Auto Biography

		Quick Facts: Born 18th May 1959 Jakarta, Indonesia. Brought up Sydney, Australia and Empeaux, SW France. First book "House in the Rainforest" published in 1990. Now living in country New South Wales, Australia with husband and children.

I don’t just dream fantasy and legend; I live it. Brought up in the cracks between cultures, in the midst of families whose storytelling was in their very blood and bones, whose imaginations could hardly keep up with their strange and extraordinary lives, I was surrounded as a child by amazing riches of experience.

My parents come from very mixed backgrounds: in us children, all the swirling currents of Old World Europe and Asia and the New World of the Americas and Australia mingle and intersect. My mother’s people come from Northern Portugal, right near Celtic Galicia, from Valencia in Spain and from the wild Basque mountain country of the Pyrenees; my father’s from South West France, where so many tribes have met and mingled, and from Quebec, in Canada.I was born in Indonesia, as was one of my sisters; my other siblings were born in France and in Australia. Aristocrats and peasants, fishermen and smugglers, the mighty and the powerless, the bright and the brutal, those whom history touched for the good and those who bore the terrible scars of its passage: they are all there in my bloodlines, and their multivoiced song sings powerfully in my veins. I was shunted around the world many times: born in Indonesia, I was sent to my grandmother in France when I was only 1, and did not see my parents again till I was five, when we came to Australia and I had to start school in a language I neither understood nor spoke, yet took to with great delight. I mostly lived in Australia, with frequent forays back to France, every couple of years, where we had to go to school in the little one-teacher school in the village where we lived, 35 kms from Toulouse. We were brought up in the midst of melodramatic family comflicts and passionate disputes, and I learnt early on to keep my counsel, and to observe. My parents speak several languages: French and English, Indonesian and Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, and the patois of South West France, Occitan, which was once the language of king and peasant alike—the language spoken in the gorgeous courts of the south, the language of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Richard the Lionheart. We were brought up to see not only the outer world, but also its inner truth; taken on pilgrimages to holy and sacred and legendary sites.We trotted along behind my father on twisting paths in strange, magical forests as he told us stories of knights and werewolves and ghosts and the Devil; we halted by ancient stone dolmens, and saw the beings of history and legend emerge from the thin mist around us. Mum told us her family stories: stories of love and death and disaster and fun; and we read myths from all kinds of places: from the Celtic countries, from Africa, Indonesia, from France, from Australia, too.. We were taught that symbol and meaning resided in everything; that each flower, each grain of dirt, each tiny little facet of the world had its place, its deep meaning, its life. In a way, it was a medieval manner of seeing the world.It was a way where everything was connected, everything could be interpreted according to dream, to allusion, to allegory, to hidden meaning.Yet there was nothing otherwordly or weird about it; in fact, it made us feel more at home in the world, more able to adapt, to be flexible, because there is nothing rigid in such a view, it does not offer certainty but possibility.The natural world was very important; but so was music.

We had an immense record collection of everything stretching from early medieval music to Louis Armstrong; from Ravi Shankar to Bill Haley and the Comets; from swing to Gregorian chant. Dad would sometimes sing bits of opera to us; he read us plays, such as Edmond Rostand’s beautiful Cyrano de Bergerac, whilst Mum introduced us to the great modern writers. But it wasn’t all intellectual and emotional and spiritual; we were early on introduced to the pleasures of the sensual world, especially food! Both my parents cook very well, and descriptions of menus feature very largely in my childhood diaries!

We grew up too with the strong notion of a code of honour. Reading the stories of King Arthur, perusing the medieval writers, I became more and more aware that honour did not mean some rigid, formal thing, but an infinitely flexible, compassionate way of seeing human life and trying to live in a world where injustice and misery are still the norm for too many of the world’s people. It meant generosity, not Lady Bountifulness; compassion and empathy, not judgement; boldness and frankness, not timidity and puritanism; the protection of the weak and the redressing of injustice, not arrogance and pomposity, courtesy and respect, not hypocritical politeness or snobbery.

It is not an easy thing to try and live up to; it can make you enemies, attract ridicule, and even hostility. But if you do not do it, how can you face yourself in the mirror each morning? It is something I have never forgotten. Because I think it is absolutely important for a writer to feel part of their own times, their own life, not just to sit in a corner and not get involved.The ideal for the medieval knight and the medieval lady(for honour was for women just as much as men, as Marie de France makes quite clear in her work)was an ideal that is still intensely relevant. It is why, hundreds of years after the time of knighthood, we are still so attracted to it.

