All Our Stories are a Variation on Her Theme Last spring, a catastrophe happened in my garden. After a couple of years of the worst drought on record, the tallest tree in my garden, a gum with two trunks, had its larger trunk fall. Some thirty metres of tree, complete with installed nesting boxes crashed to the ground. I hadn’t seen the toll of the sorrowful burdens it had been carrying: the impact of drought and age and rot on its heartwood. The pillar had certainly been sco

If you love unforgettable stories that touch your heart, stories about facing life’s challenges with courage, faith, and resilience, then Every Inch a Saint was written for you. Set against the backdrop of World War I Sydney, the Spanish Flu pandemic, and the grinding poverty of the early twentieth century, this novel tells the true story of Eileen O’Connor, a severely ill, disabled woman who only stood 115cm tall, and, astonishingly, from her own sickbed, founded the Brown N

Anzac Day is a fitting time to put the spotlight on the priest who worked with Eileen O'Connor to establish Our Lady's Nurses for the Poor, a pioneering domiciliary nursing organisation, in 1913. Father Edward McGrath was a young priest called in to help Eileen's mother evade destitution when she was widowed in 1911. He was moved by the depth of Eileen's faith and her extraordinary courage in enduring unrelenting pain and disability from what we now know to be transverse myel

I am delighted to announce that Every Inch a Saint: a Novel about Eileen O'Connor, Australia's Second Saint-in-Waiting has been released into a world that desperately needs her message of hope, compassion and courage against the odds. Eileen - and her message - is contagious, like measles, but nicer. Catch her yourself, and see what happens. What people are saying: "Spiritual readers are likely to find great inspiration and value in this novel, which consistently illustrates

1911. A nineteen-year-old girl lies desperately ill. She has been sick almost her whole life, suffering from tuberculosis which has infected her spine, leaving her in unbearable pain, partially paralysed, and only three foot ten tall. Her family and priest fear the worst… We’d call what happened next a near death experience, in our terms, but she said afterwards she had been as close to death as it was possible to come, without dying. She had a vision of the Virgin Mary, who

Seven years ago, I got the inspiration to start a novel about Eileen O’Connor, a remarkable Australian woman currently being investigated for sainthood. I started researching almost immediately, rereading the biographies about her I had brought back from her house in Coogee, collecting more, talking with two of her nuns, walking the locations where she had lived and served and died. I finished my first draft in early 2020. It was an act of devotion to Eileen, a labour of love

Words have terrifying power. A well-told tale can evoke emotions. Rhetoric or a compelling slogan can rewire the human brain: we see examples on the news and in advertising every day. Words also have limitations. On one level, they pander to our inherent biases and cultural associations. But go deeper, and we see they are squiggles on a page, or sound vibrations in the air, wannabe symbols attempting to convey a single message about an ultimately ineffable mystery that can ne

Waverley Cemetery, where Eileen O'Connor's parents are buried This year when I made a pilgrimage to Coogee to honour Eileen O’Connor’s legacy, I went to visit her parents’ grave in the nearby Waverley Cemetery. I took a measure of good luck dispensed by someone who warned me it wouldn’t be easy to find and a photo of the grave in case that helped. I knew legendary Australians repose there too: bush poet Henry Lawson, and Fanny Durack, the first woman to win an Olympic gold me

Eileen O’Connor was only twenty-eight years old when she died, ravaged by the tuberculosis that had converted bones in her spine to pus-filled abscesses, struggling for breath as her heart finally failed on the 10 th of January, 1921. Even when she was alive, she was revered as a saint by many who knew her, who stored up memories and mementos of her, knowing her terrible illness would snatch her from them too soon. When she was well enough, she was carried out to sit on the

Eileen’s chapel, Our Lady’s Nurses for the Poor, Coogee. This is where it all started, in a way, my journey of invitation to write a book about Eileen O’Connor. A pilgrimage. I didn’t know it then, of course. What I knew, that day back in 2018 was that I was in the presence of a saint. No doubt, no question. The air in the chapel was electric with holiness and I could feel it. Sitting alone in her chapel a few days before the anniversary of Eileen’s death in January 2026, I r

Writing authentically about a real person, especially one being investigated for canonisation, is a daunting task that requires not just mindful research and reflection, but also devotion. Devotion to truth, to a frequent examination of my motivation and objectives, and devotion to the woman at the centre of my novel. Fortunately, Eileen O’Connor inspires devotion, not just in me, but in her sisters, her contemporaries, and many of us who have come to know about her since her

Part one: attention to detail in the historical backdrop to the story To write a historical fiction novel requires two things: research – cold, hard, accurate facts; and inspiration – something personal that touches the writer’s heart and makes the story authentic. I imagined Eileen and her friend giggling over the difficulties of a girl dressed like this managing to do anything courageous. Contemporaneous events and the details of how people lived their daily lives are so

A modern saint "The first thing people would see, when visiting after [Eileen O'Connor] died, was the telephone by her bed. They'd say,...

Sometimes, you need to see something more than once to appreciate its story. My recent visit to the Eileen O’Connor Centre in Coogee was...

I was lucky enough to make a trip to Sydney to see the new museum that commemorates Eileen O’Connor, a young woman who suffered terribly...

Where better to sit with Life, than in a graveyard? I didn’t sit, as it happened. I laid on the grass between the rows of graves and kept...

Eileen O’Connor met Father Edward McGrath when he was called in to assist her grieving family after the early death of her father, which...

When Eileen O’Connor, Australia’s saint in waiting, was born on February 19th, 1892, the world was a very different place. Antibiotics...