Tangea Tansley

That Out of Place has come to be at all is due to two fantastic women: Terri-ann White, now publisher of the University of Western Australia Press, and Carol Major, writing consultant at Varuna, the Writers House in New South Wales.

The story started as an Honours dissertation at UWA for which Terri-ann was my supervisor. At our first interview she tossed out my carefully thought-up ideas: 'Too forced, just write what comes into your head, let the story write itself onto the page'. When I sat down to do just that I found that the whole experience of the year and a half or so I spent in Saudi Arabia came pouring out and the dissertation went on to score a First Class Honours.

Later as "Lines in the Sand" it was shortlisted from 540 other entries in the Penguin-Varuna manuscript competition. When it didn't make the final cut, I took a Professional Development course at Varuna to work on it -- and Carol did a great job of critiquing the manuscript and helping me to develop my ideas.

Yes, I was there in the late Seventies. But in those early days I had young children and then, immediately following my time in Saudi, a pretty full-on career as managing editor for an American military magazine in Hong Kong to think very much about my own writing. And later, after my second husband died, I was too busy keeping my Ridgebacks in bones and food on my own table to indulge in what I still regard as the luxury of writing full-length fiction.I did continue to write short stories, though, followed by several non-fiction books and then the historical novel A Break in the Chain.