The Larissa Epic
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 5: Katherine
Coming of Age Sex Story: Chapter 5: Katherine - At the start of the story, Larissa is a young woman failing to cope with Covid. The story trace's Larissa's growth through the challenges of Covid and marriage with Julian, and the lives of people around her, ending with Larissa and her friends changing the nature of Australia
Caution: This Coming of Age Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa mt/ft Fa/Fa Mult Teenagers Fiction Rags To Riches Light Bond Group Sex Orgy Exhibitionism Oral Sex Nudism
“Jane,” Helena said, after a long while, when they had levelled out, since Jane was in front of her.
“Yeah.”
“All of them?”
“Yes, and others. And it was good for me to do it. I’m a white nurse. I go away afterwards.”
Helena nodded. That made sense.
“It wasn’t a problem?”
“Marlu went first. She said she’d go first so they could see how it goes. Then Ina. Then Djiwada.”
“Is it actually free?”
“Well, No. But it will be in that clinic from now on.”
Helena smiled. “Thank you. They will go to school now.”
“There’s no magic, Helena. That one’s going to he harder.”
Helena leaned her head against the window. After a bit she said, “I’ll talk to Bob about the clinic. They need more nurses. They need better equipment.”
“Larissa and I are already on it. We knew before. I came to help decide what, and now I know.”
“Of course you are on it. Can I help?”
“Yes. When we talk to Bob, you can join us. Tell him about your friends. And their choice. The one they don’t actually have. And when we talk to the journalists.”
Helena closed her eyes. Under her cheek, the cold plastic of the window vibrated with the engines, and outside it the country fell away, and she let herself, for the first time since Marlu had said she had a baby, cry properly.
Once the plane leveled out, Larissa unbuckled herself and had a long hug with Jane, but soon enough she came and sat carefully on Helena’s lap, so that she wasn’t putting too much weight on Helena’s legs, and hugged Helena tightly. “Are you OK?” she asked Helena quietly.
“Of course I am,” Helena said. “But you, are you OK?”
“I will be,” Larissa said. “I’ve got my awesome sisters looking after me, and my heat pack, and I had panadol, and I’ll get good hugs here in the plane, and I’ll be OK. But are you really OK? I’m worrying that I’ve asked too much of you. I knew what I signed up for, but you didn’t, and I didn’t really explain. I shouldn’t have brought you.”
“Don’t worry about that, Larissa, I had the best time here! I loved it!”
“Thanks, that’s nice, but we both know the truth. I saw you crying. It was horrible. I shouldn’t have,” Larissa said, miserably.
Oh! Helena realised: this was Larissa feeling it, not thinking it. She wanted to argue with Larissa, but she remembered something Aunt Raychelle had told her. When you want to argue with someone, can you start by agreeing with them first? She could!
“OK. It was horrible. I didn’t like some of what I saw at all. Larissa, their families make those girls let the boys have sex on them. When they’re younger than me! And then they have babies, and give up on school and then that’s all they can do. And their families make them do that.”
“Yes,” Larissa said quietly. “I told you things were bad with then. And now you understand how bad. Some of the things are just a little bad. But some of them are very very bad, and what happens to their young teenage girls is the worst of it.”
“Did you know? Did you arrange for it to be those girls?”
“No. I let them figure it out. Left it to chance. But Helena, you did good. More than good. Jane filled me in about what you did.”
“But it’s not enough, Larissa. Three girls. Just three girls, and even then, they probably won’t stick with it.” Her anger showed clearly in that sentence. That’s what she’d actually cried about, been mad about.
Larissa paused, and then said, “It wasn’t just three girls. There were lots of them. Because the girls they chose to sleepover with you, they’re the social networkers. It’s the same everywhere, and they networked the hell out of it this morning. Jane was very busy. So it wasn’t just three. And she checked for STDs while she did it, and gave them medications too. You did a big deal.”
Helena look at Larissa, her mouth half open. Really?
“Larissa.”
“Yeah.”
“Marlu loves her baby. Like really loves her. The way Aunt Raychelle loves Genevieve. The way Isabella loves Juliano. She’s the centre of her life. She didn’t even look up from her for the whole twenty minutes I was watching her this morning.”
