Beautifully Bleak. I likened the hills encircling Canberra to the sea. They, like the sea, could be a sunny beguiling blue, or deep and inky. They could be distant and mysterious, or beautifully bleak as the wind tore across the plains from their snowy peaks. The hills were ever changing like the sea.
I was a girl in a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth to children.