Sarah Kanowski

Dad would go to the back shed and craft these fake machine guns for us.

And every afternoon was armies and in our bases.

And we watched war movies.

You know, Top Gun was the most watched VCR in our household.

And we read books like Douglas Bader, Reach for the Sky of these World War II heroes.

So

We were surrounded by this.

We knew that the men in our family had joined up.

Ideally, they'd gone off to war and had adventures and found glory.

There's always a pair of short Canterbury rugby shorts and a swan dry, which New Zealanders will know it, but Australians, you know, the dry as a bone is the equivalent here.

It's a very thick woolen smock, basically.

So his legs would be exposed to the gorse bush and the thorns and he'd put his boots on, his Canterbury shorts and his hunting smock and out he would go.

And then he'd come back three days later with a wild boar on his shoulders and he would sort of thump it on the kitchen bench, much to my mother's horror.

thrilled i you know i'd been training with my air rifle in the garage i could shoot a hole through the you know the circle and the p of the pepsi can and i was ready to go and i had my own rugby shorts and my own boots and i didn't have a swan dry yet they were too expensive but i was heading out with dad and just he and i and the gun we were using on those hunts was an ak-47

He did a hunting knife for my 12th birthday.

It was something I would take out with me on my first hunt.

It had his initials on it.

And it also had this little mantra that he was gifting to me, Far Horizons.

So we were paid by the government, by the environmental services to be hunting these feral animals.

So possums, goats, even boars.