Re-enchanting the world, making its meaning resonate within every one of us, is still just as important as it was in the times of the knights. But it is an ideal that must take account of the contradictory aspects of human nature; and that is what the Roman de Renart was about: it’s not good enough mouthing all the right things, your behaviour must match up to your words. As I grew up, I read very extensively, becoming more and more interested in Celtic myth and its effect on the Middle Ages. I accumulated a vast amount of knowledge and passion on the subject. When I went to uni, I studied Middle Welsh under Professor Stephen Knight at Sydney University (he is now at the University of Cardiff), Norse sagas under Professor Margaret Clunies-Ross, medieval texts, and Anglo-Saxon studies. I also went to Irish Gaelic classes at the Gaelic Club in Surry Hills for several months, and started up a Celtic Club at Sydney Uni with other interested people. I also studied some history, and French literature. I deferred uni studies after 18 months because it was beginning to be too difficult to support myself and go to uni at the same time (after a big fight with Dad at the end of school, I’d left home and had to live on my own resources).

Many years later, though, after many and varied adventures in life, I returned to study at the University of New England and completed a master’s degree in both French and English literature (my thesis was written in both languages, and was assessed by two different departments!). I had always written ever since I could hold a pencil. Early on, I had a great facility with the written word in English: partly, I think, because it’s less easy to become confused or misunderstood in writing than in speech, when you’re dealing with your non-native language. I wrote diaries, poems, stories; I wrote a whole Celtic song cycle, based on ancient Celtic forms, when I was in my teens and sent them to such great Australian poets as Les Murray and AD Hope — who were incredibly generous in their responses. I started a vast fantasy novel at the age of 16, which still resides in my filing cabinet; I began a series of short stories set on the (to me) incredibly exotic location of a small sawmilling village in the rainforest country of Northern NSW. But the first things I had published were travel pieces in the now-defunct National Times, impressionistic pieces about the Basque country, or Catalonia, or Ireland. Very early on, I knew I would not like to be pigeonholed, categorised; nothing in my life had ever prepared me for the routine, the easily-labelled, the specialist. I knew it would not be easy, for our modern Western culture has long favoured the specialist; but it’s like that stuff about facing yourself in the mirror. What does it matter to gain the world if you lose your soul? In any case, times are changing. The things I experienced and read and got enthusiastic about as a child are no longer marginal; now, with our world opening up and paradoxically ‘going back to the future’, with a global cultural reality more like the open, multicultural Middle Ages than the more refined and restricted nation states that followed, perhaps the time of people like me have come!

I’ve written more than 20 books, for all ages and across most genres: realism, fantasy, mystery, literary, popular. I find the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture totally ridiculous; in Shakespeare’s time, for instance, there was no such distinction. Story, character, passion, truth: those are the things everyone responds to. My fantasy is the realism of the soul, the realism of that inner world as well as of the natural world. So Knight by the Pool inhabits the mindset of the Middle Ages; it lives in the forest of symbolic meaning as well as adventure and strange magic and history and romance. For me, medieval people and their beliefs are both intensely close to us but also incredibly distant, in the same way that people from other cultures are close and distant. I wanted to convey a sense of their passion, their truth, their foibles, as well as if the magic and mystery of the story. I think Knight by the Pool and the rest of the Lay Lines Trilogy is unique, because of its layering of medieval thought and metaphysics and symbol and theories within a historical AND legendary framework, with bits of real texts and made up ones, poetry and mysticism as well as descriptions of daily life. It started in the best possible way, in both my unconscious and conscious mind.

There’s a dream I had, quite regularly. It was of walking along a path, and suddenly, there was a lion on the path, huge, golden, roaring. Its roar filled my head and my heart, both terrfying and attractive. I always woke up then. Now, a few years later, I was walking around Rouen Cathedral when all at once I came upon the tomb of the heart of Richard the Lionheart. It was like a physical shock; a jolt went through me; my hair stood on end, I knew instantly that this was an important moment.

But I still didn’t know why, any more than I understood the dream. I knew about Marie de France, too; I had read several of her things over the years, for she is an important, though rather neglected, poet in French literature, being one of the first to use Celtic and and Arthurian myths and motifs in her writing—you could say in fact she was one of the first fantasy writers! It wasn’t until my agent Margaret Connolly encouraged me to explore my knowledge and passion for the period, and to put a proposal to Transworld, that it all kicked in together. But as soon as I started to write, it was as if everything was there; as if all the paths of my life, all the fragments of my being and of the stories I had heard, came together within me.

Writing Knight was a fantastic, traumatic, moving experience: I would say a life-changing one. It took many drafts, much patience on the part of those working closely with me—my dear husband David, my wonderful editors Louise and Belinda—and I basically had to go through the same transformation, in a sense, as Marie herself, and the novel. Fantasy is the realism of the soul, as I’ve always thought: well, it’s more than a glib phrase. It’s true. Perhaps that is why it is both so popular amongst readers and so ignored or derided by too many literary critics: because it gives the lie to the idea that we have lost meaning, that we do not need symbolic and spiritual truths. It knows that we die inside if we do not have them. And the Celtic stream of thought and consciousness, with its intense appreciation and understanding of the natural world, its robust wit, its valuing of both men and women, its earthy magic, underlies fantasy in much the same way as it underlies the great texts of the medieval period: it is the reason why they have survived. The bards knew that we are fragile human beings, who live in an extraordinarily beautiful and terrifying world, that our journey through life is a quest indeed, for understanding and grace.