Boy Overboard is published on 29 July. I can't wait for you to meet Jamal and Bibi. In the meantime, you can read some other stuff about them in the G'days for May and June. And here's some other thoughts about how I came to write the book...

Last year, as the asylum seekers reaching our shores received more and more media coverage, I was increasingly struck by something. The faces I was seeing on TV were a powerful embodiment of everything that makes us human – love, hope, fear, bravery, and a desperate desire that our families be happy and healthy and safe. However the words used about these people, particularly by some politicians, made no reference to, nor contained any evidence of, humanity. There seemed to be a clear agenda in some quarters to represent the asylum seekers as non-human.

My interest as an author has always been in writing stories about young people grappling with problems bigger than themselves. These problems tend to come from the adult world, and while they affect my young characters hugely, they're usually not of the kids' own making. Which doesn't stop my characters trying to solve them. Children may lack power, but they don't lack energy, optimism, determination, creativity and irreverence ­ all fine problem-solving qualities.

As I looked at the young people on the refugee boats, and read their personal accounts in letters and on the Net, and thought about the experiences they'd been through both before they left their homes and since, I wondered how I would feel in their place. How my family would feel. Soon I was doing what writers of fiction do, imagining myself in a life I've never lived.

I started sharing more and more of my days with an eleven year old Afghan boy called Jamal and his nine year old sister Bibi. They existed only in my imagination, but as my family will ruefully tell you, Jamal and Bibi became as real to me as any of the flesh and blood people in my life.

Gradually a story started to take shape. I felt guilty sometimes that I was writing in a safe comfortable room with access to tea and chocolate bikkies, and not in a climate of war and famine and racial hatred, or in a refugee camp, or in an overcrowded leaky boat in the middle of the ocean, or incarcerated in a maximum security prison with no idea when I might get out. I felt grateful too, and guilty about that too, and the whole process might have come to a halt if Jamal and Bibi hadn't had so much energy, optimism, determination, creativity and irreverence.

When the first draft was finished I met some adults and children who had been through all those experiences and more. They told me their stories, and read mine. I was worried that my story may have gone over the top a bit for dramatic effect. I needn't have worried. Some of their experiences left my chapters for dead in the drama, danger, adventure and jaw-dropping bravery departments. And they corrected me on various points of information gently and patiently and with good humour.

Now I've finished Boy Overboard, I find myself, like all authors, anxious that the story be seen as a story and not as anything else. I love Jamal and Bibi and I'd hate for them to be reduced to political stereotypes as some have tried to do to their real life counterparts. I never intended their story to be a political tract, even though I know it exists in a highly political climate.

But I'd be dishonest to pretend that I can exist in such a climate without strong feelings of my own. As I get to know my new friends better, I'm struck by something very powerfully. That they, parents and children, are possessed of exactly those qualities we value most highly in this country, the qualities we use to define ourselves as Australian.

Phew, better stop now, or this'll end up longer than the book.

Until next time, oo-roo and happy reading,

17 July 2002