system, and surrounded by towering gum trees, including one hollow tree that was my special cubby. These days, sadly, many of the trees are gone, and so many other houses have sprung up that most of that bushy feeling has been lost. However, there is still an unspoilt view of the mountainside, covered in trees, and hordes of rosellas, cockatoos, parrots and kookaburras fly through the garden.

The Dandenong Ranges has always been prone to devastating bushfires, and one of my clearest memories of early childhood is of fire. I remember our street so full of choking smoke that I couldn't see to the other end of it, and, that night, looking out onto the hillside and seeing the glow of spotfires still burning among the trees. It was frightening, but exciting too, and for many years afterward I would dream that I was packing bags in a panic, having to flee from the house because a bushfire was coming.

When I was six years old, my family moved to Papua New Guinea. My father was a pilot, and there was plenty of work for pilots of small planes in the mountainous Highlands, where the few roads were almost impassable and everything - passengers, cows, sacks of rice and flour, tins of fish and coffins - had to be transported by plane. It was terribly dangerous work. The mountains of PNG are steep and treacherous, shrouded in mists, and it was not unknown for the little planes to miss the short runways cut into the mountainsides, or for a peak to loom unexpectedly out of a thunderstorm, unmarked on the map. A friend of my father's was killed in one of these accidents.

The most important thing about living in New Guinea in the 70s, for me, was that there was no television. There was a tiny little library in Mt Hagen, where we lived most of the time, and by the time we left I knew most of the books there off by heart. I would read at the table, I read sitting up trees, I read in the dark. After Mum had turned off our bedroom light, I used to whip out my book and read by the very very faint light from the living room that filtered in through our door.

PNG was a pretty wild place to live, not as wild as it is now, but it wasn't very safe. We were burgled many times, and once, when Dad was away, Mum caught a burglar in our house in the middle of the night and chased him outside. It was very tropical. We had frangipanis in our garden, and pawpaw and banana trees. When we lived in Port Moresby, you couldn't walk in the garden at night without treading on frogs, and geckoes would run up our bedroom wall and across the ceiling. Every day at school home time, the heavens would open and it would pour with rain. PNG lies on a fault line, and there were little earthquakes all the time. It was quite normal to feel the ground shake and hear the plates rattle on the shelves. Often the power would go out and we would have to read by candle-light.

The mountains of New Guinea are so steep that the tribes who live in the different valleys all speak different languages. There are more than 700 different languages in this one country. Because the terrain was so difficult, the centre of the country was unexplored by white people for a long time, and the first white explorers only went into the Highlands in the 1930's. When my family lived there, in the early 1970s, that was only about 40 years before. There must have been lots of villagers who could remember a time before the whites came.

This meant that PNG was a very strange, very foreign place to live. In Mt Hagen, the village men walked around the market in their traditional dress, with lap lap leaves over their bums, feathers and shells in their hair, and otherwise more or less naked. The women were half-naked too, and were bowed down with the weight of their bilums, string bags that hung from their foreheads, which carried everything from sweet potatoes to babies. Everyone chewed betel nut and sugarcane, and spat it all over the place. There was a lot of poverty.

The white population lived quite separately from the New Guineans. The school I went to in Mt Hagen, where we lived most of the time, had black and white students but the white kids were taught in English in one building, and the black kids were taught in Pidgin in another building across the playground, and we had lunch and recess at different times, so it was very difficult to make friends. The other white kids were the children of missionaries, or coffee planters, or their fathers worked for the Australian government. PNG had been an Australian dependency, but in 1975, it gained independence, and the Australian government administrators were handing over power to the locals. The missionaries came from all over the world, from Tonga, and Finland, and Germany, and New Zealand, and America. People were always coming and going. About half the class would change from year to year, with new kids arriving and others moving on. You could never be sure that your best friend would still be there at the end of term.

