Versions, and “Versions”

I’ve already written about The Wiiyaan as a journalist.

That piece lives in the Tweed Weekly. It’s careful, respectful, measured. It honours Bundjalung origin story, place, and the quiet authority of listening. It was written for a broad audience, many of whom - like me - come from settler families, carrying our own histories alongside the land we now call home.

But after filing that story, I knew I wasn’t done.

Some stories ask something back from you. This one did.

So this is the version that doesn’t fit in a newspaper column.

This is the version that explains why that exhibition cracked something open in me - why listening to Kyle Slabb speak about holding one version of Country, with care and restraint, felt like a mirror I wasn’t expecting.

Kyle spoke about perspective. About how this telling is not the story, but a story - shaped by lineage, responsibility and law. He was clear, careful, and deeply respectful of other versions held by others.

Standing there with my daughters, answering their questions, I found myself explaining it in the only way I know how.

I grew up with eight siblings. Same house. Same mother. Same major life events. And yet, if you ask each of us about our childhood, you’ll hear nine completely different stories.

That doesn’t mean someone is lying.
It means perspective exists.

But here’s the harder truth I’ve been circling lately:
there are versions - and then there are “versions”.

Perspective is real.
Truth still matters.

Sometimes what’s presented as someone’s truth is actually a distortion. A performance. A story designed to protect ego, gain sympathy, or avoid accountability. And that’s where things become dangerous - personally, culturally, generationally.

Six weeks before I attended The Wiiyaan, my mother disowned me.

I was sitting at my table, quietly working on my final assessments for my graduation diploma, when she invited herself over. I hadn’t asked her to come. I was hoping for peace.

Instead, she began telling me - unprompted - that we are Bundjalung. That we are Aboriginal. That there are aunties, connections, stories I’d never heard before. None of it had a point. None of it made sense.

She has claimed Aboriginal descent for as long as I can remember, but always vaguely. Always from the south. The pelican as the important ancestral figure. Growing up, she often spoke about Aunty Wilma - a girl from the Stolen Generations who lived and worked in her childhood home. Aunty Wilma was real. I knew her. She is still alive and lives in Darwin. That relationship mattered. But proximity is not lineage.

There is also truth in our family history. My mother’s eldest brother, who later took his own life, had children with a mixed Aboriginal woman. Those children were taken from him - adopted out, reportedly on the advice of family or the church. These are details I am open to being corrected on, but they exist. They are part of our story. They are not my ancestry.

What unsettled me wasn’t curiosity. It was certainty. Arriving late. Loud. Without evidence.

I closed my laptop and gently asked why this was the first time I was hearing all of this. I reminded her she had always said we were from the south. That I had spoken to her brothers, who were quite sure our ancestry was Irish and Scottish. That “bushman” on an old family tree may have been misunderstood. On my father’s side, I am proudly Scottish - from the Campbell clan of Inveraray.

If I do have Indigenous ancestry, I would want to know. Truly. I would want to honour it properly and share it with my children honestly.

But falsifying identity - whether for relevance, sympathy, or financial gain - is something I fundamentally disagree with. It isn’t harmless. It’s corrosive.

I was careful not to say the word “lie”.
I said, “Why are you telling untruths?”

Her response was instant.

“I am not your mother. You are not my daughter.”

It cut - but it also confirmed something I had always known.

I told her that the unconditional love that flows through me to my children could never have come from her or my father, because there was none. That I know I am a child of something higher. Something bigger.

A week later, on Christmas Day, she came to my home to collect my niece. I said two words: “Merry Christmas.”

The next morning, I woke up to a text message demanding apology - not to me, not to family, but to people I had never heard of.

That moment didn’t break me.

It released me.

Released me from inherited narratives.
Released me to create boundaries.
Released me to raise my girls differently.
Released me to finally start telling my own story.

Not the polished one I’ve shared since 2010.
The painful one.
The one that sits beside the colourful, creative, joyful life I’ve built.

My childhood was shaped by neglect and emotional abuse. Physical abuse. Somatic abuse. My adulthood has been shaped by walking through fire - again and again - to learn the lessons my mother never could.

Covering The Wiiyaan reminded me that we have a responsibility to story. To truth. To care. To restraint.

Perspective matters.
But truth matters more.

This painful chapter may be the cracking open that finally allows me to speak honestly - not instead of beauty, but alongside it.

Because life is brutal.
And beautiful.

And both deserve to be told.