“It has been a long and winding road from the Central Coast in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Along the way I have been a check-out chick, a backpacker, a student, a waitress, a barista, a cleaner, a sous chef, a caterer, an event planner, a legal researcher and a strata committee hatchet job artiste.

In 2002 I became a full-time manual labourer at ‘La Luna’, a tea garden on the south coast of New South Wales and then, in 2012, head cheesemaker and chef at The Schoolhouse in Gerringong.

No matter the turns in the road I couldn’t break life-long habits, and documented my meanderings and misadventures by drawing, painting and writing.

In 2017 my husband Jack and I ran away from real life and walked the Camino, 800 kilometres from the French Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela. Jack became ill in May 2018, twisting our path back to Sydney. With our wanderings halted, I was desperate to capture the goodness of the Camino as Jack and I trudged into dark times. So I wrote about it.”