“Yes.”
“And the way she got there — the way she said. She didn’t want him. But now she has her and she’s fifteen. And she’s the centre of her life. And I don’t know how to think about that.”
“There’s nothing to think about. The baby is the baby. She’s good news. Marlu didn’t choose how she got here, but she’s chosen to love her, and she’s lucky for that. You don’t get to be sad about Marlu’s girl. You only get to be sad about how she got here. She’s the one piece of pure good news in this whole story. Hold onto her.”
“She’s a good baby.”
“Yes, she had a lovely smile.”
“She very much did.” Helena thought about that smile, and smiled herself.
“Hold onto the smile. When you think about this, talk about this, write about this — and you will — make sure she’s in it. She’s the love. Without her, everything we just said is only rage. With her, it’s rage and the country still has love in it. She’s the thing that holds the whole story together.”
Helena thought about that.
Then she said: “But Larissa. The aunties.”
Larissa nodded.
“They’re the ones who tell Ina to be good. They’re the ones who told Marlu to go to the boy, that started it. They would tell Ina, go with Lewis, it’s family. They — I — how can they?”
She had to stop because she was crying again.
“Helena. Listen. The aunties are not the source. They’re caught in it like the girls are. Their aunties taught them the same things, and their aunties’ aunties taught them, and so on, all the way back through the missions. Most of those aunties were Marlu, once. Most of them were Ina, once. Some of them still wake up at night thinking about what was done to them when they were fourteen.”
“But —”
“And we taught them, Helena. Us. Australia. The missions. The Stolen Generations. The way we still talk about indigenous mothers in the news — promiscuous, neglected, dysfunctional. We taught them to think this way and to teach it to their daughters. The aunties are us. The system is us. You can’t fix it by hating the aunties. You hate them and the only person who suffers is you, because the aunties are not going to know about your hate, and the girls are going to be told off for being friends with you. You fix it by being a different aunty for the girls who need one. Phones. Implants. WhatsApp groups. Larger aunties, like Jane, like me, like you last night. That’s the whole job.”
“But the aunties hurt them.”
“Yes. So do we, every day, by being the country we still are. You can be angry at the aunties. You also have to be just as angry at the rest of us. Including yourself. Including me. We’re all aunties. We’re just slower aunties, and we’re slow because nobody is making us hurry.”
Helena thought about that for a long time.
“But still”, Larissa continued, “you did what you could do. That’s what we do, sister. Little things. We do the little things we can do, and we keep doing them, because we can. Sometimes, the little thing ends you up on TV and has a mighty impact. Other times, no one sees the big thing you did, and nothing comes from it, except that you’re used up.” She looked Helena in the eye. “But you keep doing the things, because even a little thing is better than no thing. And the outcome of lots of people doing lots of little things is a very big thing, it just happens slowly.”
Helena thought about that.
“And you need to understand this, Helena. You are wealthy. You are a billionaire, you have access to resources that those girls will never, in a million years, dream about. You have all the luck, all the privileges. And you have something even luckier than that: you grew up without those things. You think Isla could do a sleep over with those girls? So you have no choice in life but to do what little things you can always.”
“I’m a billionaire?” Helena could hardly speak, that was such a stupid idea. “You know mum’s got no money!”
Larissa nodded. “Right. She doesn’t. But who’s your legal guardian?”
“ ... Bob?”
“Right. Bob. One of the richest men in Australia. And you think he’s going to let you go back to having your mum as your legal guardian? Why do you think she hasn’t fought them about that?”
Helena didn’t understand. Hadn’t wanted to ask. “No idea?”
Larissa nodded. “They talked about it. Bob, and your mum. Your mum is your mum. But Bob likes you, wants to protect you. Writes his name under yours. You have his full power behind you. Your mum likes that for you, knows what that means. Even if it hangs over her head. You are one of us.”
Helena shook her head. She had never imagined.
“So you have a choice, rich girl. You can pretend that it hasn’t changed you, while you let it change everything about you. You can hide behind the security that will come, behind the money that will create a bubble around you. You can say, I don’t care, because I have wealth. Like most rich people do. Whatever happens to other people, it’s their problem.” Larissa gave Helena a hard look. “You don’t want to do that, but it just soaks into you, and bang, there you are. I’m afraid of that for me. And for you.”
