Here I am with my Aunty Flora and my cousin Janet. You can read about Flora's family in My Dark Brother, the first few pars of the publisher's blurb are below, or you can watch the documentary, "Pioneers of Love":
“My great-grandad Leandro taught his children to be proud, he told that all the people, black and white, are equal, he taught us to help the downtrodden and underprivileged and to distinguish between right and wrong”. My Dark Brother is the tale of an Aboriginal family that can trace its line of descent on one side from the earliest Russian czars, and on the other from a deeply ancient tribal group of Ngadjon-ji that has lived on the Atherton Tablelands since time immemorial. The book focuses on two characters: Nicholas Illin, a Russian intellectual, obsessed with ideas, an Utopian, and his son Leandro who managed to put these ideas into practice.
He migrated to Australia at the turn of the century, fell in love with an Aboriginal woman and married her in the face of adversity, subsequently raising their six children after her premature death in outback Queensland. Becoming one of the first European champions of Aboriginal rights in later years he was heard to quote; ‘I fought for every black that I seen wronged’.
At Flora's 95th (October 2011)
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