Recently I was thinking about writing goals (not something I often do, actually), and thought how cool it would be to have one of my poems read on radio. Poetry Please, where listeners request poems on a theme, is perhaps the pinnacle, but I’d be just as thrilled to have one of my poems broadcast as the Friday Poem on BBC Radio 3 Breakfast.

Then I remembered that one of my very first poems was broadcast on Kindergarten of the Air on ABC radio in 1967. Thankfully there is no extant record of the poem, which as far as I can remember was heavily based on the children’s rhyme Roses are red. But I do have the letter I received from the programme’s presenter, Miss Anne Dreyer.

Words hooked me. I remember sitting at the breakfast table and obsessively making anagrams in my head from the words on the back of the cereal packet. In my family, both language and music were to the fore. We played scrabble, consequences and the dictionary game. The Times cryptic crossword, which was published in the Saturday Age, preoccupied my parents, and later my elder sister as well, for most of the week until the solution was published the following Saturday.

In primary school, the library was a refuge at playtime from boisterous games which mostly seemed to involve chasing other children in order to pass on ‘the germs’. I wrote plays at primary school, some of which were performed, if I remember correctly. These were hugely influenced (borderline plagiarised, though I’m sure I didn’t know that word then) by my obsession with Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books.

Secondary school turned into a bit of a saga, and by Year 4 or 5 when we were being encouraged to think about careers (a word I have a tricky relationship with) I knew I wanted to write but most definitely NOT journalism, which was the only writing option on the school’s careers menu. It was probably around this time that I started writing a journal, though I destroyed the early ones before I came overseas. By then, I’d already written some short stories and quite a few poems, and had a handful of pieces published in small magazines.

For many years I worked in the social housing sector, managing to find/negotiate part-time roles so I had more time to write and pursue other interests. Writing has always been core to my sense of self. Right now, I’m in a barren patch. The itch to write is there, the pen is scratching the page, but nothing is firing. The well is dry. But at least I have dredged up this blog post.