The stories she carries

When Melissa ‘Mary’ O'Neill was growing up in Wee Waa, her nan used to tell stories. About the strawberries she would grow for the snake in the backyard. About where the family came from and who they were.

At the time, Mary and her cousins thought they were just their grandmother’s “silly words”. It took years to understand what was really being passed on.

“We used to get immersed in my nan’s storytelling,” Mary says. “She shared everything she knew about our culture and our family, and we were really lucky because there were some things the family wouldn’t talk about much, but she never held back from sharing these things with us. She never stopped surprising me or astounding me until she passed away.”

Wee Waa is a cotton-farming town in Gamilaraay Country in north-western New South Wales. Mary was born there in the 1970s, one of a large extended family that included cousins, aunties, and a grandmother whose roots stretched back to Brewarrina.

It was a lovely upbringing, she says, though not without its hardship. There were cotton fields to chip and plant, a small community where you could be in or out, and a teacher in high school who told Mary she would never amount to anything.

That kind of remark leaves a wound that never fully heals.

“It doesn’t heal,” Mary says, “but it does drive.”

And drive her it did. At the age of 20, Mary enrolled in an Away From Base teaching degree at ACU, completing it in 2004 while pregnant and working full-time.

She went on to lecture at ACU in Aboriginal education before building a career in child and family services in Wagga Wagga, where she has now lived for 25 years, and across the Riverina and Murray regions.

As the manager of a family referral service, Mary led a team that embedded itself in community and local schools – unusual at the time – to connect families with the support they needed. She approached this work with the same instinct as her grandmother’s storytelling: finding gentle ways to reach people, and walking beside them rather than lecturing to them.

“We played a walk-alongside role, not a heavy-handed role, and I think that’s what I loved about it most,” she says.

“We knew that every family was trying their best, but some people just didn’t have the resources, so we’d support them along the way to make sure that things improved for them.”

Then, in her early 50s, Mary’s position was made redundant. After years at the sharp end of child protection, she wanted to do “something positive”.

Having experienced limited cultural support in her workplaces, she established her own business in cultural supervision, work that drew her towards ACU’s Graduate Certificate in Education Research in 2025.

As a new grandmother, she also found herself reaching for the same gift for storytelling her nan once had, writing children’s stories for her grandkids. Yet she mostly kept them to herself.

“I didn’t think they were good enough, and the publishing world is like a rabbit’s warren,” Mary says.

“It took me a long time to decide whether to put my stories out there.”

The book she eventually published, Bipo and Roo and the Magical Didgeridoo, had been sitting on her hard drive for four years.

What finally convinced her to take the leap was a simple realisation.

“I wanted my grandkids to remember me like I remember my nan. I wanted to be an awe-inspiring person in their lives, like she was to me.”

The magical didgeridoo

Mary has three grandsons: Brooklyn, Reggie and Zephyr. Bipo’s name is drawn from Brooklyn’s initials; Roo is Reggie, her rooster. On the book’s final page, there’s an image of a new arrival – that’s Zephyr.

A second book is already underway, and Mary has others drafted and “sitting there waiting to be published”.

In Bipo and Roo, two brothers travel through time using a magical didgeridoo: back to a land of volcanoes and dinosaurs, to ancient Egypt and a pharaoh with golden rings, onto a pirate ship commanded by a sword-bearing captain, and finally to the Dreamtime, where culture was shared through song and verse.

The didgeridoo was, in a sense, Brooklyn’s idea. He has played one since he was small, learning alongside his grandfather (Pop).

When it came time to illustrate the book, Brooklyn sat down and drew a didgeridoo. The eventual book illustrator – found, after a long search, right there in Wagga – worked directly from Brooklyn’s design.

The book is full of family connection in this way. The mat in the lounge room scene is painted by Mary’s nephew. The artworks on the walls are her sister-in-law’s. The echidna motif (echidnas are called ‘bigabilas’ in Gamilaraay culture, a symbol of knowledge) appears in paintings Mary’s brother-in-law has given her over the years, in recognition of what she carries.

There’s a subtle but strong cultural presence in the book. Take the Dreamtime sequence, where “everyone cared for their culture and shared it through song and verse – the only way to learn their ways was to be totally immersed”.

It places First Nations cultures alongside the pyramids as some of history’s great civilisations – proud and present. 

“The messaging is direct but not harsh,” Mary says. “How do we find a way to invite people in? And that’s all about sharing. We’re sharing who we are. We’re not apologising for who we are, we’re grounded in who we are.”

Carrying culture forward

Much of what Mary is doing in the book finds formal expression in her PhD, which she began at ACU in early 2026.

Her research focuses on cultural supervision: how Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander leaders working in non-Indigenous institutions can be supported in ways that honour, rather than erase, who they are.

At its heart is the knowledge of her late father-in-law Tex Skuthorpe, an Elder from Goodooga in north-western NSW.

Tex was a proud custodian of Nhunnggaburra culture, and spent his life recording and teaching it before his passing in 2019.

Before he died, Mary had many opportunities to sit with Tex, listening to his stories and learning from his art.

“He was really big on sharing,” Mary says. “It’s a privilege to be able to not just represent him but the family that I married into, around what we have in Nhunnggaburra knowledge and Nhunnggaburra stories.”

Her PhD will draw on these stories as chapters, each one carrying the lesson at the heart of cultural supervision: how to know who you are, and hold it, even when the world around you asks you to be something else.

It’s this kind of impulse that sent Mary to her desk, years of hesitation behind her, to finally publish her first children’s book. What lets her rest easy with the outcome, whatever it may be, is a piece of advice from her nan that she’s carried for decades: Be authentically you, and you can never get it wrong.

“Even if I don’t manage to finish the PhD, or if nobody buys the book, I’m still me, and that’s okay,” she says. “I’m doing it for family, for my kids and my grandkids, and for me. In the end, that’s what matters most.”

Learn more about Melissa ‘Mary’ O’Neill, and purchase her book, Bipo and Roo and the Magical Didgeridoo.

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