[5] 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.

[1] In 1989 she left TV to write her first novel, Heart of the Dreaming, which was published in 1991 and became a best-seller, establishing a demand for Australian-based stories.

[2] All her novels are inspired by landscape with environmental, political and cultural issues woven into mass market popular fiction.

[8] Following her support of Aung Sang Suu Kyi, she travelled to Burma (Myanmar) in 2011 and published her book The Golden Land in 2012.

[11] Morrissey was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the 2019 Queen's Birthday Honours in recognition of her "significant service to literature as a novelist, and to conservation and the environment".