I was sixteen when I decided I wanted to be a writer, and that was in what my grandkids call “the olden days”, back in the nineteen forties. Which means I’ve been earning a living as a writer for over sixty years. I was married at the age of twenty one, a truly close marriage that lasted until the death of my wife last year. She was a tremendous help in my work, including the latest book, Barbed Wire and Roses, dedicated to our two children and to her memory.

Writing was a hard way to make a living when I started. There was no Australia Council, no Film Commission, no government funding of any kind. (In fact I’ve never had a grant or any handout in my life.) I began with short stories, then radio scripts until we went to England where I wrote television series and plays, feature films, and after that took a brand new direction and one that I loved— writing plays for the theatre.

Later, coming home to Australia I wrote a lot of television for the ABC and commercial stations. Both adaptations and original TV mini-series, these included “Captain James Cook”, “The Timeless Land and “1915”, all having world-wide sales. Most importantly, in 1992 I also began to write novels, and Barbed Wire and Roses is the latest. And because of its contentious subject matter, perhaps the most important.

I hope you have time to search this website at your leisure, and that it gives you some idea of what it’s like to be a writer in Australia — not only now when there are frequent Writer’s Festivals and the Australian Film Industry is established — but also back in “the bad old days” when it was really tough trying to survive by stringing words together.

Peter Yeldham

May 2007