Rhonda Jankovic was born Caroline Watts in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1963. She was the daughter of a young single mother and, as was the custom in the 1960s, was given up for adoption. As a young teenager she spent time in Strathmore Girls Home and the Sunnyside Mental Hospital where she underwent deep-sleep therapy. In 1980, aged 17, trying to break out of a cycle of hopelessness and despair, she saved enough money to buy a plane ticket to Sydney. She hitchhiked around Australia, living by her wits, and eventually ended up in Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory.
After a marriage breakdown she moved to Melbourne where she lived on the streets, making contact with John Smith's ''God's Squad''. Rhonda's determination to make something of her life led the woman who had barely finished year 10 to enter La Trobe University as a mature-age student in 1988. Naturally curious, intellectually able, someone who worshipped "the power of words", she finished her honours thesis in 1996. It was on George Augustus Robinson, the Tasmanian and Victorian protector of Aborigines, a man outside the mainstream who, like Rhonda, understood the power of words. In 2012, she enrolled to complete a masters of arts in history by thesis to gain a greater insight into what made Robinson tick. During the early 1990s, Rhonda was involved in organising several ConFests.Involvement in the ConFest movement whetted her appetite for radical activity. She had a great moral compass, was cerebral, capable, loyal, passionate and sympathetic. Rhonda became involved in the Gippsland forest struggle and participated in the G20 struggles of 2000, in which she sustained a serious lifelong back injury as a result of a police baton charge. Her back injury did not prevent her, however, from attending demonstrations, including the G8 demonstrations in Melbourne in 2006. Rhonda died in Frankston after a long battle with cancer. (Source: http://www.theage.com.au/comment/obituaries/broke-free-from-agonising-childhood-20121217-2bjou.html )
