I was born in Melbourne, Australia and educated in various state schools and convents in the Victoria countryside. My father was a Station Master with the Victorian Railways who enjoyed being transferred every two years, along with his ever-expanding family which ended up being seven children.

Marya and Charles

The two tangible results of this itinerant lifestyle are: my fragile grasp of the rules of English grammar, having missed so many lessons through moving in the middle of the school term and changing from State to Catholic curricula – I am the queen of the split infinitive but you will never know it thanks to the vigilance of my editor Susan Hampton.

The other thing I was left with was an urge, long after the family imperative had gone from my life, to move somewhere else every few years

About the grammar, due to my mother’s fondness for Georgette Heyer’s historical romances from the local library, I read a lot and got the hang of most things and became a bee-winning speller.

Road Warrior

My first venture as a road warrior was a working holiday with my girlfriend.

Marya & 'Cookie Monster' aka Euan Bowen Parliament House Canberra - July/Aug 2003

The plan was to spend some time on her parents’cattle property in North Queensland, then work our way around Australia.

Our adventures in the Gulf of Carpentaria form the basis of my play Gulf Country.

I tried to write about that and some other things when I was around twenty, but somehow I wasn’t able to. Yet though I didn’t write anything more taxing than a letter home for many years, I always thought I was a writer, a playwright, and would write ‘one day, when I have the time, maybe when I retire’

A Writer

In my forties I received a phone call from my eldest brother, Peter, telling me the sad news that his life had been foreshortened and he had pancreatic cancer.

The day after I returned from his funeral six months later, I sat down and started writing.

In the meantime, I’d got on the road again, this time a bit further afield to Hong Kong and Macau where I lived for eight years and then London for two, and had some adventures.

For months, I wrote by hand, in a big journal, on weekends and any days off from work, a record of and everything I could recall about every job I’ve ever had, which is a lot: the job, the people, the bosses, anything at all. This was my first experience of the joy a writer feels when the doors of memory are allowed to open, the vista becomes wider and deeper, and all sorts of long forgotten trivia float back into view.

I thought that this journal would provide me with source material, that I would refer to it as to a diary, but I’ve never looked at it since I finished it.

Then I wrote some short stories as most writers do, to hone up my writing skills which were pretty raw, and entered them in competitions which I never won.

Hong Kong Lover

Marya in Kowloon - 1970's

I started to write Hong Kong Lover around 1996. Its working title was Julia and Lee who were the two main characters. I wanted to see if I could write my story as a novel rather than a memoir, though most of the material in it was going to be based on real experiences, either my own or someone I knew or heard of. My heroine Julia, for example, who like all the characters is completely fictional, I gave the impeccable background of being the landed gentry from a cattle station family in north Queensland.

I was living in Canberra, working full time running a campus bookshop, The Co-op Bookshop at the University of Canberra, a full-on job for large periods of the year and especially at the start of the University terms.

I was married to Charles Glyn-Daniel whom I’d met in the Dateline Bar on Hong Kong side the night they released the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and married a year later in 1968. He was a theatre director currently resting and working as an academic, an historian lecturing at the University of Hong Kong – Hong Kong U – and was gung-ho for my new career as a writer as I’d gone on about it, especially after a few snorts, for years.

Again, I wrote on the weekends and holidays, straight onto our new Mac computer.

When I finished the book, I sent it to independent editor Carl Harrison Ford. Carl had some good and bad things to say about it, mostly encouraging about my writing abilities, but noted a big flaw in the plot of this piece of fiction: the author kept popping up everywhere.

Because of his Herculean schedule, Carl took about a year to look at my book, so while waiting I started another one.

Macau Grand Prix etc

I’d found writing ‘fiction’ or whatever it was, very hard, so I started something completely different: The Macau Grand Prix and My Part in the Cultural Revolution in China.

In 1966 I’d gone to live in Macau, a Portuguese Overseas Province about forty miles south of Hong Kong, on the mainland of China, to work with a fellow Australian, Geoffrey Powell, on the advertising and publicity of the Grand Prix Car Race they held there every year (and still do). Geoff was a television cameraman in a former life and we were the official cinematographers for Portuguese television of every event of significance that happened. When the Grand Prix ended and the Cultural Revolution in China spilled over into our sleepy backwater, we were there!

I loved writing this humorous and very personal memoir covering the minutiae of my daily life, the people I met, the things Geoff and I did to ginger up interest in the Grand Prix, the car race itself and the frightening political events that followed.

Hong Kong Lover

Every so often, I’d get the manuscript of Hong Kong Lover out, have a look at what Carl had suggested – he read it three times and each time I’d turned it around completely.

To solve the ‘author peeking out’ problem, I made the author a character who was a friend of the main protagonist Julia back in the day, and had them meet again in 1997, a few months before the handover of Hong Kong back to China.

Playwright

Marya & the cast of Gulf Country

My dream of being a playwright came true when I wrote two one-act plays within a year of each other in the late 1990s.

True to form, I drew on my life for both plots.

Gulf Country is based on events that happened when Trish and I were on our ‘working holiday’ in the Gulf of Carpentaria, and The Ball’s Up sprang out of a manic episode at Ian Allan Publishers when we launched the book in London of Geoffrey Greene’s Soccer in the Fifties. I updated it by twenty years, called the book Football in the Seventies and set it in the Aussie Rules football mad culture of Melbourne in the ‘Nineties.

Both plays were produced by The Players Company and received encouraging notices.

At the moment I’m trying to get it together to go up to the Gulf again in 2008 and pull some material out of it to turn Gulf Country into a two-act play, which would give it a better chance of a life than as the one-act play it is now.

A Book About the Book Business.

I wrote a book about being in the book business, with the working title Judge a Book: Behind the Book Business. For a while I ran The Harris Bookshop in Princes Building in Hong Kong, a very famous bookshop throughout Asia.

In London I worked for a publishing house called Ian Allan who published militaria, nostalgia, and books about old steam trains. Back in Oz, I still work for another unusual company The Co-op Bookshop whose outlets are all on University campuses. Editor Carl took a look at my manuscript, said he laughed his head off and suggested I deposit it in the National Library with instructions for it to be made available to scholars in fifty years when all characters have left the building.

The Adventures of Sikat

My other unpublished work The Adventures of Sikat, is for old children or besotted cat lovers, or both. It’s my take on what happened to our Chocolate-Point Siamese cat, an uppity number called Sikat, when he dodged the column at his holiday home and disappeared from our lives for several months.

Thespians

In 1998 Charles and I started up a theatre company, The Players Company, and put on plays at the University of Canberra. Sadly, in 1999 Charles died.

Enter Coralie Wood

I and other members carried on the theatre company and after a while I met a larger than life character, a theatrical publicist and promoter called Coralie Wood who thought I could do justice in print to her life on stage and backstage.

Coralie is very funny and a great raconteur so we had the best fun for three years touring with The Great Moscow Circus and The Pirates of Penzance, going to every theatre show for miles while Coralie told me story after story about being backstage with the stars. I wrote it all down and jushed it up with plenty of my own thoughts. I think you’ll get a few laughs out of Floating in Foyers: Coralie Wood Lashes Out.

Hong Kong Lover Comes Home

Finally, Hong Kong Lover is finished. In a way, I was sad to let it go after all those years of happy tinkering. Whenever I’d got it out, it really was like going home. When my new editor, Susan Hampton looked at it she pronounced it ‘95% there.’ After one last run-through and tidy up, I sent it off to be available this year, 2007, the ten-year anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China.

I hope you enjoy it and all my work. I’d love to know what you think.

Love Marya