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I lived on the farm with my parents and grandparents. I had no playmates as a young child, and I was indulged. I helped my grandmother piece quilts, and we made pretty albums, an old-fashioned pastime. We cut poems and pictures out of magazines.

As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my 'farm chores' - but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.

My parents owned a plants nursery. We all grew up growing things and planting things and selling things, and I also managed landscape crews.

All this time I lived with my parents, and wrought on the plantation; and having had schooling pretty well for a planter, I used to improve myself in winter evenings, and other leisure times.

I'm one of five kids and we lived on a massive farm in New South Wales with my mum and dad.

When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age - was, in a sense, me.

I knew everything in the forest. I had a secret home tree, where I pretty much lived. I also liked rooftops and streetlamps. My parents would get calls saying 'He's out there again.'

I was raised by my grandmother on a farm, where we were really poor - we had dirt floors - but so did everybody else.

I worked on a farm for a little bit.

I had a free-range childhood. We lived in town but with a cow, chooks, bees, and multiple veggie gardens so we could live self-sufficiently.