 According to Cooke, they were her "first, and maybe biggest ever, influences".In 2010 Cooke accompanied fellow authors Andy Griffiths and Kate Grenville to the remote Northern Territory community of Manyallaluk, 66 kilometres north-east of Katherine, to work with schoolchildren as part of the Indigenous Literacy Project.Cooke started as a cadet journalist at "The Age" in 1981, a month after her 18th birthday, and worked as a junior news reporter in the "Age"'s Sydney bureau in the early 1980s.