When author Di Morrissey published her first novel in 1991 at the age of 48, it was the culmination of years of dreaming and yearning. It began when she was growing up on the shores of Pittwater, NSW, in the late 1940s and ’50s. Seven-year-old Di had strayed into the overgrown garden of Dorothea Mackellar and announced boldly when asked what she was doing, that she was hunting for fairies. An amused Dorothea invited Di in for a glass of milk.
“She was quite imperious,” Di recalls of the writer best known for her sweeping poem that begins I love a sunburnt country. “When you say something as a kid, and someone takes you quite seriously and listens, you want to elaborate.”

Di told Dorothea that she loved to read and would make up her own stories because money was tight and new books were rare treats. Dorothea said Di must write her stories down so other people can read them.
“I came home and said, ‘I’m going to write books! I could put my stories down and other people are going to like them.’ My mother said, ‘Go and shell the peas for dinner’.” Di laughs.
You don’t leave school and become a novelist, Di discovered, so her uncle, ABC correspondent Jim Revitt, suggested she start with journalism. Di spent time as an eager copygirl and later cadet at The Australian Women’s Weekly before working in London. A romance with an American diplomat who “looked like a Kennedy”, Peter Morrissey, led to years of globetrotting and motherhood, which kept Di busy.
But she always harboured a desire to write fiction. Eventually, Di told Peter she wanted to return home to live out her dreams, not be an accessory to his.
Di’s debut novel brings drama
Back in Australia, Di Morrissey needed to pay her bills. Her friend from her days at The Weekly, Ita Buttrose, suggested she look for work in television. Good Morning Australia was hiring and Di became their entertainment reporter. The job eventually took her to Longreach with R.M. Williams where she encountered a tall, striking horsewoman. R.M. asked Di if she wanted to meet the woman.
“I said no, because I thought she might just spoil the image.” That image would become Di’s first novel: Heart of the Dreaming. But first, it was a 30-page outline. Literary agent Selwa Anthony sold it to publisher Pan Macmillan, who gave Di $5000 and one year to complete the manuscript.

Di quit GMA and rented a shack in Byron Bay, back when it was home to “hippies, junkies and rabble-rousers”. For a year, she wrote, living mostly off eggs laid by her landlord’s chickens, and avocados and mangos that grew on the property. Finally, the book was published. Di had achieved her goal. But her happiness was interrupted when a news crew barged into her leafy sanctuary, accusing her of stealing the book.
“I had no idea what they were talking about. The book had just come out! I just ran inside and locked the door,” Di says.
She phoned a lawyer she knew. “He said, say nothing. I’ll contact them. Maybe you can make a statement.”
Di pieced together what had happened. One of the last stories she had done before leaving GMA was a visit to a film set in Armadale. “I met the location manager who is this schmoozy, good-looking fellow. We were talking and I said, ‘I’ve got a great idea for a TV series’. He was very enthusiastic,” Di recalls. He came to visit Di in Avalon in Sydney to talk about her idea. When he was leaving, Di said, “Oh gosh, I’ve got to get into town and register my outline with the Writers’ Guild. He said, ‘I could do that for you’.”

When Di’s book came out, the scout went to heavyweight news producer Gerald Stone, claiming Di had stolen his story. And he had proof. He had registered her outline with the Australian Writers’ Guild in his name. Di was in her hinterland shack with a scarf wrapped around her head, stripping furniture when the news crew turned up, calling her a thief and demanding an explanation.
“I said, ‘No you can’t come in’.” Di agreed to make a statement. “I’m crying and putting on my make-up,” she recalls. “Now the publisher’s screaming at Selwa going, ‘Who is this woman? What have you done?’”
The TV news played footage of booksellers pulling Di’s books off shelves. “The whole thing was a nightmare. It was really hard to fight. I had no guns on my side other than the truth,” Di says.

Her uncle Jim urged her not to let the experience hold her back. “You pick yourself up,” Di says. Selwa reminded her she had a two-book deal: “You’ve got a second book — you’d better make sure it’s bloody good.”
Millions of sales and 29 books later, Di has more than proved herself.
Di Morrissey’s home setting
As The Weekly crew climbs the steep stairs of “Lady Di’s studio”, on her bucolic country property, we’re surrounded by evidence of a storied career. Every wall is lined with bookshelves, every shelf overflowing with books. Some are yellowed with age and belonged to author Di Morrissey’s grandfather and great-grandfather.
“They brought them out from England when they came on a sailing ship,” Di says. “Who would bring a box of books? Respecting and treasuring books was ingrained in all of us.”
There are press clippings in frames and, reigning over the second-floor writing space, a large oil painting of a younger Di in a black cocktail dress with a sweetheart neckline flopped on an armchair. (The portrait by David Andrews was a finalist in the 1992 Archibald Prize.) She has stacked research notes in a pile up on a table.

