Not simply a biography. A woman still becoming.

I began my working life as a nurse, spending fourteen years caring for people at their most vulnerable, including time as a burns nurse. Somewhere along the way, I became curious about the suffering we cannot see — the stories beneath the wounds, the relationships that shape us, and the things we carry long after the body has healed.

So I retrained as a counsellor.

For the next twenty-six years, I had the privilege of sitting beside people as they made sense of love and loss, relationships, faith, trauma, change and the complicated business of being human. My work grew to include counselling, education, supervision and pastoral leadership.

Perhaps I didn't know it then, but all those years of listening were teaching me something about stories — the ones we tell, the ones we inherit, and the ones that remain unspoken.

Australia gave me roots. It shaped my vocation, my faith and my understanding of service. It will always be home.

And then, quietly, another kind of home began calling.

Today, my life stretches between Australia and Perthshire, Scotland. I once thought of them as two homes. Now I see them as two landscapes, two histories, woven into one continuing story of becoming.

In 1864, my second great-grandmother, Sarah Campbell, left Inverness for Australia with her younger sister. They were just sixteen and fourteen years old.

The story passed down through our family was always one of their courage — two young girls leaving everything familiar behind and crossing the world towards a life they could not possibly have imagined.

I wasn't looking for a novel. I simply wanted to know more about Sarah.

Years later, I found her death certificate. Where her mother's name should have been was a single word: Unknown. I couldn't stop wondering about that blank space — not only who this woman was, but how easily a woman's name, and eventually her story, could disappear.

That blank space became the beginning of everything.

The more I searched, the further back the questions took me. I found myself drawn not only to the women in my own ancestry, but to the women history had left in its margins — and to an ancient understanding of Wisdom, so often spoken of in feminine form.

Scotland led me further still, into the Reformation and a time when faith, power and the lives of women were changing profoundly. I began to wonder about the women whose questions became dangerous, whose wisdom was mistrusted, and whose voices were easier to silence than to hear.

Those questions became the beginnings of Daughters of Wisdom.

I've returned to Scotland again and again since 2013, following questions of family, faith, place and belonging that have never seemed to have simple answers. In time, my husband and I made a home in Perthshire — a second home I never expected to find.

History often preserves the voices of the powerful, while the lives of ordinary women — mothers, healers, migrants, wives and daughters — quietly slip between its pages. Not because their lives mattered less, but because so much of what they carried was never written down.

My novels do not attempt to rewrite history. They imagine into its silences — exploring the lives of women whose courage, faith, questions and resilience shaped generations, even when their names and stories were seldom recorded.

When we recover a name, we remember a life. When we tell a story, we honour the possibility that a life lived quietly was never a life lived without significance.

For over forty years, I listened to other people's stories — in hospital rooms, in counselling rooms, in the quiet aftermath of grief and change. I told myself that was enough. It took me a long time to realise that everything I had learned about healing was also preparing me to write.

Somewhere along the way, I believe, we grew rich in information but poor in wisdom. Story is how I try to close that gap — not by explaining wisdom, but by letting readers experience it, the way I have: quietly, and often when I least expected to.

Every novel I write is, in its own way, a pilgrimage — not simply into the past, but towards home.

Today, that same thread runs through my novels, the stories I share in The Story Room, Serenity Unveiled, my speaking, and the intimate ancestral journeys I lead through Scotland.