I was born in Gunnedah, on the Liverpool Plains in north-central New South Wales - a small farming town with a population of about 10,000 people, though it was slightly busier at the tail-end of the '80s, when the agricultural industry at its heart was still booming.

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It is still called "the koala capital" despite sadly dwindling koala numbers.

The region has been inhabited by the Kamilaroi (Gomeroi) people since time immemorial, and certainly for thousands of years before the first Europeans settled along the fertile Namoi River in the mid 1830s.

It was those settlers and their sheep farms who first put it on European maps - initially as The Woolshed before it was officially named Gunnedah, from the Kamilaroi name for the people living in the area, who reportedly called themselves the Gunn-e-darr.

By the time I showed up in 1989 I think my family represented a fairly common blend of cultural backgrounds in the region, a melting-pot mix of Irish, German, Scottish, English and Kamilaroi. From both convict and free-settler stock, my European ancestors ended up living all over the area, from Inverell to Werris Creek, Boggabri, Wallabadah and Willow Tree, living and working on farmsteads until the gradual progression of modernity drew most of them into the relative economic safety of the suburban townships - the inevitable on-flow effect of the colonialism that bore them there in the first place. My mum's dad (my Pop) was from Werris Creek, and it was stories of Werris Creek which inspired me to set my novel, The Doubles, in the region.

Any time we drove through the town we would detour past the old house with its tin roof where mum's Nan had lived with the family, and then where she'd lived by herself until she couldn't anymore.

Mum would tell stories of school holidays,........

© Canberra Times