“Or, you can make a different choice. You can say, money is fine, and I like the security, but I must think outside that bubble. Like you did last night. What hurts other people: it’s my problem. That hurts, Helena, because then you have to do something about it, and all you can do are little things that aren’t enough. But that’s the pain you have to seek out in our life.”
Helena thought about that. She thought about that a lot. She thought about her grandpa, bastard that he was. He was acting like he thought rich guys were like, just without actual money. At least, what he thought rich guys were like. She thought about her mum, doing her best to be decent, after a life of thinking everything was other people’s fault. And she thought about Ella: do something for other people. But mostly she thought about Larissa.
But still: “But what do I do different?”
Larissa smiled at her. “Nothing different, now. What you did for those girls was great. What you do at school is great. Jedi.”
Helena sat up straighter. “I can do that.”
“Good.”
“So, Larissa, it was good that we went there. Good for me. And even if that bit was bad, the rest was great. Thank you for that.”
Larissa sighed. “Maybe. No, you’re right. But tomorrow, you have to talk to everyone. You’ve never done that. Will it be a problem?”
“I really don’t know. What do you want me to say?”
“You just have to tell them your story. Want they want you to say is that in spite of your handicap, you can still have a good life, that you’re not sad.”
They talked about what Helena was going to say. And Helena felt better. And stronger. She could do this.
After Larissa went back to her seat, Helena carefully knelt beside Athena, who was at her laptop with her headphones in, typing slowly. Helena tapped her on the shoulder. Athena pulled out the headphones.
“How’s it going?”
Athena turned the laptop slightly so Helena could see. The cursor was at the top of a document headed ‘Day 1/2: Gunbalanya’. Below it, two short paragraphs. Above the document, in another tab, a folder of about forty photos.
“That’s all you’ve got?”
“That’s all I can write.”
“Show me the photos.”
Athena clicked through. Helena watched. Ice cream by the supermarket. Biscuits on the tray. The five girls under the verandah light, sprawled on the camping mattresses, laughing about something Helena had already forgotten. Lightning, half-blurred, over the verandah roof. The spear grass flat in the morning. Marlu’s baby on her lap chewing a crust. Ina holding Athena’s hand at the airstrip with her chin tilted just so. The aunt waving from the door. Yuwunyuwun in the art shed. The crocodile from the boat. Helena’s barramundi held up by Mr Gabriel.
“They’re really good,” Helena said.
“They are.”
“What’s the problem?”
Athena turned, properly, in her seat to face Helena, and her face was — Helena saw, for the first time — full of an anger Helena had only seen on Athena’s face once before, back in February, when Helena had been lying on the concrete after Jason had punched her.
“The problem,” Athena said, and she was barely able to say the words, “is that anybody who looks at these photos and reads what I’m allowed to write is going to think we had a lovely sleepover. Aw, the girls. Aw, the storm. Aw, the friendly aunty. Aw, Marlu’s baby. Aw.”
“Mm.”
“And it was lovely. The girls are friends now, that part is real. The ice cream was real. The lightning was real. None of these photos are lies. But that’s not what I want to say. I want to say what they actually told us. What is happening to them. What is being done to them. By their boys. By their aunties. Because I’m fucking furious.”
“I know.”
“And I can’t, because the girls. So I’m writing nothing. So the people who follow our blog get a fun travel diary and the people I actually want to scream at, who would never read our blog anyway, there’s nothing.”
She closed the laptop, partway, and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.
Helena was quiet for a moment.
“Athena, Listen to me.”
“Yeah?”
“Write it. Write all of it. Every fucking bit. Jut say exactly what you think. Then we’ll decide what to do about it.”
Athena looked at her. After a second, she opened her laptop and started a new document.
Athena typed for what Helena counted on her watch as just over twelve minutes. Her fingers flew. She slammed the keyboard. The headings came first, fast and decisive — What they actually told us. What the boys did. How young they were. How it’s just that’s how it is. That was a headline: ‘We know what’s coming’. About the girls knowing what will happen. Then the paragraphs underneath. Athena was a much better writer than Helena had ever properly admitted to herself, and watching her work, even through the anger, was a small private pleasure that Helena would later feel slightly guilty about.
