I was born in a tiny town in the Mallee area of north-west Victoria in Australia and lived the first half of my life on a farm with my family. Life was tough, no electricity, money or entertainment, but lots of hard work as we were all expected to help on the farm and in the house.

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      Unfortunately, I was born with an invisible disease called Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, an inflammatory autoimmune disease for which no cure has ever been found. I looked like a big, robust, healthy child, but as I grew, I was always tired, with aching joints and limbs. I found it hard to focus, and when other kids were still full of energy, all I wanted to do was lie down. As well, my immune system was so challenged when I started school that I caught every bug going around. Numerous days were spent at home recovering, and I fell further and further behind in my reading and writing. 

 

    But that was not my major problem. Even though I tried as hard as I could and listened intently to my teacher, phonics and word recognition simply made no sense to me, and my progress was pathetically slow.

 

   When I had to repeat Grade 3 because I could not read or write, I was so ashamed and upset. Mum and Dad had their own problems, so there was little sympathy or help coming from them, except for......

       'You had better pull my socks up, my girl, or you'll  end up being a ning nong and a no-hoper.' 

I didn't know what a ning nong was, but I sure as heck knew it sounded pretty awful. After Dad's prophecy, I spent a lot of my time trying to figure out how I could avoid it.

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      But I was not only hurt and humiliated at having to repeat Grade 3, but also as angry as a hessian bag full of half-drowned kittens. And I was damn well not going to accept that I was DUMB....... because I knew I wasn't !! I could figure things out, like measurements, money, addition and subtraction, multiplication, and even long division. Times tables were easy for me, so why couldn't I learn to read, spell and write? 

 

      It wasn't until many years later, when I was at teacher's college, that 'dyslexia' became a word that caught everyone's attention. And when I found out what it was, I knew that was what had been my problem. Moving on a few years to when my daughter, now a Research Scientist, working in oncology, showed signs of dyslexia, I tried so hard to give her the help I was never given. Years passed, and intense research into what caused Dyslexia enlightened me. Diagnosis of auditory agnosia, which is the inability to recognise or understand sounds, even if the physical hearing is intact. And after that, Cortical deafness was diagnosed as a similar condition in which the brain could not process auditory signals, resulting in hearing loss despite the ears functioning normally. Then I found out about oculomotor dysfunction, which Google describes as any problem with eye movement control, affecting tasks like reading, writing, and tracking. 

 

​      Ha, ha, begad and begorrah!!...... YES... finally.... as a grown, mature woman, I had finally figured out why I was unable to learn to read and write like the other kids. I was no longer' thought of myself as 'DUMB.' 

 

 But I transgress..... just how did I manage to learn to read and write when I was only eight years old? 

 

 In my childish mind, the one thing I knew I had that was above average was my memory. So I looked for other attributes in my personality, of which I had many: 1. my dogged determination, 2. my great memory, and 3. my absolute desire to achieve and 4. my utter stubbornness - to never give in, and never give up, no matter what.

 

      A year before I figured everything out, our house burned down when the kerosene fridge exploded. Devastated, my parents had little time to consider my need for books to further my plan. So each afternoon after school, I would sit and attempt to read the simpler words in the *Sun* and *Weekly Times* newspapers that Dad had delivered twice a week to the farm. I also had my school reader, which I would read every evening. After that, I would sit at the kitchen table under the light of the old hurricane lamp, trying to read from the newspapers while Mum prepared the evening meal. I would spell out the words I couldn’t sound out or understand to her. Little by little, the number of unfamiliar words decreased, and my reading skills slowly improved.

 

      The other thing I decided would be a great help to my reading, and especially my writing, was using my excellent memory to become a 'you beaut' top speller. So each evening after I went to bed I would memorise, the shape, the sequence of the letters of my ten words on my daily spelling list and repeatedly spell them over and over until I fell asleep. The next morning at school, if I didn't get one hundred per cent correct, I would, as soon as I arrived home, practise writing the words I mispelt over and over until I made no mistakes. Over time, I became a 'word nerd'. And when I went to boarding school, my entertainment after I had finished my homework was to scroll through my dictionary, all the time testing myself on spelling, and discovering the meaning of recently acquired words. And it worked.......

 

      I can read, and I can write, and I think pretty damn well. 

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      In adulthood, I became a primary school teacher, teaching mostly on a casual basis in many Mallee rural schools, after which I became a farmer's wife and partner in running a few thousand acres of wheat and sheep for 23 years. It was during this time that I went back to what I had loved as a child, drawing and eventually painting seriously,  learning all I could about Art from books on loan from the library bus that came to our tiny town once a month. I had three beautiful children, then after leaving the marriage and the farm, due to continual episodes of domestic violence I decided to go on an 'art crawl' around the world to educate myself about all facets of art, visiting artists' studios, fine art printers, print manufactures, exhibitions, and so much more,  as I drove myself across Canada and the USA in a 1974 Ford Econoline Van I called 'The Radisson'.  Wow, what an amazing trip that was. During that time, I spent a lot of time on Vancouver Island and in British Columbia, not realising that I would one day write Book 3 of my trilogy, "On the Wings of a Dragon Fly," about that fascinating, beautiful place.

 

      After six months instead of the planned twelve months, I returned home to Australia because an Art Gallery I had hoped to buy had finally come on the market. After I bought Kerry Anne's Akoonah Park Gallery, I spent four years having the privilege of promoting many of Australia's major artists, writing editorials and advertising major Australian artists, writing editorials, designing advertising and promotional articles for many regional and city magazines and papers.  Working seven days a week caused my Hashimoto's to become dangerously high and my energy levels to drop drastically, so I decided to downsize, sell the real estate and move the business/gallery into Toorak, where "Kerry Anne's Fine Art' traded until I met my 'good husband,' Paul. 

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      Back in 1993, when I first left my marriage, I turned again to writing poetry, and it was then that I began to write my first novel about my life in the Mallee, involving twenty-three years of domestic violence, with few women's rights and constant generational male bigotry and dominance. This book went through numerous titles until I settled on "After Dark Comes Light". Unfortunately, threats from my ex 'to sue the pants off me' forced me to put that novel to rest to wait for a better time further down the track. Then, in 2005, I began writing my trilogy called 'Thieves of Innocence'​