Hello there! Please make yourself comfortable and walk with me a while.

I am Jane Grieve, Australian, traveller, motelier, erstwhile horsewoman, writer, poet, sometime blogger, freelance journalist, speaker, mother, sister, lover, friend, country person.

Above all, I like to think that I straddle the main two worlds which are Australia – city and country; each of them the real deal in terms of what it is to be an Aussie.

The way I do this is through my writing. I write for magazines, I was once a columnist for a major newspaper. And then life led me to the world of books. My first book, Slippin’ on the Lino, was self-published. Very well, I might hasten to add. Edited properly, laid out professionally, printed by Griffin Press, and all in all from my point of view an exercise in appreciation of the vicissitudes of publishing. It was a great initiation into that world. Slippin’ on the Lino came about with encouragement by a support group of close women friends, an art group calling ourselves 9 Ante Portas. For our first exhibition in 2009 I published a compilation of my family humour columns which I had written for Queensland’s Courier Mail when my kids were young. It was a fantastic experience, and a great book even if I do say so myself.

My second book In Stockmen’s Footsteps is the real deal in terms of publishing. Allen & Unwin asked me to write my memoir, and published it in 2013. They had an idea it would be quite interesting, since my career with the Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame was indeed quite unique. However, I felt that this story would not be complete without the story of my growing up on a farm in the Fifties and Sixties, and then wandering around the world once I felt I had grown up, in the Seventies.  I wrote all that because I felt it was an era in Australian life that should be recorded (nb – I didn’t include the saucy bits; that’s for the 50 Shades of Grey edition, although I’m not sure when that will be requested). Most importantly, In Stockmen’s Footsteps gathers the threads of the untold inside story of my 10-year career in the inner circle of the group of prominent Australians who built the Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame – a National Monument.

It, too, is a great book, hopefully timeless, and well worth the read.