Sanchona is, as you've suspected, a "made-up" name. I make no apologies for this. My photograph on the right shows you what I look like, just more spruced up than usual!

As a child, I learned in my history class that the treatment of malaria lay in drinking the tea made from the bark of the cinchona tree. I fell in love with the word, "cinchona". When I was asked to find an 8-letter word for a username when I subscribed for an internet service, I jumped at the chance to use this word. I substituted "san"(which happens to be my best friend's surname) for "cin", and Sanchona has been my username ever since. It soon became my pseudonym for all my writing. This is why it is listed as the author of my novel.

I'm Australian of course, but it didn't start out that way. I was born in Malaysia (Alor Star) and educated there. After I graduated with a B.A.(Hons) degree from the University of Malaya in 1968, I worked as a high school teacher for a year before returning to the university to get my teaching credentials. Then I did some travelling—first to New Zealand, then to Australia, England, Europe, Canada and the United States of America before finally settling in Australia. I obtained my M.Comm(MIS) degree from the University of New South Wales in 1991

I've worked as a teacher and a secretary. I've helped run a small private maternity hospital in Malaysia, and I part-owned and ran a busy supermarket in Sydney.

I am a voracious reader, and have been since I discovered fiction in my early teens. Over the years, I became convinced I could write a novel as good as several I'd enjoyed reading, and better than quite a few that I found absolutely disappointing.

I decided to write a novel about the Chinese in Australia during the gold rush of the 1850s.

While I worked at a "real job", I began researching material for my novel. As a history graduate, I kept extending my research into Australian history to include that of the United Kingdom, Europe, China and the United States of America, while deepening the research by going further back into history to get a better understanding of the setting for my novel. It struck me then that I should write my story from the start—when Australia was founded. And as I wrote my saga, the words ran away from me. I couldn't cram the story I had envisaged into one novel. And so I was obliged to divide it into sequels.

Joining an online writer's workshop taught me a humbling fact—I was a fool. I had written a book, but I knew next to nothing about the technical aspects of writing a novel. Several writers in the workshop became my friends, and they taught me the necessary basics.

I was lucky in my first venture out to secure a literary agent. Sonia Land's interest in my novel was most encouraging, though no sale resulted from this association. Two other agents thought my novel had promise, but did not manage to sell it either. It took John Helfers of Tekno Books to make the sale.

I am hopeful my first novel which covers the period 1793–1802 will be well-received so I'll get to tell the rest of my story, especially that of the Chinese in Australia in the 1850s.