Melissa Lucashenko

No, the trick is to remember to wear a mask and earmuffs if you're sanding a Queenslander, which I didn't do a lot of.

I probably inhaled a great deal of lead paint when I think about it.

Yeah, and cutting in, you always got to cut in and then you fill in once you've done the outside edges, the tricky bits.

So do the tricky bits first and then do the easy bits.

But I interrupted you, sorry.

You were saying you had a partner.

Yeah, he was a house painter and so I learned how to sand and how to fill and how to...

And how to carry bloody trestles around.

I tell you, I was so fit back then.

I was very strong, very fit, and I could move a four-metre trestle on my own, hoik it around on my shoulders.

I'd done a degree in public policy and economics at Griffith, which changed my life, and gone away to Canberra and done a short stint in Canberra and decided that wasn't for me and went back to Eagleby because I thought living at Eagleby, painting houses was preferable to being an intern in the federal government under Hawke.

Possibly a mistake when I look back, but anyway.

I don't think I ever would have stayed very long as a desk worker.

I don't have the persistence to...

Well, my eldest brother, I didn't know growing up.

I only met him once or twice as a child and then we reconnected when I was about 24 maybe.

And that was because he'd spent the majority of his life up to that point in and out of prisons in Australia and New Zealand.

And also my father had banished him from the family and so mum had to only have contact with him in secret.

So I had this kind of secret brother who was a crim and that was part of the reason why when I heard there was a...

a meeting to form an organisation or do something about women in prison in my early 20s that I thought, yeah, that's something I'll definitely be interested in.