When Athena slowed and sat back, the document was about four pages long, and her hands were trembling slightly.
“Read it,” Athena said.
Helena read it.
It was extraordinary. Cold and sharp and completely controlled. But the rage ... Athena had compressed everything from the night before into prose Helena would not have believed her friend could write. The way Marlu had said not really, the first time. The way Lewis kept ignoring Ina when she said no. The way the boys ran off the girls who didn’t comply. The way the family pressure closed in. The way Australia continued, blandly, year after year, to fund the same things and to call it welfare.
Helena got to the end. Read it again.
“Athena.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s good. It’s really good. Fuck I’m angrier now I’ve read it. But there’s two pieces missing.”
Athena looked at her.
“What.”
“A bit about contraception, if Jane wasn’t there. And the aunties.”
“I mentioned the aunties.”
“Not enough. They’re complicit. Fuck the aunties. Say more about them. But Larissa said something about them on the plane just now, and I think you have to put it in. The aunties learnt this from their aunties, who learnt it from theirs, all the way back through the missions. The aunties were Marlu once. They were Ina once. Some of them still wake up at night thinking about what was done to them when they were fourteen. They’re not the source of it. They’re caught in it like the girls are.”
Athena thought.
“OK,” she said. “I’ll add a section.”
Her hands went back to the keyboard. Helena watched her work. Athena was slower this time, choosing the words carefully, building the section around what Helena had said. The aunties stopped being individual villains in the document and became something larger and sadder — women who had been the girls, women whose own pain was sitting underneath the things they were now doing.
When Athena stopped, Helena said:
“And one more thing.”
“What.”
“Larissa said something else. The aunties are us.”
“Us?”
“Australia. The system. We taught them to think the way they think. By being the country we are. By the missions. By the Stolen Generations. By how we still talk about indigenous mothers in the news. We taught them to teach their daughters to be afraid of being stuck up, and to do what the boys want, and to leave school when the babies come. The aunties are us. The system is us. We did this.”
Athena looked at her for a long second. “ ... yeah,” she said. “That’s true.”
She typed more. These paragraphs were the angriest in the document, but somehow the fury was wider, and the document was better for it. The aunties stopped being a separate problem. The country became the problem. Australia became the problem. Us became the problem.
When Athena finished that section, Helena said:
“Athena, this isn’t just your document anymore.”
“What?”
“You’ve got my anger in it now. And Larissa’s.”
“You wrote half of it.”
“I didn’t write any of it. You wrote it. But it’s ours. It’s mine and yours and Larissa’s. The three of us together.”
“Yeah,” Athena said, quietly. “It is.”
She read the whole thing through one more time, fixing two small things, and sat back.
“OK. I’m done.”
Helena read it again from the top. The whole thing, slowly. The headings, the paragraphs, the new aunties sections, the us. She felt her chest tighten and not loosen.
“Athena.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s breathtaking.”
“ ... thanks.”
“We have to show it to Larissa.”
They walked the laptop down the plane to where Larissa was lying on her side on the floor with the heat pack against her belly. Toni was beside her with her own laptop, working. Suzy was up the front on the phone, organising - that never stopped. Larissa was reading something on paper. She looked up.
“Larissa,” Helena said. “Athena wrote something. About last night. We want you to read it.”
“OK.”
She took the laptop. Sat up, slightly, against the cushion. Read slowly. All the pages. They watched her face, both of them. Jane and Toni read it over her shoulder.
When she was done, she pushed the laptop away very gently, and looked at them both for a long moment.
“Athena, this is one of the most powerful things I have ever read.”
“ ... thanks.”
“Jane?” Larissa looked at her sister.
“All of it, Larissa. It’s what I want to say after today. Athena, I have a few words to add as a nurse. But it’s so ... my soul is in those words.”
“Yes. Our souls, in words.”
Athena nodded.
Larissa asked, “Do you want to publish it?”
“No. We talked about it. We can’t. The girls.”
“No, you can’t. But you can do two other things with it, and I want you to. Are you up for that?”
“What things?”
