Western Australia made me welcome in a way I hadn’t experienced before. When I arrived in Perth from the UK aged nine, it felt like I’d landed in paradise. Our first rented house had the Indian Ocean at the bottom of the street and we swam and wore T-shirts all winter while the locals huddled in their winter coats. We started road-tripping north for family holidays the following year.

I remember the first time I stopped at the side of a highway on a road trip and experienced silence as a physical sensation in my ears. The first time I saw wedge-tailed eagles feeding on roadkill. The first time we sat in the car in near hysterics as a family because a huntsman spider was outside on a window and no one wanted to be the first to open their door.

I can’t imagine writing about Western Australia without the wildlife I’ve encountered playing its part. One of the first things I remember us learning at school was the number and variety of creatures that could bite, sting, poison, drown, kill, eat or otherwise harm you, from redback spiders to great white sharks and everything in between. What I remember most about that time is it was awe-inspiring rather than frightening.

The feeling of welcome I had arriving in WA felt like it came from the place itself, and from the sixty-plus thousand year-history of First Nations Australians’ continuous connection to country. This sense of welcome persists however far I travel from home, and is the reason I write the stories I do. My characters are often searching for that sense of belonging too.

In 1991 when the movie Thelma & Louise was released, I was a newly qualified veterinarian in rural Australia coming up against sexism and misogyny every day in my work and life. In one country town where I lived, I was told in no uncertain terms as soon as I arrived that of the upwards of twelve pubs in town, there was only one I’d feel safe in as a woman.

I made three female friends while I lived there — one married, one divorced, and one single in her early twenties, like me (I think we were the only two in town). I was on the east coast and a long way from home and family in Perth. I remember that time as one of strong female friendship I’m grateful for to this day.

Try as I might, I can’t remember which cinema I was in when I first saw Thelma & Louise. But I remember the electrifying effect it had. The laughter. The shock. My favourite lines. Thelma hanging up the phone when she knows right away from Daryl’s hello that he’s aware of her crimes.

That movie was a gamechanger. I’d never needed anyone’s permission to do what I wanted but it felt like the world had tilted on its axis at a time when I was looking for my place in it. I was twenty years off writing my first novel but the seeds of the kinds of characters I write were right there. They don’t need anyone’s permission either.

There’s no journey quite like a road trip, and no road trip like one through remote Australia. Across the Nullarbor Plain with two friends before I started my first job as a vet. Adelaide to Melbourne along the Great Ocean Road at the end of 1999. From Perth to Broome in a LandCruiser Troop Carrier, skirting a cyclone on the way. I love the highway unspooling ahead and vanishing behind, not knowing where you will stop for the night.

Writing has been like that. A decision to set off. A first step on the road when I found an agent with my first novel and almost, but not quite, a book deal. Years in the wilderness when I wrote more novels and didn’t submit them to anyone because I didn’t think they were good enough.

I started writing as soon as I left Australia for the UK and all these stories were about home. No matter how dark the themes or what was happening in the plot, the characters were always looking for an experience of home and family, a connection to it as a way of understanding themselves in one way or another.

That tension between the known and unknown, home and away, has permeated my life and everything I write during all the years I’ve been away from Australia.

Writing No Country for Girls, this love letter to Western Australia in the form of a dusty, gritty, road-trip thriller, transported me back home when the pandemic prevented me from visiting there in a physical sense at all. I’m so grateful to the book and these characters for keeping me connected to the place through dark times.