Melissa Lucashenko

And Mary Petrie, the mother of these boys and the

wife of Grandfather Andrew Petrie, who was called the father of Brisbane.

Yeah, Mary knew she had a premonition that they would find him in water and he'd just gone missing and they couldn't find him for two days or three days and eventually they found him under this makeshift bridge in shallow water where he'd been knocked out and drowned in the creek.

Well, I think I'm always learning.

I was raised by my mother, who was raised by her grandmother with her extended family, and mum's granny was a child slave.

So only my mother is separating me from the experience of Aboriginal slavery in the 1800s in Queensland.

Having said that, mum was very quiet about her Aboriginality and I just thought every, I just thought human experience involved some people having dark olive skin and curly brown hair and other people just popped out white and red haired and that was nothing unusual.

But as a young teenager, someone from outside the family said to me, you're Aboriginal.

And I said, no, I'm not.

And they said, yeah, yeah, go home, talk to your parents.

And I did.

Yeah, about that time, mum fessed up.

Very brief.

What she did was she took out a photo.

We've only got three photos of Granny Christina and she put one of them on her dresser.

And I said, who's that Aboriginal woman?

And she said, oh, that's my grandmother.

And I went, oh, that's why we've all got brown skin and curly hair.

Right.

And then I just, you know, being a teenager, I just turned my attention back to karate because that was what I was interested in at the time, karate and I suppose boys to some extent.