Not that she is an amateur in the modern sense of the word. Today, she is one of the country's most respected ceramicists, with a career spanning five decades and hundreds of exhibitions. The next of these, a major survey of her work, is about to open at Craft ACT, and will include works from every phase of her career.

Among these will be her first creation, a pinch pot made as part of her first pottery course. It was while she was studying for a science degree at the University of Sydney that her mother, an avid amateur potter, encouraged her to tag along to an evening pottery class.

"I grew up in a house that really enjoyed art and practised it," she says. "I went to Saturday-morning art classes, my father played the piano, they had lots of art books and things like that, but I studied science at university. I was competent enough academically, and in those days, if you were competent enough, it was a waste to do [art]."

Still, she longed to do something with her hands, and an evening pottery class seemed as good a diversion as any. It turned out to be the making of a long and fulfilling career. The rest, as they say, is history, albeit one with as many twists and turns as you would expect from someone who came of age in bohemian inner-city Sydney in the 1960s and '70s.

Her mother was instrumental. "She had a studio at home because she had been doing pottery classes and she bought a little kiln and the garage was extended. She was the classic enthusiastic amateur," she says.

"And so I did that, and it was at the time when pottery was cool. It was in the mid-'60s, and the people in the class were a group of people I wanted to belong to. In other words, they were older and they were interesting people like architects and the like."

It was this crowd who told her about a specialty night course on glaze that would be held the next year at what was then East Sydney Technical College. She jumped at the chance to go, although she was still completing her final year of science, and had already begun a teacher's education course, but the future looked dire.

"I was on a teacher's scholarship, so I'd done some practical teaching, and decided teaching high school girls science was not my metier. It was a nightmare," she says.

Luckily, the instructor of the glazing class was the head of ceramics at East Sydney Tech, Peter Rushforth, today widely regarded as the father of studio pottery in Australia and one of the country's most revered ceramic artists. He suggested she ditch the teaching and study ceramics full time, an option that had never occurred to her.

So she threw herself headlong into ceramics, completing an intensive, two-year certificate, one that involved long days and two-hour practice sessions. At the end, there were three part-time teaching jobs going. She was offered the one in Canberra, at what was then Canberra Technical College, and part of the NSW technical and further education system.

For the next four years, she commuted to the capital from Sydney, working part time for two years, and then full time for the next two. Eventually, she resigned, craving stability. Canberra, in the early '70s, was small, and her heart was in Sydney.

"It was good, but I lived in inner-city Sydney in Glebe, and it was much more interesting," she says.

She began hunting for jobs, offering to throw pots for a large production studio, before taking someone's advice to go back to Rushforth and ask for her job back.

"I went to see Peter, and he was a bit horrified that I'd resigned. Looking back now, I can see that he has very much opened doors and looked after me. You see that in retrospect," she says.

Rushforth, who is now in his early 90s and has just gone into care, was in many ways a role model for DeBoos, even if she didn't realise it at the time.

"He was an exceptional person, because he'd been a prisoner of war of the Japanese, and that was the culture that he embraced when he took up pottery," she says, referring to the Japanese pottery movement that he taught under.

"He was a very good human model."

Rushforth effectively created a full-time position for her out of three part-time jobs, during which period she shuttled between three separate TAFE campuses in Sydney, as both an instructor and eventually head of each. She insists, now, that she was too young and flighty to head a department at the time. She took over Rushforth's position for a year after he retired, but left when she had a baby.

By this time, she had reconnected with an old Canberra flame, sailor and former barrister Michael Wignall. When their daughter, Mary, was barely one year old, they travelled to the United States, where Wignall was overseeing the fitting out of a yacht in Wisconsin, and delivered the vessel across the sea to France.

"We had a car seat strapped to the mast because [Mary] liked to be the centre of attention," DeBoos says. "When I look back on it, it was pretty privileged. It was very privileged to grow up in that time, because you could resign from a job, and there would always be a job, or if you wanted to make pots, you could make pots and sell them. It was simpler."

Amid teaching, commuting and travelling, she made pots the whole time. "I was making work and I had annual studio sales. I had a friend who was an avid book collector in Sydney, and he and I used to have combined book and pottery sales.

"It was great fun."

After the small family docked in Europe, she spent time with Mary and a friend in Marseilles.

"Michael left the boat because he was missing us, and then we sat there drinking bad Greek wine in Corfu and talked about what we would do with the rest of our lives," she says.

"I said, `I've always wanted to run a production pottery', and Michael said, `Well, I've always wanted to build a building', so we looked at where."

