Louise Cusack - Biography

Where to begin?

Well, I saw Aldrin walk on the moon on our grainy black and white television in 1969.  That's my first important memory, and I'm not sure if that's because I was in awe of the event, or simply because I got the day off school.  But I remember it distinctly.  It was the first time in my life that I thought I might like to be anything other than a writer.  Although in those days there wasn't much question that a 'girl' would get to do anything exciting with her life.  Not in Brisbane in the Sixties.  So I went back to telling my class-mates that one day they were going to see a book with my name on the cover.

Another 'peak experience' in my life was when a Russians in Space exhibit visited our town.  The show was in a big tent with all the exhibits behind rope cordons, but I begged, and the man running it let me slip past the barrier when no one else was looking so I could touch one of the sputniks that had orbited earth.  I can't begin to describe what it felt like to lay my fingers onto that pockmarked surface and know it had been in the vacuum of space - where I wanted to go.  I get goose-bumps still, just thinking about it.

My elder brother's obsession with Science Fiction was another important factor in my development as a writer.  Everything he read, I read.  Asimov, Heinlein, Herbert, E.E.'Doc' Smith.  When I was thirteen, he started sneaking pornography home and I was 'borrowing' that as well, taking it under my mosquito net at night with a torch.  Perhaps that's how I developed a fascination for the psychology of sex - why people become obsessed with the object of their desire and how lust twists lives.

My family life was suburban, middle-class.  When I go home to Brisbane now, summer still smells the same way as it did when I was a kid.  We had a mountain near us that we used to climb - Peg's Mountain - which is still a reserve.  I went there a lot with my brothers, we'd disappear for the whole day and come back for dinner.  I remember Guy Fawkes night vividly and still find fireworks to be a magical thing.  When I was eight I was in love with Prince Planet.  When I was thirteen I fell hard for Captain James T. Kirk.  He was my first big crush and I've never quite gotten over him.

In my teens I forgot about writing and started 'living' instead.  I hung around with my tribe, a group of six girls who still keep in touch.  We partied and had opinions - I felt very passionate about politics then.  In my twenties I was an activist, first in the peacemovement, and then with a big-time commitment to Animal Liberation.  I protested outside rodeos with placards like "Real men don't rope baby calves", and did a lot of work towards educating people about animal experimentation.  I became a vegetarian then and married.

By thirty I'd had children and I've been passionate about motherhood ever since.  However, shortly after the birth of my last child I realised that the odd restlessness which had begun when my father died years earlier, wasn't going away.  I went back to working part-time but that wasn't it.  The problem was writing.  I'd somehow forgotten that I was going to be a writer.  I remembered then and I began.

For years I typed every day until I found characters who would tell me their stories, rather than me having to 'make them up'.  Finally that happened and I started to get published.  I don't pretend to understand the alchemy that occurs when people appear fully-formed in your mind to tell you about their lives, but I'm very grateful that it happens to me and that I'm able to share it with others. I adore the voyage of discovery that drags you along with your characters to see how a story ends.  Each new day finds me in front of the computer doing what I love best, drinking heaps of coffee and creating like a mad thing.

Who needs drugs when you can write!