Publisher's Synopsis
Raised in the era of the 'White Australia' policy and widespread racism, Dianne grows up believing her adoptive mother, Val, is her birth mother. Val promises Dianne that when she turns fifteen, she will 'tell her a story'. But just months before Dianne's fifteenth birthday, Val dies. Abandoned by her stepfather, Dianne is raped, sentenced to a girls' home and later forced to marry her rapist. She gives birth to a baby girl - the first of seven children - and goes on to endure years of horrific domestic violence at the hands of different partners, drug and alcohol addiction, and cruel betrayal by those closest to her. But miraculously her fighting spirit is not extinguished. At the age of twenty-nine, Dianne learns she is Aboriginal and that her grandfather was William Cooper, a famous Aboriginal activist and community leader. She chooses to forgive the past and becomes a leader in her own right.
