Welcome to the website of Judith Leoni, an Australian author who grew up in the small wheatbelt town of Wagin in Western Australia.  Judith has written three volumes of her memoirs and the following books make up that trilogy:

In My Mother and Myself Judith’s story commences with the arrival of her pioneering Irish ancestors in the newly-founded Swan River Colony of Western Australia in 1829. It provided an entertaining account of her own adventurous and zestful childhood during the 1940s and up to the age of fourteen, when she is about to leave the town to attend boarding school. It is both a vibrant personal history and a vivid social history of life in rural Western Australia in that era.

Book number two, Sunshine and Shadows, takes the reader on a wonderful getting of wisdom journey through her formative teenage years at boarding school in the monastic town of New Norcia in the 1950s and into womanhood and a successful and dedicated career in Paediatric nursing and midwifery . She provides wonderful insights into hospital-based nursing training at Princess Margaret Hospital for children and Royal Perth Hospital,   and the nursing profession and life in general for young Western Australians in the vibrant and eventful 1960s.

The Silver Lining is book number three, which completes Judith’s autobiographical trilogy and takes in the years from 1971 to 1985 when she as a new wife accompanies her husband Len to California in the United States, arriving in the turbulent times of the Vietnam War and all that that entailed.  She continues her story of their life and travels from California to Alaska, where their first daughter was born, back to Australia for the birth of their second daughter,  then on to Papua New Guinea and lastly Vanuatu before returning to Australia where the family settled in Nambour, a town on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland.