I was 5 when we left for Australia, settling  first in Morwell, Gippsland Victoria,    and then   in Chelsea  a suburb of Melbourne on Port Philip bay.

We travelled to Australia via Suez canal on an ocean liner and many of my first memories are of the voyage. These memories have been kept fresh by the home movies my father made of that voyage. These contain scenes of the desert region either side of  the Suez Canal and then the lush, tropical images of Colombo, where my sister and I were photographed on a rickshaw. This feeling that life contained great voyages was very influential in my art and writing.

I went to school in the beach town of Chelsea. This proximity to the bay meant that I could walk home from school along the beach.  This walk home became an exciting adventure with toes paddling in the warm  waters. It was here that my father built our modernist home, but nor before we had lived in caravans and self-built temporary accommodation on our block of land!

When I was 20 my family had decided to move back to England and so began another exciting voyage – again by ocean liner this time returning through the Panama Canal and stopping at many exciting places en route.

I have lived most of my life since then in the London area and a few years ago bought an old barn near the Atlantic in the south west corner of France. This, for most of the time, is a holiday house but after a period of three years living in France, my first novel began to grow in response to the surrounding landscape and seascape which can be wild on the Atlantic coast and mellow inland where agriculture is mostly vineyards, maize and sunflowers.

I left Australia with the equivalent of A Levels and always regretted not going to university or art school, so when I came to London I decided to fill the gap. I enrolled in an Open University degree course. Since I needed to earn a living and could not become a full time student. I completed that first degree on a part time basis, but went on to do many other courses: a Post Graduate Certificate of Education at London University, which qualified me to teach in secondary schools, followed by a Fine Art Degree at University  of Hertfordshire and finally a Masters at the Courtauld Institute of Art also part of London University.  With all these academic qualifications I naturally became a teacher and then a lecturer. For many years I taught literature in secondary schools, after which I began teaching Art History to American University students in London.