“First. You’re going to email this to your english teacher now, copy to Louise. Submit it as the homework piece you owe him for the holidays. Tell him it’s top secret. He’ll know what to do — he’ll mark it, give you the credit, lock it up. I’ll talk to Louise to make sure he does. She is one of the few teachers in this country I would trust with that.”
“OK.”
“Second. I want your permission to send a copy to the Prime Minister.”
A very long silence.
“What?”
“I’m meeting with him this week. About indigenous policy. That’s what I’m doing this week, the policy. They want to discuss indigenous women’s services and the funding allocations. I want to put this on the table. This, written by both of you, fourteen years old, immediately after a sleepover in Gunbalanya. I want them to read what two fourteen-year-olds wrote after one night on the verandah. It will hit them in their hearts.”
“Top secret?”
“Top secret. Marked. Privacy clauses. The PM’s office isn’t going to leak it. There is a meeting where things are about to be decided. This will make a difference.”
Athena’s hands were on the back of the seat in front of her. She was gripping it.
“Larissa.”
“Yeah.”
“You think it’s that good?”
“I think it’s that true. And so angry. And that’s enough.”
“What about the swear words?”
“Yes. All of them. School too. Because for once, that language is every bit justified.”
A silence.
Then Athena said, very quietly:
“Yes. Send it. Submit it. Both. Yes.”
“Good. We’ll need a cover sheet. By Athena, age fourteen, written on Larissa’s jet returning from Gunbalanya, April 2023. Top secret. Do not reproduce. That kind of thing. I’ll send it through Toni to the PM’s office with the right level of seal on it.”
Athena nodded. “What about the public document?” she said.
“Now you can write that,” Helena said. “All the good bits. The fun. And we can pull what we need to out of this one. Carefully.”
“Finish with Marlu’s baby,” Larissa said. “Hope and love out of despair. And right relationships. Even if the context is bad.”
“Yeah. I like it. I’ll do that.”
Larissa handed the laptop back. Athena, very carefully, took it.
Athena opened the public document. The angry one was open in another tab. She read it again, for a few minutes. Then she started typing — the public version, slowly, mining the angry document for the bits that could go out into the world.
She wrote about the welcome. The supermarket. The swimming pool. The crocodiles. Ubirr Rock. Yuwunyuwun, and the art for those who can’t see. The lightning over the verandah. She wrote about Ina holding her hand at the airstrip. She wrote about Marlu and the baby with the happy smile and the very serious concentration of an eleven-month-old who had food in her hands. She wrote about Marlu loving her baby. She did not write about how he got there. She wrote that her best friend Helena had given a speech to a stranger on a verandah that had changed something for both of them, but she did not write what the something was. But then she went back and wrote it was, changing the words several times, choosing the anger so it was there, so that people knew enough. She wrote that there was a friendship now between two girls in Gippsland and two girls in Gunbalanya that hadn’t existed three days ago, and that she expected it would go on, and that anyone reading who wanted to know more should learn about Bininj kinship.
She was still writing when they landed, and she had to stop.
The plane lined up to land at Katherine and Helena pressed her face against the window. The town came up below them — small, dusty, hot-looking even from the air, with one main road and a river curving past it and flat green country on every side. There was a huge runway, a civilian airport, and opposite the civilian airport, what was clearly the air base — long taxiways, hangars in olive drab, two grey fighter jets parked in revetments at the far end, an enormous transport aircraft squatting on the apron with its rear ramp down.
“That’s RAAF Tindal,” Toni said over Helena’s shoulder. “The biggest air defence base in the north. F-35s. They’re who supported Layna when she filmed up here last year.”
“Are we landing on the air base side?”
“Yes. Larissa’s arriving as Australian of the Year. You’ll see.”
The plane touched down on the civilian side, taxied for what felt like a long time, then turned through a gate and rolled along an apron Helena hadn’t realised they were going to use. They came to a stop in front of a small VIP terminal building, and through the window, on the apron beside the building, Helena saw a small marching band lined up in formation, instruments down, polished. A group of about a dozen men and women in uniform stood beside them, in a precise small arc, with two officers in front who were clearly the senior ones. A small handful of civilians stood off to one side. An Australian flag and a Northern Territory flag hung from poles beside the terminal building, completely still in the windless air.
