LSV: So I guess really I have been very fortunate. I have 31 years of not having too much happen to me in my life. I thought I’d married the man of my dreams if nothing happened. But I certainly ended up with three beautiful children. The journey after packing everything up within four days to make my way back to the Kimberley, something I had dreamed of for a very long period of time was an incredible journey.

It was great for the boys and I. We did this in the middle of the wet season actually, so it took many months. We had no real goal on which town to go to. We weren’t sure whether it’d be Derby, Wyndham or Broome or wherever. Anyway, we ended up in, in Wyndham and I was very fortunate to have relatives there who provided a house for us.

I must say that when my husband did run off with our marriage counselor, he took all our money as well. So and I couldn’t track him down in Melbourne. So we were fairly poor and I obviously chucked in my job down in Perth, which is where we were. So I had to virtually start from scratch. But that journey during the wet season, we had lots of camping.

So in many ways we had a very long period of time just healing and it’s just amazing how healing the Kimberley is. It’s something I still feel today, even at that ancient age of 71. You know, if I get an old lady’s voice, blame my age. So we spent a couple of years in Wyndham and then if we fast forward to 1986, we move to [inaudible word].

That was another testing period. There were many, many houses, homes, waste homes available, but it was incredibly difficult to get homes waste to provide one of those. So my sons and I ended up by squatting in one of the houses and it took an entire year of fighting tooth and nail before we ended up with that home. And that became our home for the next couple of decades.

So it was really basically fast forwarding again to 2000. It was an incredible period during that sort of 1986 to 2000 with [inaudible word], she really became quite a soul mate. We spent a great deal of time walking the Kimberley and as mentioned, we recorded over 12,000 rock art sites and other archeological sites. So it was an incredible journey and without [inaudible word], probably an almost impossible one for me that she made it so easy to get access to a lot of these areas.

During that time also, we set up community specialists in research, which was a nonprofit organization, sponsoring students from Australia and overseas, mainly from what used to be the old Holland, just doing various projects throughout the Kimberley. And so we would get various tour companies to sponsor these students. So we achieved a great deal and it was around that period that I also met my now husband, Dean  [inaudible word]

That was a pretty stunning thing. I was pretty ancient by then, 49, resolved to being on my own for the rest of my life. The boys were growing up and leaving home one by one, and Dean stepped into my life. Long flowing hair down to his back was just incredible. It was love at first sight. Last display sight.

And so basically he joined [inaudible word] and I. He had a wonderful ability to photograph, had lots of cameras. So he became our photographer and we covered a lot more area with him. So we continued doing that. So fast forward 2000 to model 2020 and during that period of time we set up Kimberley Child Busters that was an unbelievable journey of several years where we would take up to two busloads of children out into Bush, into the Northern Territory.

Our main goal then, which seems really quite crazy now, was to see if we could stop the cane toad from crossing the border into western Australia, what an absolute joke. I mean, we were picking up 10,000 cane toads a night, so it was pretty staggering that she can [inaudible word], but it was great for the kids. So we had a lot of kids at risk out there and they just loved that whole opportunity.

And [inaudible word] became known as the pink whisperer, for some reasons she would always find a peak at some of these billabongs and she would whisper it and all the other Aboriginal children thought that was just absolutely amazing. We set up a research base as well on [inaudible word] for six years where we also took quite a number of groups of kids at risk out there and which was always an interesting thing because for the first three days while everyone got off their Coca-Cola and fast, you know, sweets and everything, it was just a nightmare.

And they went; once everyone had settled, it was just terrific. After the Close down, we then set up on Nicholson Station for nine years once again undertaking [inaudible word] exercises, mainly training. So we would have a lot of the Aboriginal training groups from around the Kimberley learning how to [inaudible word] and all sorts of things. So it was a pretty incredible period right up till 2020, but it was also a period in my life where I lost quite a number of people.

I lost my mother and my father and I still miss them terribly. I lost two sisters and a brother and of course I lost [inaudible word]. Sorry, it still affects me. But before [inaudible word] died we had made, I guess, the promise that I would look after her grandson, which I still do. Tyrese’s turned 19 today, actually, and so he’s in Melbourne doing really well.

And that I would also start producing all this research that we have done. So we’ve started producing these rock outputs. We had several more to do which covid kind of slowed things down a bit, but over the next couple of years I will endeavor to honor that promise.

Thank you.