There have been so many times that I wanted to speak to my mum about all that I’m going through, but I can’t. I look at my daughter and wonder if one day she’ll feel the same, when she might need me more than ever, and I may not be here.
- Rachel Douglass
The photograph features a young woman in a lacy, antique Frida Kahlo inspired dress, sitting serenely in front of a wall.
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Behind her are framed photos: a great aunt, a mother, an aunt, a sister and a daughter.
The subject is Rachel Douglass, and like her, the women in the pictures are all beautiful, with smiling eyes.
An image of Rachel’s daughter, Ava (10), is there too, half visible, in the corner of the photograph.
At the age of 40, Rachel is battling the hereditary breast cancer that has devastated four generations of her family.
In Skin of a Rhino, Heart of a Dove, Rachel explores both the tough exterior needed to confront her illness and the vulnerability the experience opens up.
In the years since her diagnosis, Rachel has been busy defying the odds, inspired by her love for her two young children and the will to work towards a cure.
Her beloved sister, Jane, has also been diagnosed with breast cancer.
The women, who cared for their mother before her death from the same disease, now in turn care for and support each other.
Always passionate about life and art, Rachel has drawn on her creativity to find new avenues for expression and meaning.
She comes from a long line of artists, dreamers and inventors, and from a rich life, she singles out precious years on Browns Mountain at Cambewarra.
Here, her enterprising family experimented with coffee planting, worm farms, tea planting and farming goats.
With no electricity or hot water, it was here that Rachel’s love of nature and horse riding was given free rein, as she rode the Cream Trail over Browns Mountain to Kangaroo Valley.
Her parents’ planned idyllic lifestyle at Browns Mountain was curtailed when her mother became ill.
Rachel and her sister Jane, an actress, returned to care for their mother until her death, taking shifts in between making art and rehearsing lines.
“We cared for mum, which is much more difficult than going through it yourself. It's so much worse on the other side,” she said.
Some years later, while living overseas, Rachel received her own diagnosis, and was advised to have genetic testing.
"The BRCA2 gene wasn't even known about that much. I did the test and, yes, it came back as positive.”
She then contacted an aunt in the UK who had also had breast cancer; it could be traced back over four generations.
She went on to learn the harrowing stories of how earlier generations of women in her family struggled, with little money and non-existent treatments.
While Rachel was staying positive and defying the predictions of her doctors, came the terrible news of her sister Jane’s diagnosis.
“Jane said she'll never forget the look on my face when she said that she’d have to have chemo. I couldn't bear to think of her having to go through that,” she said.
Rachel supported Jane through her treatment; the close sisters now share a home together with their four children at Bellawongarah.
“There are things there that are so deeply personal; we can't talk to anyone else about it,” Rachel said.
The concept for the exhibition, Skin of a Rhino, Heart of a Dove, began to evolve some years ago, and has been given new life through collaboration with Huskisson photographer Lea Hawkins.
“Working with Lea has opened up a whole new palette of self expression,” Rachel said.
“It is a unique relationship. We didn’t know each other, so I was extremely vulnerable.”
But from their first meeting, a shared artistic vision and a great deal of trust was present.
Lea first asked Rachel to bring along some items that were important to her; momentos and photographs.
“That was the way we got past the sadness and grief,” Lea said.
Rachel describes the project as a way of stepping outside her experience and says the finished pictures are “layered in meaning and deeply personal”.
“I wanted to take it to a different level and just say yeah, this has happened to me, in a physical and mental state but what else is going on?
“It’s thinking about change and identity and how that can be expressed in another form.”
In the making of the “ancestors” photo, Rachel’s daughter, Ava, was adamant she wanted to be in the photograph.
“We sat down and had a very adult conversation about it, and she really wanted to be there,” Rachel said.
“She said, 'we don’t know what’s going to happen and things are changing, and that might not be my story, but I would like to be there.'”
