| Sumario: | This extraordinary and heartfelt story chronicles the lives of the Rodriguez family of Debesa Station in the West Kimberley; their livelihood through difficult times, love of family, place and culture, and the challenges of day-to-day living on a small sheep station amid huge pastoral properties. Spanning four generations from the 1880s when the author's maternal great-grandfather, Indian deckhand, Jimmy Casim, met and lived with Nigena woman, Lucy Muninga on Yeeda Station near Derby, Debesa centres on the unlikely partnership of Cindy's parents: Frank Rodriguez, once a Benedictine novice monk from Spain, and Katie Fraser, who had been a novitiate in a very different sort of abbey - a convent for 'black' women at Beagle Bay Mission, 130 kilometres north of Broome. Together, Frank and Katie Rodriguez established Debesa, where Cindy and her three siblings grew up with the rich cultural heritage of their Spanish, Nigena and English ancestors. Debesa is a sweeping social history of one family's struggles and triumphs set against the backdrop of the beauty of the West Kimberley. Dr Cindy Solonec, a Nigena (Nyikina) woman from the West Kimberley, is married with two daughters and five grandchildren. She graduated with a PhD in History from UWA in 2016 and Debesa is a rewriting of her thesis that explored a social history in the West Kimberley based on the way her parents and extended family lived during the mid-1900s. As a university sessional staff member, Cindy lectures and tutors in addressing Aboriginal themes. She is a member of the History Council of Western Australia and she plays violin.
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