“I just don’t know what I’d do with myself if I didn’t write,” Di says, settling into a blue and white toile armchair. “I see stories everywhere I go.”
Like the woman herself, Di’s home is styled with care. Starting her day by doing her hair and make-up is a habit from when she was working on breakfast television. “I was always a morning person,” she says. She’s up, dressed, fully made-up and at her desk before nine. “I’m very professional because it’s difficult when you’re not going to a job.”
Her partiality to glamour and her attention to how she presents herself disguises her toughness. She has withstood tragedy, hardship and sexism. Di’s mother, Kay Roberts, taught her women can do anything. And Di has an unshakable self-belief and a determination to act when she sees something amiss.
“I guess it was the way I was brought up,” she muses. “When you see something that is wrong … you speak up and you do something.”

Di Morrissey’s family influence
Her upbringing was unconventional. Kay is remembered glowingly as a pioneer of Australian television. She was the country’s first female commercial director, but the industry was tough and sexist. Kay was forced to put up with things Di says women wouldn’t tolerate today. She had little choice.
Kay’s husband, William Roberts, a former prisoner of war at Changi, operated a water taxi service until 1954 when Di’s little brother, Michael, fell into the water. Bill dived in to save him and they both drowned. Kay was grief-stricken, but she had a daughter to provide for. Before Bill’s death, she had never really worked. “She’d driven a truck in the war,” Di says.
Kay was steadfast and hardworking and by the time Di was 15. She was respected. Di has one particularly fond memory from her teens when Kay brought her to the Christmas party at Artransa Studios. Di wore a dress made from a fabric of “soft violet, dusky pink and pale apple green stripes”, and was invited to dance by a handsome cinematographer, Boris Janjic.
The friends Di made along the way
At The Weekly, Ita wasn’t the only colleague who became author Di Morrissey’s friend. She admired the immaculate fashion editor Betty Keep in her Chanel suits and laughed at the wit of news editor, war correspondent and ‘It Seems to Me’ columnist Dorothy Drain. But it was chief sub-editor Kay Melaun with whom she developed a special bond.
After Di completed her cadetship, London called, and Di needed a passport. When she asked Kay for her birth certificate, she was evasive. “She was being funny. I said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll go down to births, deaths and marriages’. When I went to get my bus there was an envelope. I looked at this birth certificate and went, ‘Who’s that in the space that said father?’”
This was when Di discovered that Bill Roberts was not her father. It was a man named Len Cairns. Although, he went by Snowy. He and Kay married before WWII. “He was a soldier and then after the war, he came back very bitter and twisted. They had me. There was a big falling out. He was still … ” Di breaks off, thoughtful. “I can see now the effects of the war. He just kind of disappeared.
“Everything was, I think, too painful for my mother to talk about. It could never be spoken about. It was a taboo subject. I moved on. I got married. Had a family and rarely thought of it.”

Di’s time in London
Di’s stint in London brought interviews with The Who and The Rolling Stones. When she was en route back to Australia, Di met and fell in love with Peter. They married and had a daughter, Gabrielle, and a son, Nicolas. During these busy years, Di was always writing, mostly for local papers. She was never able to throw herself into a novel the way she had always wanted. Di, Peter and their kids were living in Indonesia when Di’s yearning to write got the best of her.
“There just came that point where one day you wake up and you think: If I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it, and there’s this kind of panic,” she says.
In need of space, Di decamped to London where she stayed in “a house full of noisy Australians”. Among them was Thomas Keneally, who’d won the 1982 Booker Prize for Schindler’s Ark. Di confided in Tom her overwhelming desire to write. “It’s a bloody disease. You’ve got it,” he told her.
Ultimately Di decided “the worst thing would be regret. I thought: If you don’t try, you’ll never know.”
Author Di Morrissey’s own love story
And so, author Di Morrissey returned to Australia, having decided to end her marriage to Peter. She took a years-long detour via GMA where, like her mother, she found television’s glitzy facade hid an unseemly secret. Sexism was rife and big egos bashed around the studio corridors unchecked.
Once she started writing, Di found it impossible to stop. Her second book was published the year after Heart of the Dreaming (which, despite the controversy, was a big hit). A third quickly followed. After her uncle Jim read her fourth book he said, “I know you’ll be alright now.”

