Rosalie Ham

Author

Rosalie Ham completed a Bachelor of Education majoring in Drama and Literature, then went on to complete a Master of Arts, Creative Writing at RMIT in 2007, simultaneously completing two best selling novels.

Where were you born?

I was born and raised in Jerilderie, NSW, population 1000, and this nurtured in me a need to know exactly what everyone else was doing and form an opinion about it. I am very good at secrets. Being a farmer’s daughter, I had a fabulous childhood – swimming in creeks and irrigation channels, riding a horse behind a slow moving flock of ewes, rousabouting, cutting wood and setting the fire after school every day in winter, learning to drive aged nine so I could help with Bathurst burr cutting and other slow-moving country driving tasks. My peers and I also conquered tree-climbing, mushrooming, removing bindis from rubber thongs, fishing for and then murdering European Carp, yabbying, and turning leeches inside out on twigs and baking them in the sun. We enjoyed rambling across dry plains surrounded by unreachable horizons and very little parental supervision

What themes are recurring in your work?

Small communities, isolation, treachery, betrayal, revenge, love, hate, and choices.

What have been the highlights of your career?

The Dressmaker is currently in development for a feature film, with producer Sue Maslin (Film Art Media), screenwriter, and director Jocelyn Moorhouse. The Dressmaker was short listed for the 2001 Christina Stead prize for fiction in the NSW Premier’s Literary awards, nominated for Vision Australia’s Braille Book of the year as well as the Booksellers Association book of the year award. The Dressmaker is also on the VCE Readers list for Literature.