While she wanted to write fiction from an early age, she was not published as a writer of fiction until the late 1970s. During this decade she wrote several radio plays, receiving many rejections, but on 29 April 1977, her radio play "The Penny Ha-penny Stamp" was broadcast. However, with the publication of her short story, "Call me Pinkie", in "The Sydney Morning Herald" in 1978, she moved from writing drama to prose fiction. Between 1979 and 1980, she won nine awards for her short stories. She wrote fiction full-time from 1982, after the publication of "The Home Girls".