Sarah Konoski

He was working there and took the family.

But mum was placed in this hospital in Adelaide and she would get visits from the family every so often.

But she also spent an incredible amount of time by herself there, just getting sicker and sicker, which would have been, you know, obviously pretty tough for a little one.

She taught herself to draw and to paint and, yeah, as she explained to me, she felt that there was something about that, paying attention to nature, to plants, to the sunrise, you know, all the things she could see out of the window from her hospital bed.

that she found healing in that.

And there was someone else who was painting in the garden that she described.

And I think she may have befriended this person and that they maybe taught her or gave her some pastels or some ingredients that she could keep furthering her art with.

But, yeah, I think that for mum it was one of the hardest things she ever lived through, having a priest come, you know, to her deathbed, which it was at the time she was told she was going to die, and read her her last rites.

give her a splash of holy water and a piece of cloth from a saint which she kept for the rest of her life.

But she was so stubborn and resilient in a way.

that she wasn't going to let this little terminal illness kill her.

Somehow she survived and, yeah, as I mentioned, she always saw it as the art that healed and the attention she gave to nature.

She just wanted to keep painting.

She wanted to live to keep, you know, observing the world.

Yeah, well, I don't know.

I always wanted to play football.

I was rubbish.

But, you know, Dad played for Hawthorne, so there was a certain... And he never put any pressure on me to play football.

But, yeah, it was just a game of kick to kick at lunchtime on the Oval.

And I went up for a mark and...