When Life and Story Collide: Behind the Scenes of Runaway Lady

A runaway heart, a dangerous past, and the convict’s son who captured her destiny.

The thing I love most about writing is storytelling — that moment when imagination meets curiosity and suddenly the past feels alive again. My books always seem to circle back to people, their contradictions, and the adventure of simply being human.

Meet Heath Ransome

In Runaway Lady, that energy centered on a character who began as a mystery to me and ended up being the one I most enjoyed discovering — Heath Ransome, a pastoralist with a secret past.

How, I wondered, did the son of a transported man — even an educated one — make his way in life and become a landowner?

Perhaps it’s because I’ve always had a romantic attachment to the land myself — a “father’s daughter” who grew up believing that working the soil and watching things grow is one of life’s greatest joys. When I began imagining Heath, I wanted to understand what kind of man he would be: someone ambitious, decent, and quietly defiant in a country that didn’t make it easy for men with his background to rise.

Or perhaps, as a New Zealander, I had to face the little streak of colonial smugness we inherited — that comforting belief that our English ancestors were all solid yeoman or gentlefolk, with no convicts among them. (How wrong that probably is!)

Inspiration from the Native-Born

The real spark came when I read Native Born: The First White Australians by Emeritus Professor John Molony of the Australian National University. It’s one of those rare books that marries scholarship with soul — full of passion and humanity as well as hard historical truth.

Molony wrote movingly of the first generations of “native-born” Australians — the children of convicts, born before 1850, who grew up without land, education, or respect from free settlers.

He said:

“The native-born … have walked constantly with me, but only as shadows. In libraries and manuscript rooms, in the faded pages of newspapers and journals, in the lectures of my colleagues or conversations with others, they have been there, but shyly, and rarely did they speak for themselves.”

Those words stayed with me. They became the heartbeat of Heath’s story — his quiet strength, his sense of belonging, and his struggle to define himself in a world that would rather forget where he came from.

Genealogy Meets Imagination

At the same time, I was indulging my other great passion — genealogy. While digging through family records, I stumbled upon a “John Wheeler,” aged forty, sentenced to transportation for bigamy.

Now, I don’t believe he’s one of my Wheelers — and it’s quite possible his sentence was never carried out — but still, the idea took hold. He’s exactly the kind of forebear I can imagine in Heath Ransome’s family tree!

It’s such fun when real life and fiction intersect in these magical and unexpected ways.

A Grateful Heart

Every book is a team effort, and Runaway Lady is no exception. My thanks go to:

• Jane Dixon Smith in London for her haunting cover design.
• Lauren Finger on Australia’s Central Coast for her careful and insightful editing.
• Tiffany Bartlett in New Zealand for keeping my email (mostly) under control.
• Jin Wang and the team at Jin & Co. in Melbourne for expert web support.

Despite all our combined efforts, a few little mistakes always seem to sneak through. For those, I’m entirely — and apologetically — responsible.

Looking Ahead: Runaway Lady #2

The next story in the Runaway Ladies of Sydney series takes us to a very different world — seventeenth-century London, where my new heroine is the daughter of a goldsmith.

This idea grew out of my latest genealogical discovery: a branch of my family were London goldsmiths during the chaotic years when King Charles I seized the Royal Mint’s gold. Out of that turmoil came the beginnings of modern banking — paper receipts, credit systems, and the foundations of our global economy.

It’s a world of risk, daring, and reinvention — exactly the kind of world my Runaway Ladies love to explore.

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