In Between the devil and the deep blue sky, Gina Wilkinson recounts an unexpected sense of belonging when she first crosses into Saddam Hussein’s Iraq - the desert and enormous sky were reassuringly familiar for a girl who grew up in remote Western Australia. Gina spent her childhood in series of small towns in WA. Her family was “among the fast-vanishing tribes of the outback; nomadic caravans of white collar gypsies made up principally of bankers, headmasters, Telstra workers and the occasional priest”.

At the age of 17, Gina’s nomadic callings took her to Brazil and she went on to live in the Americas, Asia and the Middle East although she returned often to Australia. For more than 15 years she’s worked as a reporter, correspondent and radio documentary maker for the ABC and SBS in Australia, the British Broadcasting Corporation, Agence France Presse and public broadcasters in Canada, the US, Hong Kong, Germany and Ireland.
In 2002, Gina’s aid worker husband was offered a job with UNICEF in Baghdad. The regime did not permit journalists to reside in Iraq so Gina decided to put her career on hold and accompany her husband to Baghdad. While she chafed at her new role as a “UN dependant spouse”, Gina gained a unique opportunity to experience the final year of Saddam’s tyrannical rule. After the fall of Baghdad in 2003, she was appointed the ABC’s Iraq correspondent.

In early 2004 Gina moved to Sri Lanka and life was soon turned upside down once more, when the Boxing Day tsunami killed over 30,000 people on the Indian Ocean island and left more than 100,000 homeless. Gina played a key role in covering the tsunami for the ABC, the BBC and other international broadcasters. She also worked with the international relief organisation IOM to help rebuild the country. In 2006 she moved to New York, where she writes and takes care of her new baby boy