At 15 you don’t leave school and become a novelist. It was all I wanted to do since Dorothea Mackellar told me at age seven to put the stories I made up into a book one day.
I left school at 15 as so many of us did back then. I floundered around doing a bit of modelling and acting till my uncle Jim Revitt, an ABC foreign correspondent, told me I should tackle journalism. So, I started as a copy girl on The Australian Women’s Weekly. It changed my life in that it gave me skills that have served me well all my life.
My first day I walked along Martin Place, up charming Rowe Street (what a loss), dawdled past the posh shops of Cornelius Furs, Steiner’s Jewellery and David Jones to the large ACP (Australian Consolidated Press) building on the corner of Park and Castlereagh Streets; the media empire owned by the mighty Sir Frank Packer.
I stepped into an empty ground floor lift just as a large austere man in a double-breasted dark suit strode in and harrumphed to me,
