Di Morrissey was born in Wingham, New South Wales and at age five, moved with her family to the remote surrounds of Pittwater, north of Sydney, Australia. As a child, she counted famous Australian actor Chips Rafferty as a close mentor and friend who helped provide for her and her mother after the death of her stepfather when she was a child and helped raise funds to send them overseas to California to live with family. Her mother, Kay Roberts, became Australia's first female commercial TV director working at Artransa Studios, Australian Film Commission and Film Australia.
Career
Although wanting to be a novelist since she was a young girl, Morrissey started writing as a cadet on The Australian Women's Weekly magazine at age 17. Later she worked as a journalist on Northcliffe Newspapers on London's Fleet Street for several years. She then married US diplomat Peter Morrissey and lived in Hawaii where she had her own morning TV show for KGMB and appeared in several episodes of the CBS TV series Hawaii Five-O, starring Jack Lord. Morrissey and her diplomat husband lived in various countries in South East Asia and Guyana before Morrissey returned to Australia and became one of the original presenters on Australia's first national current affairs Breakfast TV show, Good Morning Australia with Gordon Elliott, premiering on Network Ten in 1981. In 1989 she left TV to write her first novel, Heart of the Dreaming, which was published in 1991 and became a best-selling novel, establishing a demand for Australian-based stories. She is an environmentalist and activist. All her novels are inspired by landscape with environmental, political and cultural issues woven into mass marketpopular fiction. Following her support of Aung Sang Suu Kyi, she traveled to Burma in 2011 and published her book The Golden Land in 2012. She has subsequently established The Golden Land Education Foundation and raises funds for the school she has established outside Mandalay. In 2015 she launched The Manning Community News, a monthly newspaper covering local news in the Manning Valley, New South Wales. Morrissey was made a Member of the Order of Australia in the 2019 Queen's Birthday Honours in recognition of her "significant service to literature as a novelist, and to conservation and the environment".
Personal life
Morissey lives in the Manning Valley New South Wales with her partner, cinematographer Boris Janjic. She has a daughter, Dr Gabrielle Hansen, and a son, Dr Nicolas Morrissey, and four grandchildren.
