The story behind the storyteller
A life shaped by listening, faith, place and the stories we carry.
I came looking for a name
In 1864, my great-great-grandmother, Sarah Campbell, left Inverness for Australia with her younger sister. They were sixteen and fourteen years old—two young women leaving everything familiar behind and crossing the world towards a life they could not possibly have imagined.
The story passed down through our family was one of their courage. I wasn’t searching 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 could not stop wondering about that blank space—not only who this woman had been, 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 also to the women history had left in its margins—women whose lives remained only in fragments: a name in a register, a marriage, a migration, a trial or a silence.
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.
What happened to their stories? What survived? And what might still be whispering beneath the history we inherited?
Those questions became the beginning of Wisdom’s Unbroken Thread, the historical fiction series I am now writing.
I have returned to Scotland again and again since 2013, following questions of ancestry, faith, place and belonging that have never offered simple answers. These days, I spend part of each year in Perthshire with family—a place I never expected to find.
The thread through my life
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Registered Nurse
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Counsellor and speaker
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Pastoral leader
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Writer
Before I wrote, I learned to listen
My path to writing did not begin at a desk. It began in a working life spent listening to people’s stories.
I started my working life as a nurse and spent 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, clinical supervision, pastoral leadership and retreat facilitation.
Those forty years taught me to listen beyond what was immediately spoken. They taught me to notice the stories beneath the stories: what is remembered, what is silenced, what is inherited and what may be waiting to be understood differently.
I did not know then that those years were also preparing me to write.
Australia is home. It shaped my vocation, my faith and my understanding of what it means to serve, and it is where I live for most of each year.
But family has a way of widening the map of home. Since 2013, I have returned regularly to Scotland, drawn not only by its landscapes, history and ancestral threads, but by the people I love. These days, I spend part of each year in Perthshire—sharing life with family, gathering stories and writing—before returning home to Australia.
Two landscapes. A family across oceans. One continuing story of belonging and becoming.
Writing into the silences
History is often told by the victors—or by those who held the power. The lives of ordinary women—mothers, healers, migrants, wives and daughters—can quietly disappear between its pages, not because their lives mattered less, but because so much of what they carried was never recorded.
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 preserved.
I am also drawn to the Spirit of Wisdom, so often spoken of in feminine form. In my writing, she is not an answer placed neatly before the reader. She is a thread—a presence inviting us to become curious, to listen more deeply and to consider what the past might still illuminate about the way we live today.
The men who recognise, protect and support women as they find their voices are part of these stories too. History may show us the harm caused when power silences, but it also contains acts of courage, loyalty and love that helped wisdom survive.
Somewhere along the way, I believe, we grew rich in information but poor in wisdom. Story is how I explore that distance—not by telling readers what to think, but by inviting them to enter another life, another time and another way of seeing.
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.
That same thread now runs through the novels I am writing, the shorter pieces I share in The Story Room, Serenity Unveiled, my speaking and the intimate, reflective journeys I lead through Scotland.
If you have read this far, perhaps something here has spoken to you—a story, a question, a name or a whisper you have been learning to trust.
I hope you’ll stay a little longer. There are more stories to come.