“Holy shit,” Athena said, very quietly.
“Don’t say that out there,” Suzy said. “Larissa, when you go down the steps — they’ll do the welcome on the apron. The base commander is Group Captain Hannah Curtis. She did the briefing for Layna’s filming last year. You’ll like her. After Group Captain Curtis there’s a Major from Army Reserve who’ll be your ground transport for Katherine, and the Major’s an absolute sweetheart. Helena, Athena, you stay one step behind Larissa. Smile. Wave when waved at. Don’t try to shake every hand — only the ones in front of you, if they want to. It’ll be over in fifteen minutes.”
Helena looked at Athena.
“Are we doing this?”
“Apparently we are.”
“OK.”
The pilot opened the door. The heat came in.
Helena understood, in a small body shock, that she had not actually known what tropical heat felt like before this — not even in Gunbalanya, where there had at least been vegetation, the verandah and the pool, but here, on the open apron, with the sun off white concrete and the smell of jet fuel and dry red dust, this was a different category of weather. It was two in the afternoon and the air was the temperature of an oven.
Larissa stood. She’d changed from the tidy t-shirt and shorts that they’d all worn in Gunbalanya, into a very nice business dress. “You good?” Jane asked her, sympathetically. Jane had changed too. Not the others though.
Larissa took a deep breath, and nodded. “I can do this,” she said.
Helena saw Toni and Jane glance at each other, and she knew that they’d both be watching Larissa like a hawk.
“Nah, serious,” Larissa said. “You’ve given me lots of love. And hot packs. And drugs. I’m good.”
Larissa went down the steps first, with Jane. The band raised their instruments. The bandmaster lifted his baton. They played the first few bars of Advance Australia Fair.
Helena, three steps behind Larissa with Athena beside her and her stick in her right hand, descended the staircase very carefully — her legs were extra uncooperative this morning, possibly from the sleepover, possibly from the heat, possibly from being fourteen — and reached the bottom in time to be a respectable two paces behind Larissa as Larissa reached the Group Captain.
Group Captain Curtis was perhaps fifty, in dress uniform with hair pinned up under her cap. She saluted. Larissa, who had clearly been briefed, did not salute back (because she was a civilian) but inclined her head and shook the offered hand.
“Larissa. Welcome to Tindal. I’m Hannah Curtis. Welcome to Katherine.”
“Thank you. I have with me my sister-in-law Jane Peterson.”
Jane also got a snappy salute. Helena had no doubt it was because of she was married to.
“This is my cousin Helena, and her best friend Athena. They’re with me for the trip.”
“Helena, Athena — welcome. The kids in our base school have been following you on YouTube since the Jason assembly, and are looking forward to the trip blog this week. Helena — the Tindal Primary disability club asked me to tell you that are very much looking forward to seeing you at the school day tomorrow.”
Helena, who had not been expecting that, said, “Thanks!”
“Right. The honour guard. Larissa and Jane, would you walk the line with me? Helena and Athena, please come with us. We’ll take it slowly.”
It took, as Toni had said, about fifteen minutes. They walked the small honour guard, hand by hand. Larissa was good at this — stupidly good, Helena had decided at Gunbalanya, the way she was stupidly good at everything she did, asking each person their name and their job and making one specific small bit of conversation with each before moving on. Jane joined in smoothly. The Group Captain walked beside her, and then Major Rebecca Karangi, and behind them, Helena and Athena walked the line too, more slowly, with the people they passed inclining their heads to be at eye level. Two of the women in uniform asked Helena to sign their notebooks. One of them — a woman in her thirties with a flight suit on, evidently a pilot — said, very quietly: I’ve watched the Jason video about twenty times, kid. They showed it again in our briefing this morning. Don’t stop. Helena did not know what to do with that, so she said, “Athena’s the one who keeps making me look good in the videos,” which got a laugh, and she moved on.
At the end of the line the band finished playing. Larissa thanked Group Captain Curtis. The Major took over.
Major Karangi — small, no-nonsense, about forty, with a wicked smile — escorted them across the apron to two khaki army trucks parked beside the terminal building.