AustLit

Author's note [from Sister Girl]: Probably good therapy after one writes a book is to reflect on why one wrote it! It can show the absolute importance for a writer to have written what she considers to be 'the right message'. Taking time to reflect on why it was essential to write a book about my mother helped me understand the enormity of her compassion and love toward her fellow human beings. While I knew she was a product of her time, as am I, the challenges to encapsulate the generational and social mores and political ideologies without tampering any further with our mother/daughter relationship is set out in this essay written in 1991 (p. 37).