Norway.

Lise’s father was a ship’s captain from Tromsø. Lise loved time with her father but he was seldom home, captaining ore freighters from Australia’s Northern ports to Japan meant his absences were long. She whiled away the dim Norwegian winters pining for her papa, replaying times spent snuggled on the couch, twisting locks of his salty beard as he recounted tales of the long lonely nights at sea and less lonely nights on the streets of Manila. Papa would say to her ‘Lise my love you don’t need to worry, I will be back soon enough…’ but 6 months to a child was a life time. Lise naturally became a little untrusting, not only because of these exhausting absences but also because she didn’t know who her mother was. Little detail ever emerged despite constant prising of her father. As a teen Lise started to reject her father’s bogus efforts in contacting her mother, she knew it was a ruse. Needless to say, her trust in men grew threadbare. The only knowledge she had was that her mother was Australian…

Brisbane.

Courageously, Lise fled to Brisbane in her late teens with nothing but a backpack and her smarts. She lived off Ski-Queen cheese and Ryvita while working reception at the Hilton Hotel to fund her studies in finance at university. She felt one day she would stumble across her mother. Lise met Jimmy in her class at university, a blue eyed and blue blooded lad with a twinkle in his eye. Jimmy was heir to a cattle dynasty whose vast fortune he recklessly singed the edges off with a heady mix of bravado and ineptitude. Jimmy was a playboy who could navigate a golf links better than a stock exchange and amongst his many weaknesses were tall women with accents. Lise was captivated by his cheek and energy, and just a little bit by his bank account, something she knew she had the skills to grow, given the chance. The wedding was small, in Hamilton Island and naturally only consisted of Jimmy’s side. She remained rather mysterious to the Brisbane set. 

A plan.

Two years into the marriage Lise grew impatient, all the while forging a solid public demeanour, nourishing the grass-fed fortune to new heights. Jimmy not surprisingly emerged to have all the features of a philanderer and dim-wit. Lise wanted to unlock the full girth of the pre-nuptialised bullion she had so deftly improved upon and went about hatching a cunning plan to have Jimmy deleted by some local bikies, only to be conveniently assisted by the strange combination of the 2022 Brisbane floods and Jimmy’s urgency to play golf. With the floodwaters in slow retreat, Jimmy, tranquillised by tequila couldn’t wait to hit the fairways again, so he went alone. As the water drained back into the Brisbane River it left who-knows-what lurking in the sand-traps-cum-water-traps. Jimmy’s swing acquired a shanked trajectory into a pooled-up trap on the 9th. Charged with ethanol he waded in to retrieve the ball. Later that day, authorities drained the trap to find a thrashing and very full Bull Shark, and Jimmy’s mauled corpse. Lise was off the hook and in the clover.

Sydney.

Lise, bank-account replete, widowed and without any heart-felt relation to Brisbane retreated to Sydney where she sees out her time tirelessly wandering the city streets and cafe’s hoping to catch a glimpse of her mother. To do so she cultivated a mysterious incognito persona changing outfits 12-16 times a day, all from her favourite designer… P Johnson.