Lisa Jackson Pulver: Jewish, Aboriginal, survivor

It wasn’t being alone in the world that Lisa found scary. “What was scary as a teenager was not being able to lock my door,” she tells The Jewish Independent. “We had a violent, violent home. Dad would come home in a rage. Anything would trigger him. Even a window he broke months before. Both my parents became alcoholics. None of the other kids from school were allowed near our place.

“I’d present at school physically battered. No-one cared. The other kids hated me and I hated being there. It was brutal.”

Eventually, the violence was too much for Lisa Jackson, and she  ran away from her home in Sydney. “I lived in the back of cars, on peoples’ couches, on the street. I’d go into shops, say I needed money and do odd jobs. I worked in milk bars and cleaned toilets.

“My father had a gambling addiction. He had served as flight crew in the Royal Australian Air Force in the Pacific campaign during World War II. He came back psychologically damaged, a violent man, having apparently been a beautiful man before the war. He had PTSD big-time and never recovered. He’d put himself in harm’s way for his country, but wasn’t looked after when he needed help. His personality was disfigured.

“He got a job as a boilermaker and would return from work covered in fine white powder. He got asbestosis and emphysema and the last eight years of his life were terrible, like he was breathing through a straw all the time. He died in a RSL home.

“Us kids were also damaged. We remain damaged. I still can’t sleep without a light on. Every door in my house has a bell on it.”