Millthorpe author and freelance book editor, Kim Kelly, is known for her colourful and evocative writing, bringing to life forgotten stories from Australia’s past. With her ninth novel Walking hitting the bookshelves this month, Orange City Life caught up with Kim to talk about her journey to becoming a published author and the importance of Australians telling and reading their own stories.

Tell us a little about where you grew up?

I'm from Sydney, Little Bay, I had quite an idyllic childhood really, by the sea. It was a really culturally interesting place to grow up because there was a very strong Indigenous community out there, but also a huge migrant population and a diversity of migrant population as well… the older I get the more I realise how informative and nourishing that experiences was for a young person to grow up in an environment where everyone in that classroom at school had a different story to tell.

Was being a writer something you always aspired to?

That is a really interesting question for me, because ever since I was a kid I've written. But the idea of wanting to be a writer? I don't think it really entered my mind as a formal thing, because I thought that's what people who were posh and clever did — certainly not someone like me! And in a funny way going, to Sydney University was the worst thing I could have done — I have a very old fashion, formal degree in English Literature — it only reinforced those ideas that somebody who was as scrappy and nobody-ish as me couldn’t do something that was as magical as writing books.

I don't think it was necessarily inevitable that I would end up writing novels and sometimes I still don't understand why I do it! It is not an easy thing to do and it is certainly not a path to riches, but I think there is something that feels good and giving about telling stories.

Can you pinpoint where your love of books and writing came from?

Growing up… the roots of the family were working class. My brother and I were really the first in our family to be able to freely explore education, but we grew up with my grandparents living with us in the house. My grandfather was self-educated and he was very proud of his Readers Digest collection of history books and Australiana and military books and all that stuff.

Whereas for a lot of writers, their first literary loves tend to be novels like Enid Blyton or Andy Griffith it would be today, my first loves were those encyclopedias of my grandfathers. I think that's what switched my imagination on first.

How was it you found yourself working in the publishing industry?

I was originally going to follow my brother into the Law. I was working as a paralegal, doing my law part time and realising that I'm not cut out to be a lawyer, when I lucked out getting a job at Random House. I really lucked out. Somebody happened to go on maternity leave and they needed a filler as a publishing assistant, which was a bit of a come down moneywise for me at the time, but it was the best thing that could have happened to me in terms of allowing those secret dreams I had of wanting to be a writer.

What inspired you to take that leap and finally write your first novel Black Diamonds?

I had been working as a book editor for about ten years and for all of that time my own ambitions were little by little being fed and at one point my mother, who has since passed away, she said ‘just bloody do it!’

But it took me a long time to get past those negative voices that said you really shouldn't be doing this. When you are writing your own thing, especially when you are starting out, you don't know if it is any good. You know it kind of felt good doing it, but you don't know if it might be a disaster! It didn't matter that I was a book editor you still don't know so I sent it to a very hard-nosed, very good friend of mine who is also an editor with the question ‘Is this a novel?’ She said yes, and then the rest is history. It got picked up a little while later and I'm still going.

You are now known as a writer of Australian historical fiction. Is that a genre you set out to write in?

Not at all. I think it is really that confluence of personal experiences and influences and natural interests that I have and all of those things come together.

I don't just write historical fiction I've got another novel coming out in July which is my first sort of contemporary story and another one coming out next year, but there are those same questions for where the characters came from how they got to Australia and a back-story that involves the big ticket items of history, including war and immigration and things like that.

You said before that writing is not always a lucrative profession; what it is that drives you to keep telling stories?

Some of us are just storytellers; we need to tell stories and we need to find ways to get our stories out there. Unfortunately, at that big end of town is a skewing of who can write. It is something I think about a lot; it tends to be only people who can afford to write who can write, which is a really sad thing. It is bad for diversity — bad for diversity in storytelling, never mind the diversity of the writers who are writing it.

I think that is another thing that drives my story writing as well; I tend to write stories about the little people who don't make it into the history books— their stories don't get told. There aren't many kings and queens in my stories!

You are particularly passionate about sharing Australian stories. Why do you think that is important?

Australian stories are more important than ever. We need to be really respectful of our stories, and how important it is to tell each other our stories, rather than have stories about universal things being constantly told from outside by American writers and British writers.

We are a unique island nation with a very complex story and complex culture. One that has lots of wonderful colourful threads to it, lots of awful threads to it too, but unless we look at those awful threads as well as the pretty one, we don't know who we are.