Wignall owned a property near Wee Jasper in the Brindabella Range, and together they built and set up the Brindabella Pottery in 1982, an enterprise that continued until 1998, when DeBoos accepted the position as head of Ceramics at the ANU School of Art. In the interim, they spent several years at Tanja on the South Coast, home-schooling Mary until she went into high school in Bega.

DeBoos brought Mary back to Canberra to complete her schooling at Narrabundah College, during which time she taught two days a week at the art school.

"They needed someone to teach glaze, and I'd written a couple of glaze books and was known as a glaze teacher – a glaze lady," she says. She published a successful handbook on glazing in the late '70s, a follow-up 10 years later and a general potter's handbook in 1984.

She taught part time for two years, under school director David Williams, and was eventually offered full-time work. Not wanting to commit full time, she hatched a plan with fellow artist and teacher Greg Daly to job share, an arrangement that made the school nervous, but worked well for the next six years.

She was on a sailing holiday when she received a fax, via the Fiji Yacht Club, offering her the job of head of the department. The head at the time, Alan Watt, was resigning, and both he and Williams felt she would be best suited to the role. She asked for the remainder of her holiday, another 12 days, to think about it.

"I thought I was ready then. I was older, whereas I'd been really too young to head a department before, as my behaviour probably evidenced," she says. "And it was great!"

She held that position for the next 15 years, steering the department through a period of great transformation for the art school. In a time of major funding cuts, when the ACT government stopped funding the School of Art, she saw opportunities to make money, rather than pinch pennies.

The workshop established a distance course, using videos made in house, a method that turned out to be very successful. By then, many TAFE colleges had closed, leaving scores of "passionate amateurs" – the types to whom DeBoos felt she owed her career – with no official creative outlet. Scores of distance students enrolled, about 70 at any one time.

"It just became very popular and internationally known, because we could afford to pay people to come [and teach]," she says, but changes in funding policy meant the venture, which had brought so much money to the department, came to an end.

The passionate amateurs are now stateless once more, but DeBoos has been watching with interest as the community arts sector again comes into its own.

"The community organisations are booming … and private organisations – courses inviting international guests, having residencies, all of that. That's the base of the triangle on which you build a more elite professional body, and you have to have that," she says.

"What happened was during the '80s, people ignored that broad base and wanted the elitism and didn't wanted to be tarnished with the amateurs, whereas I think amateur is a word that needs reinstating, because it means `a lover of'. You do it for love, not for money."

During her time at the Ceramics Workshop, she also established links with China, via a factory in Zibo in Shandong province, the home of porcelain.

"It's a fantastic facility for artists, because porcelain production has always been a segmented production, unlike our studios, where we do everything ourselves," she says.

"It's a very exciting place to be, so we set up as part of the distance course a three-week intensive in China, and we were the first university to do it at the place we were working."

Several of the distance students, who completed the type of diploma the art school eventually shelved, have gone on to create first-class dinnerware collections. One even supplied restaurants owned by celebrity chef Neil Perry.

DeBoos retired two years ago mainly to give someone else a go, namely her long-time colleague, Greg Daly, who, apart from being a prolific potter, has instilled a fresh agenda in the school.

Meanwhile, it didn't take long, soon after her retirement, for the idea of a retrospective of her work to come up. This one has been guest-curated by another long-term friend and colleague, Canberra Times art critic Peter Haynes.

The process of collating examples from five decades of pots has been "bloody hard work", she says, although seeing her work laid out chronologically for the first time has been almost like reading old diaries, not least because of that first pinch pot she found while going through her late mother's possessions.

"Peter going through and choosing things has been interesting too, because what he chose is not necessarily what I would have chosen, but it has enabled me to see my work in a different light, and kind of a continuity of some threads in it that I haven't seen before, which is a real privilege," she says.

"I think all artists effectively make work for themselves, and what you're trying to do with it is to answer questions about the world and things you see, or your practice."

She can see, for the first time, cartwheeling circles in her creative trajectory, rather than something linear.

"I don't think I have an aesthetic as such. I like functional pottery because of its interaction with people, so it's about relationships, and, in fact, that relationship that exists between the maker and the user is also something that I've explored between pieces in one set.

"I think Peter's quoted me in there talking about how I like to work in spaces between things, so rather than it being specifically this or specifically that, I find this grey or difficult area much more interesting. Grey is much more interesting than black or white.

"[It's like a] cartwheel moving forward. I would think I'd gone onto a new field, but in fact I'm dragging all the past with me."

Janet DeBoos: A Survey opens at Craft ACT on May 29 and runs until July 11.

Curator Peter Haynes will give a free talk on curating and the evolution of an exhibition at the gallery on Friday, May 29, from 4pm-5pm.

Janet DeBoos will present a free floor talk on her work at the gallery on Thursday, June 11, from 2pm-3pm.