Melissa Lucashenko

Well, she was raised to assimilate, you know, to survive in the world that she was born into.

Mum very nearly starved to death as a child in the Gympie area.

She was born in 26, so she was a very small child during the Depression and the family were...

very poor and um if it wasn't for the fishing fleet kind of donating a mullet to granny christina every so often and going out for bush food you know living on bush oysters and and you know whatever they could scrounge my family probably would have starved mom said she nearly starved to death

So proclaiming yourself Aboriginal was kind of not top of their agenda.

It was surviving and passing as white has been a survival tool for colonised people all over the world, which is something I was ashamed of for a long time.

But I think I've just about let go of that shame and just accepted that

I've had privileges in my life that have arisen out of mum assimilating, but I have reversed that process in my lifetime and I'm very much part of the Aboriginal community.

Well, the guru community.

And I think as a guru, I dream as a guru, I live as a guru.

And I'm very much the better for it.

And mum, you know, she put a veneer of whiteness over her life in order to survive and in order to keep her kids apart from anything else.

But, you know, she married a very violent Russian man and her life was about survival on many levels.

But there was an Aboriginal person underneath that and I glimpsed that.

I only glimpsed it occasionally.

In what sort of way?

Well, the most obvious way that was ongoing was Mum's exceptional ability with plants.

She had an encyclopaedic knowledge of plants, even though she only went to about Grade 3 of school and then had to leave to be a domestic.

She was always a very curious woman, very, very intelligent woman, always learning and

And she knew the common names and the Latin names for just about every plant that grows in Brisbane, I reckon.