My travels

John with Lisa and Keiran, Greece, 1979

I suppose my travels began with holidays to relatives–in the 1950’s most people in my street only had these sorts of holidays. We traveled by steam train to Kyogle in the north of New South Wales (including an overnight sleep which was thrilling to us as kids) where my mother’s sister lived. This was once every two years and in between times took shorter trips to The Blue Mountains only a few hours from Sydney. The most enchanting holidays that I remember there were with my older sister Margi, in Megalong Valley where my grandmother ran the tearooms and cooked her famous apple pies (described in my novel Valley under the Rock). She did this daily for hundreds of tourists who came down from the Hydro Majestic Hotel in the town of Blackheath. Down in the valley an imaginative uncle told us stories of fairies and bush sprites and encouraged my writing by setting challenging writing tasks.

Libby, Papua New Guinea, 1995

As a teenager my best friend and I planned our big overseas trip for when we were 21. It took years in those days to save a fare and the trip was to be by sea on a big liner which would take from 4 to 6 weeks. We dreamed of England and‘the continent’and once out of school took on extra jobs whilst at Teachers’College to save. But I fell in love and married John so it was many years before I was to go overseas. We took our two children–daughter Lisa then 7 and son Keiran then 4–on the great‘overseas’trek so many Australians did, to England and then to Europe. We were away six months and lived in Sussex in a cottage leaving the kids with Paddy (a wonderful Mary Poppins type woman who came to look after our kids as babies and stayed until they were quite grown up) to tour in Europe.

Libby with David Malouf
and Gillian Mears,
India, 1997

With the children we lived in Greece on the island of Samos and Patmos for a few months. Perhaps that whet our appetite for travel because from that time, every few years we traveled to places near and far, for example Indonesia and Bali (near) and the United States( far) where our favourite city, like so many tourists before us, was New York. Some of my books were being published in the States (Thunderwith and various picture storybooks like Freya’s Fantastic Surprise, Tram to Bondi Beach and Way Home and so on) and I was able to visit my agent plus various publishing houses, all very exciting to me.

Libby and Lisa in
Tiananmen Square 2001

When the children were grown up John and I were able to go away regularly and stay for much longer times as John was buying antiques from England and France. We had a wonderful stay in Amsterdam where my Dutch publishers found us a fabulous apartment on the Princengracht right in the heart of that wonderful city. We then stayed in the Normandy area in France, where an antique dealer gave John and me the use of his crumbling chateau so I could write my film script for Thunderwith (The Echo of Thunder).

Lisa and LIbby in New York 1993

This was for Hallmark Hall of Fame who had bought the rights at this time and the French countryside provided an inspirational setting to write an Australian movie script! We then lived for a few months in the Village, New York, in Mulberry Street, in a wonderful loft in Little Italy. Shorter trips giving talks saw me traveling to Papua New Guinea, India, Wales, and China where my picture storybook The River was launched.

A trip to Tokyo, Japan in 2007, helped me enormously with a wonderful project I’m undertaking in schools both here and internationally, called 100 Views. It is inspired by the Japanese artist, Hokusai’s One Hundred Views of Mt Fuji. I devise a way with the school that students can undertake a hundred views of their own community, and celebrate it with poetry, artwork and a Festival!