In 1997 Camille won third place in the same awards with Don�t Call Me Sonny Boy. She later workshopped this script at Interplay, the International Festival of Young Playwrights at Townsville, Australia. She also attended Interplay 1999, where the internet anthology play Something Blue in which she participated was directed by playwright and artistic director of the Queensland Theatre Company, Michael Gow. She wrote and directed her first full length play She Called Me Honey Bunny in 1997, where it received rave reviews at Sydney's Cafe Basilica.

Several of her radio dramas have been heard on ABC�s Radio National and Triple J radio stations, including Am I Your Dream? and Hebephrenia. She has participated in numerous interviews and panel discussions on local and international radio on topics ranging from literature, womens' modernist art, and film theory. In 1998 she published a book of short stories, Crush, assisted by the Sydney University Cultural Arts Grants Board. She graduated from Sydney University in 1999 (majoring in English and Art History and Theory). She currently writes full time for computer games company MicroForte, where she is working on their Massively Multiplayer Online Game project, BigWorld: Citizen Zero and has gained reknown as Australia's only female game designer.

She is currently working on a third novel, The Bondmaid, as well as several film projects including a script about Australia's early film history, to be produced by Tony Buckley (The Potato Factory, Caddie, The Picture Show Man). Her interests include silent film, collecting 1950s design, and Renaissance literature.

I was born on October 17th, 1977 in Sydney, Australia. My parents, Lyn and Peter, met through a mutual love of motorcycling. No - they weren't `bikies' - far from it! My mother was a successful commercial artist and a Brigitte Bardot lookalike who rode a 200cc Yamaha. My father was an Australian champion motorbike racer, as was my uncle Jim, and as was their father Charles before him. Legend has it that my mother finally fell for him when he quoted her some Shakespeare at a party. Not surprising at all, given that he was later known as the Only Engineer Ever to Read Virginia Woolf on his Lunchbreak.

They married on December 15th, 1974, and spent a year in Europe - the highlight of which was the famous incident at Moroco where an Arab offered 20 camels for my mother! Dad's kicking himself now that he knows how much camels are worth ;)

Several years of relative peace were disturbed, appropriately enough, just as punk was gaining a toehold on the other side of the world. I'd say my lungs were and are definitely on a par with Johnny Rotten's. I was named Camille Emma Scaysbrook - Emma after Jane Austen's heroine, courtesy of my literary-minded mother (who is herself Lyn Anne, after `Anne of Green Gables'). Little Wingnut was about to take over their lives.

It's an underestimation to say I was a curious child. By the age of one I was pushing my playpen around the room for a better vantage point. By two, I was the youngest child to use the alphabet eye-tester at the doctors. My mother read to me almost literally from birth, and was amazed at how much I picked up, even before I could talk. I could not (and never have been) able to sit still! Amongst my favourite things of my first few years were Ian Dury, Adam Ant, David Bowie, Mork and Mindy, Wonder Woman, and Batman. The latter was a particular obsession - the suit was omnipresent, and there was a period where I would not be known as Camille - I would only answer to `Robin'!

In 1980 my brother Dane arrived to torment and delight us all. Dane was an adorable baby with big brown eyes and blonde hair. His arrival coincided with our temporary move to my father's childhood home at Hurstville, while we were building the home that we still own, in the idyllic southern suburbs of Sydney.

I began my schooling at Bonnet Bay Public School. It was my first year when I discovered that a story more than two lines long with a beginning, middle, and end, could actually cause a stir. It was some time before I gave up my ambition to be an artist or scientist and become a writer instead, though. This was largely through the influence of my personal Mr Keating of `Dead Poet's Society', Mrs Quill, who told me a very important thing that I have never forgotten. She told me never to stop being creative, no matter what. I made several valiant first attempts at writing a novel, the first in Year 3 with a saga about a child who was a witch, and the ultimate in Year 4, when I produced a sequel to my favourite series of stories, `Little House On The Prairie'. This was fully illustrated and typed up by my mother. I had the honour of seeing it go into the school library - a pride which fully defeated the accusations of `oh, her mother wrote it.' I wrote it - but I was very disappointed to find out that those months of work added up to little more than a single chapter of a `real' book.

My schooling continued it at Sutherland Primary School when I was accepted into their O.C. programme for talented students. I was never really happy at Sutherland, learning to struggle for my place at the top of the class.

I began my high school years in 1990 - the beginning of an amazing decade, the beginning of a saga from which you could say nobody ever recovers. Seeing a former schoolmate is still like seeing the fellow survivor of a shipwreck. My school was St Patricks College at Sutherland, where yet again I was forced to begin on a clean slate. I seemed to get off on a wrong foot with people, but in myself, I felt perfect. I had learned not to care a jot what others thought - possibly the most important lesson of them all. People flailing in the mire of adolesence do not take kindly to someone who is able to achieve this tricky feat, and even today I am amazed at how many people who threatened me at school were secretly scared of me, or even admired me.

1990 was also the year I wrote my first novel, `The Nearest Revolution', an odd but by no means regrettable sci-fi coming-of-age hybrid. It concerned the experiences of Orion, a naive sixteen-year-old who works with his brother and their friends in a restaurant named Zenith's. The people of their race absorb music rather than eating food, and it is via a famous DJ that Orion idolises that he learns about `heavy' - the drug of choice amongst young, hip Alpha Centaurians.

1992 was the year our school became co-ed, and it was also the year I began taking drama classes with Roundabout Theatre and Community Projects

... TO BE CONTINUED