Who am I?
I grew up in Hawkes Bay on the folding hills of Havelock North. I went to Woodford House and Karamu Highschool and then did a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Otago.
In 1979, aged 20, I spent a long summer working as a jillaroo on a big Australian outback station near Longreach, 3,000 miles inland from Brisbane. When I came back to my family home, I wrote an article titled "That's life in the Australian Outback", which was published in the Hawkes Bay Herald Tribune. That was the beginning of my writing career.
I completed a Diploma in Journalism at Auckland Technical Institute (ATI) at the end of 1979. I worked for a year as a reporter/photographer on the South Waikato News in Tokoroa, and then was the sole journalist/photographer on the left-leaning Inner City News in Auckland. My first assignment was to cover the 1981 Springbok Tour. I took photos of protesters tearing down the fence at the Hamilton game.
Since then I have written for a wide range of publications; travelled as far as India on assignment for the Reader's Digest; published a book Going the distance: Women Outdoors In New Zealand; written for North & South magazine and spent 18 months as their commissioning editor for the Four Corners, Family Ties and What's On sections.
From February 2005 to August 2016, I worked full-time at the University of Auckland first as editor of Ingenio magazine and other projects and then as Publications Team Leader for all the University's major publications: Ingenio, the Annual Report, Auckland Now, University News as well as working on the web and pioneering the development of the University's staff intranet.
I continued to work part-time at the University of Auckland as the Media Relations Adviser for the Faculty of Arts and the Auckland Bioengineering Institute until February 2019.
In 2014 I graduated from University of Auckland with a Masters of Creative Writing. My novel, Gone To Pegasus, which came out of that course was published in March 2018 by Makaro Press.