Country to the core
As a child living in country South Australia, Léonie (Lee) Kelsall recalls her parents turning the lights out at night and being so engrossed in whatever she was reading that she’d hide under the covers and continue reading by torch light. “Eventually, of course, the batteries would go flat,” she recalls. “So I’d lie there in the dark and invent the next chapter. Inevitably, it wouldn’t turn out the way I had imagined.”
Life and work intervened and Lee was a young mother on maternity leave before she actually got around to committing all those stories that were swirling around in her head to paper. In those days, publishing was very Anglo-centric, so she mailed her manuscript off the UK. After six months of crickets, she consigned it to the
