Sita Walker

He calls me his precious treasure and he always has done since I was very small and maybe he was offsetting the fact that my brother would always tell me what an accident I was and he always would say, oh no, no, she was a pleasant surprise.

How did your mum and dad meet one another?

My mum and dad met at a Baha'i conference in Sydney in the mid-60s, I think 1966, and at that time...

It was very unusual for mixed race couples to marry.

But my father, being the principled man that I have just said that he is, was really wanted to show his principles in his relationship.

So he's told me that he always wanted to marry someone that was of a different race to him because the Baha'is believe that there should be no prejudice between couples.

that everybody is equal, which nowadays we think, yeah, all right, of course.

But in the 60s, you know, we were still in white Australia policy times and it was very unusual for them to be together.

Yes.

Well, his father became a Baha'i first.

His father became a Baha'i and that caused a real rift in the marriage between his mother and his father because his mother was not a Baha'i.

She was a

She was the opposite to my mother in a way.

She was very much about what will people think.

And I'm not saying that's a bad thing.

Sometimes it's good to think about what other people might think.

But her husband, my grandfather, became a Baha'i and my father would find Baha'i books that his father had hidden away because his mother wouldn't let them be

out in the home, but he would find them and read them.

And he was really taken with the philosophy of the religion.

Well, he tells me that he read a book, a Baha'i book called the Book of Certitude.