Melissa Lucashenko

And she passed on a lot of that knowledge, but it wasn't in the European sense alone.

It was, you know, little things like me and each of my siblings were given a tree.

We were told, that's your tree, that's your special tree, growing up.

And it wasn't, you know, no one made a huge deal about it.

It was just, oh, yeah, that's my tree, that one, oh, that's my brother's tree, this is someone else's tree.

And it was only decades later that I realised that that's an Aboriginal practice, you know, and probably mum didn't get to bury our placentas under the trees, but nevertheless the practice persisted.

Things like that.

Tell me about the place you grew up, your house, Melissa.

What did it look like?

Oh, God.

I got in big trouble from mum once for revealing that it was a converted chook shed.

She was horrified that people would come to know this.

I think it was actually a converted pig shed because it was long, you know, like an industrial pig shed.

Dad's family had fled the Russian Revolution and come to Brisbane via Shanghai and

and um then my grant my russian grandmother had put my father and his older brother into an orphanage in brisbane to escape her extremely violent husband who was a real piece of work and then after 12 months she went and got the boys back and she ended up marrying a czech man who was my dad's stepfather and he was a pig farmer who um

And actually, I just made a connection then.

It's funny what you don't realise.

He farmed pigs out at Rochdale, and I grew up on a bit of the farm that was carved off for Dad.

But he used to sell the produce from the pig farm at Woolloongabba.

So, of course, Woolloongabba's significant, and that's probably part of the reason why I set the pullin' pullin' at Woolloongabba.