‘For several years after our return, I had the eerie feeling that my Sydney life continued, that I had somehow split in half and lived two lives at once; I had only to somehow find the money for a plane fare and I could slip back inside that other skin.’

For novelist Stephanie Johnson, her relationship with Australia and Australians has been a complex one. She has lived there for periods of her life, and several of her books, including her first, a collection of short stories, have been published in Australia. For Johnson the longing to return has waxed and waned. ‘Why don’t I live there?’ she often asks herself. Yet she is a sixth-generation New Zealander.

In this BWB Text Johnson explores her elusive and ambivalent feelings about the sunburnt country and in so doing casts fascinating light on some of the formative influences that have shaped the work of this award-winning New Zealand writer.