My family was no exception to all this movement. In the five years that we lived in New Guinea, we moved towns and houses many times. When my grandfather died, Mum and my sister and I returned to Melbourne for several months to be with my grandmother, then went back to New Guinea again. We came back to live in Upper Ferntree Gully for good when I was eleven. By the time I started high school, I'd changed schools eight times, and moved house twelve times!

I was lucky to win a scholarship to Presbyterian Ladies' College, where I spent six happy and uneventful years. I had some wonderful teachers, and an inspiring, regal headmistress, Joan Montgomery. My favourite subjects were Latin, History and English; my least favourite were sport of any description, especially swimming, which made me feel ill with dread every week, and maths, which I gave up with great relief in Year 11. I say I was happy, but when I was 14 or 15 I was intensely miserable for much of the time, for no particular reason, and the rare photos I allowed at this time show me spotty-faced and scowling behind enormous glasses (hm, maybe I did have a reason to be depressed). I distinguished myself in my very last week at school by throwing up all over my HSC English exam. Miraculously, this didn't seem to affect my marks. Apparently this story is still told at PLC to encourage other nervous exam-takers!

After school, I enrolled in an Arts/Law degree at Melbourne University. I moved out of home immediately, first into college, then into a succession of shared houses in Fitzroy and Collingwood. I was extremely lucky to belong to the last generation to enjoy debt-free higher education, so all I had to worry about was paying my rent and kitty. I finished my degrees over seven years, working part-time in various jobs, including doughnut girl in the Phillip Island bakery, waitressing, handing out free papers to commuters at 5am, and taking phone bets at the TAB. Finally I settled into the job that was to become my main source of income for the next thirteen years (yikes!): phone sales, admin assistant and occasional receptionist at Warner Music.

Even though I spent so long finishing my Law degree, it took me a long time to realise that I was essentially a shy, anti-social and unambitious person, fundamentally unsuited to the world of law (though somehow I was able to survive in the highly social, ruthless and sexist world of a multi-national record company.) Finally I realised that what I really wanted to do was what I'd wanted to do when I was five: be a writer. I spent the next few years working at Warner, taking extended breaks to travel overseas (mostly to Scotland, England and Italy) and writing.

In 1993 I had my first short story published in Meanjin. It was called "Graham Remains" and it's quite different from anything else I've ever done (no punctuation). Hearing it was to be published was one of the greatest thrills of my life, certainly to that point! Other stories were published in other magazines - Writing, Island, Ulitarra - and in 1996 I won second prize in the annual HQ short story competition. All these stories were about the kind of people I was friends with, youngish, inner-city types who were trying to work out what they wanted from life and love. Gradually I stopped writing stories and tried to write novels on a similar theme. The whole bottom drawer of my filing cabinet is now full of drafts of these novels, in tiny handwriting, which I can't bear to discard even though I'm sure now that I'll never go back to them!

Perhaps it was something in the stars, but after my life had been trundling contentedly along like this for several years, quite suddenly everything changed. I fell in love with the man who is now my husband (he had been a friend for years and was my boss at Warner - but that's another story!) I moved to the other side of town to be closer to him, then into his flat. Place is very important. Making the change in surroundings helped me to make other changes. Soon after, I threw away the novel I'd been labouring over for four years, about two thirty-ish people who act like eighteen year olds and can't admit that they love each other (hm… I didn't need to tell that story any more!) Instead, just for fun, I wrote a fantasy book, which became The Singer of all Songs.

When Singer was accepted for publication by Allen and Unwin in 2001, I was at last able to put "author" on my tax returns! Since then, Michael and I have had two gorgeous daughters, Alice and Evie, and I divide my days between looking after them, and writing. Fantasy is still my first love, but I'm beginning to branch out into other forms of writing too. Writing for young people is the most exacting and fulfilling vocation I could wish for. It's particularly satisfying because of the wonderful feedback from readers. It's such a privilege and a thrill to meet or hear from people who have enjoyed the books, though I still find it hard to believe that they are out in the world, independent of me and passing from person to person without me knowing anything about their secret life!