Brenda Hodge's story began to take its awful shape when she was raped. She was four. It was the first chapter of a history of sexual abuse - her mother sold her to men - that continued throughout Brenda's young life.

As a child she got in her mother's way. She was a nuisance and, later, a troublemaker. She knew that: her mother had made that very clear.

She was promiscuous from a very early age. (In her middle age and studying in gaol, she learned that children who are molested often become promiscuous). She was in her late teens before she went out with a boy her age. Her previous 'boyfriends' had been much older men, affairs condoned and sometimes connived at, by her mother. She knew that she hated her mother - and craved her love.

She drifted twice around Outback Australia, pulling beers in bars, travelling with a carnival sideshow, cooking on cattle stations, working with her only contstant love, horses. She drank, she did drugs. She married, split with her husband, a kangaroo hunter, found happiness with an uncomplicatied, decent bloke and inexplicably left him, and met up, finally, with Peter, the policeman she was to shoot dead.

Her experiences are unimaginable to most of us. Can you imagine yourself - aged 15 - set to work in a mining camp brothel?

For much of her life Brenda has been in and out of institutions. Bullied, drugged, locked in solitary confinement, ignored, forgotten. And for much of the times she had no idea why.

Brenda ran away at 13, but in prison she began to study seriously for the first time in her life. She topped the state in English before graduating with an arts degree. She is, say her tutors, one of the most gifted students they have known. Her poetry, some of which is in Walk On, has been highly praised.

Today, Brenda Hodge has found the growing love of two sisters. And, finally, she has found piece.

Brenda Hodge titles include:

Walk On

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