The literary life wasn’t quite what Di had pictured, however. “There’s the literary establishment and there’s the commercial side of it and each looks askance at the other,” Di says. “We were commercial and therefore of little value. We were never invited to literary festivals and events.”
The “we” Di is referring to is her and fellow bestseller Bryce Courtenay. “We were treated, I felt, so poorly.” She recalls being shunned at a writer’s festival.
“The whole time I was in agony. I had no one to talk to. I felt awful. I was constantly fighting the concept that I write women’s romances. There was no word of encouragement or congratulations.”
One bright moment came at the Sydney Writers’ Festival one year when her former mentor from The Weekly, Kay Melaun, found Di. “You did it!” said Kay, now in her eighties. “She was so proud. It was wonderful to have that,” Di says.
Around the time she published her ninth novel, a chance encounter reconnected Di with Boris, the man she had danced with at the studio Christmas party all those years ago.
“He was sort of in the shadows of my life. My mother would say, ‘Oh I saw Boris the other day’,” Di says. When they met up in 1999, the attraction that had first stirred decades earlier returned and soon they were inseparable. On their first Christmas together, Boris handed Di an envelope. Inside was a black and white photo of them dancing at Artransa Studios. Boris had kept it all these years.
“I was his great love, and he never really forgot me,” says Di. Boris moved to Byron Bay and for the next 25 years, they were supremely happy.
Learning more about her past
Author Di Morrissey and Boris eventually moved to the Manning Valley where Di had been born. It was here, in 2008, that she learned more about where she came from.
“I was speaking to a well-known local identity here and he said, ‘Your sister was in here the other day’.” Di replied, “I beg your pardon?” This supposed sister was tracing her family history. “I said, what the hell are you talking about? I rang Uncle Jim.”
The woman’s name was Venise. “I don’t remember now whether she contacted me or I contacted her,” Di says. However it happened, they spoke on the phone. “We started this rapport.”
They decided to meet. “She came down to Byron with her sister, Glenda, and we pieced the story together.” Venise and Glenda were Len Cairns’ daughters. There was a third sister, Lee, too.

“I did ring and speak to Venise’s mother. She said, ‘No, it was nothing like that. He’s not your father’.” Di asked Venise if they should do a DNA test. She said, “No. Dad asked us to find you … He always wondered about you’.”
According to Di, Len was gravely ill when he said to Venise, “What would you say if I said you had an older sister?”
“They said, ‘He always wondered about you.’ That was a comfort. Venise and I keep in touch,” Di says. “There’s a lovely bond.”
Di Morrissey looks to the future
For the past almost decade, author Di Morrissey has juggled writing novels with writing and publishing The Manning Community News, a local newspaper. In June 2024 she published her last edition. She made the decision, in part, because she couldn’t imagine keeping the paper running without Boris, who had died of brain cancer that March.
“It was hard because it was so unexpected,” Di says. “I just miss him. It’s a big hole in my life. He’d make lunch and then text me at 5pm and say, ‘Meet me in the man cave’ or ‘Meet me in the garden’, or ‘Down the bottom pavilion for sundowners’.
“He just woke up one morning and didn’t know his name or where he was. It was terrible.”
When people ask Di what she’ll do now she answers, “Same as I’ve been doing. When you love what you do, you just don’t turn that off one day.”

What’s next for the author Di Morrissey?
She’s channelling her energy into new projects. Her series of books set in Broome are in development for TV and Di’s trying her hand at writing a stage show — not unlike the characters of her newest release, River Song. “I want to do other things, but the books always come first,” she says.
With River Song on shelves, Di is well into writing her 2025 release. And despite her tough year, she’s attacking it with gusto. “I still get excited,” she says. “I’m really excited about doing the next book after this one.”
She adds, “You still start every book with trepidation.” But that’s all part of the fun for author Di Morrissey.
River Song by author Di Morrissey, Pan Macmillan, is out now.
This article originally appeared in the December 2024 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Pick up the latest issue at your local newsagents or subscribe so you never miss a magazine!