I was born near Dartford, outside London, in 1948. We moved a fair bit when I was a child, something which made it difficult to make friends. I learnt to rely on my imagination, books, and an insatiable curiosity about my surroundings. When I was four, my brother, who is fourteen years older than me, was conscripted into the army and sent to Kenya for two years and then shortly after he came back they called him up again and he was sent to Cyprus. His stories, which I must have picked up sitting around listening to the adults, fed my interest in new places, exploration and what was to become an abiding interest in maps and geography.

When I was about eight my dad opened his own business - a shipping and forwarding agency in the City of London - and, because I didn't seem to be doing too well at school, I was shunted sideways into a preparatory school for boys. I was being groomed for the English public school system, which, as anyone will tell you, is not public but rather exclusively private. My fear and loathing of exams saved me. Having not taken my 11-plus, the exam which determined whether one went to a Grammar - good - or a Secondary School - not so good, I dug my heels in and refused, at age thirteen, to sit the Common Entrance Exam to go into the public school system. Which meant I ended up at Secondary School anyway. I would like to say that my school years were wonderful but I'd be lying, although in both systems I did come across inspirational teachers who taught me the value of language, observation and self-education.

At the same time as my father opened his business, the family moved to South Croydon, which at the time was right on the edge of the Green Belt. A whole new world opened up. I had always been interested in nature and The Stone Crown is written, in part at least, out of my love of landscape and the natural world; however, up until this point, apart from the local golf links and the Norwood Lakes, I'd never really experienced 'the bush', because for a ten year-old that's what it was, unexplored country. The odd picnic excursion beyond the periphery of London had whetted my appetite though. The street where we lived was called Birdhurst Road - hurst meaning wood - and beyond our rather tame back garden was the tangled, overgrown greenery and bird-life of an adjacent bombsite. Slipping between the broken paling fence I disappeared into another world, losing myself amongst the extensive - and to my adolescent mind seemingly endless - corridor of parks, commons, woodland and expropriated farmland, where I watched badgers and made casts of fox spoor.

At sixteen I entered the work force, moving around from job to job - boy-soldier, clerk, door-to-door salesman - but always in the background was a profound desire to travel. And in 1973 I set off across Europe and Asia with an old school friend on what was called the Hippy Trail. I was heading for Australia. Not because I was fascinated by the country itself - I knew remarkably little about it - but because it was, apart from New Zealand, the most distant point on the map where they spoke English. I was away from Britain for nearly five years. I had various adventures in Central and South America, where I taught English in Peru and Brazil, before a deep longing to see my parents catapulted me back to Europe. I re-entered England in style, having hitched a ride in a Rolls Royce with the bodyguard of an Arab prince.

Much as I love Britain, it had in some way shrunk. Winter was no longer romantic. I found myself feeling lost and claustrophobic in London. I needed space, light and air. However, I lived for a while in a chaotic share house in Forest Gate with a bunch of Australians and New Zealanders, during which time I went for a summer day-trip to Brighton with a friend. I watched him run down across the pebbles and plunge blissfully into the English Channel. I barely managed to wade out up to my knees before I returned to my towel a shivering, quaking heap. It was around that time that I decided to return to Australia.

I've known I wanted to be a writer since I was eighteen and, between raising a family, working, and attending university quite late, where I ended up teaching and doing a Doctorate, I've dabbled in various forms - film and television scripts, a play, short stories, murder mystery games, adult novels - but with limited success. The Stone Crown is my first young adult novel.

I live in Adelaide now with my family. It's a fairly typical suburban existence, involving house renovations, gardening and shopping every Saturday at the Central Market. But, not more than a four hour drive to the north is the outback, that immense and often intimidating country that refuses to conform to any map and which I have learnt to love. Much of my time is now taken up with the exploration that is writing, creating new worlds from the blank page, but whenever I get time I renew the promise that I understood so perfectly as a thirteen year-old, a boy who loved maps and nature and yearned for wild places, and that is that I will continue my explorations. There is always another road to drive down, always another turning to take, always another view or friendly face to encounter.