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Hazel Catlin's father was Indigenous and her mother was non-Indigenous. Catlin has traced her family history back to convicts transported to Tasmania. Catlin's father worked for her mother's family farm; they married after Catlin's mother's first husband died and the children from the second marriage were treated poorly. All the money her father earned working at the farm was withheld by her mother. By the time Catlin was fourteen, her father left the family and never returned. Catlin was then barred from seeing her father's family and she was made to work as a servant to her mother and half-silblings (who were non-Indigenous from the mother's first marriage).
