This book is a memoir and a manifesto. It is about a life lived challenging dominant mindsets, bucking the trend and pushing boundaries, in Pakistan where I grew up, and in Australia where I migrated with my husband, one year old son and two suitcases to make a new life three decades ago.
As the first Muslim woman in any Australian parliament, the one hundredth woman in the Senate, and the only engineer in the Senate, Mehreen has a unique and crucial perspective on our country and how things are changing for the better or worse.
This is the story of a brown, migrant Muslim woman breaking into a white man's world and striving to change it without being changed. It is an honest, no holds barred account of what happens when reality meets perception and when you shatter long held stereotypes and confront a system steeped in privileged hierarchies, racism and sexism. It is the tale of a political outsider fighting for her right and the rights of others like her to be let inside on their terms.
From her beginnings in Pakistan and remaking in Australia, Mehreen recounts her struggle to navigate two vastly different, changing worlds without losing herself. The insights gathered through life in two culturally differed continents, as an engineer, a migrant and politician inform her way forward and hope for the future on the climate crisis, gender, racial and social equity.
