my childhood

I spend a lot of time writing about the dark side of family life. I've created some sinister and downright evil dads and some bitter and twisted mums but they're nothing like my own family. My mate Phillip Gwynne (author of Deadly Unna, Nukkin Ya and Jetty Rats) told me that happy families are boring for writers. There's no tension. Take a happy family and make it unhappy and the story will start to come to life. Take an unhappy family closer to happiness and the story will also come to life, but happy families are boring.

I couldn't agree more.

My home life was good and boringly happy. I think my work as a counsellor and youth worker introduced me to wobbly families. Some of the people I've worked with have survived families from hell. It's the fact that they survived that intrigues me. And the fact that every sort of family hell is unique.

I can tell you that there is a lot of my real life scattered through my fiction, I just can't tell you which bits are real and which are made up. That could be incriminating and at the worst, embarrassing.

So here's a silly snapshot of my family and my childhood. It's the closest I'll get to a memoir and if you can psychoanalyse me and my books through it, you deserve an honorary doctorate! Most of the photos were taken by my parents and they were all laboriously scanned from slides by my angelic Aunty Kay. Click for enlargements.

Dad is a draftsman and used to work with the SEC. The front tyre of his motor bike popped on the way to work one day and took all the skin off his leathers. We spent long summers at Venus Bay yelling 'SHARK!' for kicks and digging pipis with our toes. He's a good man and still a huge part of my life. I know I got lucky there.

Mum is a Diversional Therapist who specialises in distracting old people but when I was a kid she did exercises with my friends' mums in the garage at the back of Cam St. She had a sauna and a vibrating belt and a tan lamp with little red goggles you had to wear. Mum works hard at making everybody's world a better place and always has. I'll be right if I get half of her community spirit.

Mum and dad are good together. They've been married longer than I've been alive ... believe it or not ... and they still love each other to bits. They're addicted to line dancing and country music but I wouldn't hold that against them. They laugh a lot and made my bum sore as I was growing up but only when I'd earned it. They were loving, supportive and encouraging and totally unsuitable for fiction.

my childhood

my childhood page 2