'My father enlisted in the army as an engineer about a year after I was born. He would have liked to remain on the coast, surfing and knocking around with is mates, but he did what was expected of a new husband and father back in that era, and no doubt felt the pressure all the more for having hitched up with a seventeen-year-old Aboriginal girl. We moved down south into a fibro-board house in the western Sydney suburb of Holesworthy. Reportedly, it was a rough and peculiar place at the time. Dad was often away, either at barracks or out bush on exercise, leaving my barely eighteen-year-old mother to care for me and my younger brother alone. Perhaps because of this situation, my paternal grandfather, Jack, used to drive the seven or eight hours it then took to travel from the mid-north coast down to Sydney to collect me and take me back to my grandparents' home in Kendall.' (Introduction)