The TEACHER'S DAUGHTER

At four years old, Shanelle Dawson was told her mother, Lynette, left the family home of her own free will. But in a deeply emotional journey that lasted 40 years, she gradually learnt Lynette had been murdered by her husband - and Shanelle's father - Chris. Shanelle's father and his family have been the subject of court cases, tabloid news and hit podcast The Teacher's Pet. Today, Shanelle tells her own story.

- SUSAN CHENERY

When she was a little girl, all Shanelle Dawson had of her mother were a couple of photos in a shoebox that had been shoved to the back of a cupboard. There were no photos around the house, she was never mentioned. It was as if she had never existed.

When her father wasn’t around, Shanelle would pull out the fragments of the vanished mother and spend hours gazing at photos, longingly devouring every detail. “As though,” she writes in her book, My Mother’s Eyes, “that might somehow bring her back.” The absence, the disappearance of Lynette Dawson (née Simms) was a “deep and huge, gashing wound that nobody but her knew how to tend”.

The motherless child would go on to be a “wild, free spirit”, an adventurer and a seeker. She would travel to many lands, but she would always ache for her mother – for the maternal embrace that was snatched away, the love that was lost.

“There isn’t a corner of my life,” she writes, “that hasn’t been touched by the loss of my mother.”

Shanelle doesn’t have a TV or read newspapers. “News has always made me get really anxious and depressed,” she tells The Weekly team when we meet on a blustery day by the sea, near her home in northern NSW.

She has never sought attention. Instead, she journeys inward, finding solace in the spiritual, being comforted and held by nature.