Amanda Webster Amanda Webster i(A147819 works by)
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 2 y separately published work icon A Tear in the Soul Amanda Webster , Sydney : NewSouth Publishing , 2016 9694677 2016 single work biography

'A foreigner’s criticism provides the impetus for Amanda Webster to embark on a long-intended search for two former school friends – Aboriginal kids from the Kurrawang Mission near where she grew up in Kalgoorlie. As a child, Webster supposed Mission kids were well-cared for orphans, however growing awareness forced her to think otherwise. Over the years her questions accumulated: were her friends members of the Stolen Generations? What was life at Kurrawang really like? What are her responsibilities as a non-Indigenous Australian whose family’s privilege was built on stolen land? For an institution that existed for over two decades, Webster finds that Kurrawang was strangely undocumented. Nor can she find any trace of her former friends, including a young Aboriginal girl who went on a beach holiday with Amanda’s family. Then in 2012, Webster meets Gregory Ugle, an older brother of her former friend Tony. After a four-decade absence, Webster returns to her hometown with Ugle to reconnect with her former friends, and to piece together Kurrawang’s story through oral histories and local newspaper archives. Over several trips, a sometimes uneasy tension emerges with Ugle as both he and Webster inch towards a fragile reconciliation.' (Source: Publisher's website)

1 'You Just Want Me to Get Fat' Amanda Webster , 2012 extract autobiography (The Boy Who Loved Apples : A Mother's Battle with Her Son's Anorexia)
— Appears in: Good Weekend , 23 June 2012; (p. 20-24)
1 3 y separately published work icon The Boy Who Loved Apples : A Mother's Battle with Her Son's Anorexia Amanda Webster , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2012 Z1869812 2012 single work autobiography

'When it became clear that Amanda Webster's eleven-year-old son Riche was not just a little too skinny but dangerously ill, people were often surprised.

'Do boys get anorexia? they would ask. And then, How did he get it?

'That was the question Amanda asked herself, too. She had trained as a doctor; she knew that every disease has a cause. And if her son had an eating disorder, she wondered what the cause could possibly be but something she and her husband Kevin had done—or failed to do?

'Quick to blame both Kevin and herself, worried about how her two other kids were coping, Amanda also found herself at odds with a medical establishment that barely understood Riche's illness, far less how to treat it. And as she embarked on the long, agonising process of saving her son's life she found herself battling not just Riche's demons but her own.

'Brave, honest and ultimately uplifting, The Boy Who Loved Apples is a compelling and beautifully written account of life with an eating disorder, and a gritty, moving testament to a mother's love.' (From the publisher's website.)

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