My mum took me backpacking when I was 11. It was courageous of her – and changed my life | Laura Elizabeth Woollett

I spent six months in Europe as my peers were finishing primary school. It's only now I can fully appreciate the gift

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Around the end of primary school, I became a girl-child: something less free than the kid I'd been. I became, in my own eyes, fat", ugly", wished I was dead or not-born. I didn't know how to keep these thoughts to myself.

Mum didn't know what to do about the change in me. But she knew school wasn't helping and she'd always wanted to travel. So at the start of 2001, instead of buying me a new schoolbag for my final year of primary school, she bought some luggage, a copy of Europe on a Shoestring and two one-way tickets to Madrid. (In what was perhaps the greatest inequity of our childhoods, my older sister stayed behind in Perth with our dad and stepmother.)

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