Brooke Boney new book: Mum’s reaction to her poignant chapter in memoir All Of It | Interview

When Brooke Boney made the choice to walk away from one of the most high-profile jobs in the country, her mother Leonie Boney couldn’t have been prouder.

Leonie has always been proud of her daughter, who exited her reporting role on Today in 2024 to pursue a post-graduate degree at Oxford University in the UK – but not before writing a book of essays called All of It.

Leone was one of the early readers, seeing the chapter about their family that Brooke has called Ghost Stories: On mothers, grandmothers and what we inherit.

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“I sent her one of the essays to have a look at, because it’s quite personal. You don’t want to be talking about people’s things without talking to them about it,” Brooke tells 9honey.

“She called me, or she messaged me, and she said, ‘Ring me’. And I was like, ‘Oh no, she hates it’,” she recalls.

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“So then I called her … just silence at the end. And then she just started crying. And she was like, ‘I feel like you’ve just described exactly how I feel’.

“It was so special. It was like a moment of closeness between us that we’ve never had before.'”

In the essay, Brooke, a proud Gamilaroi woman, spoke of her family’s experience as part of the Stolen Generation, when “the children were taken”, and of the horrific abuse suffered by Aboriginal people.

She recalled her “Nanny Nola”, who was a baby in the 1930s before Aboriginal people “were considered human in New South Wales” and the lasting impact this had on her Nanny Nola and the entire family.

Purchase your copy of Brooke Boney’s All of It here.

In the chapter, Brooke recalled her own upbringing by her mother, who faced extraordinary challenges.

She recalls Leonie telling her she could be “anything you want to be” and spoke of her “tenderness and hope for me and my siblings”.

Elsewhere in the book, Brooke discusses broader Indigenous affairs, ageing, fertility, celebrity, friendship, Australia’s “toxic love of sport” and the “age of social media”.

“You know, social media is so weird because it’s not like reality, right? We all know that. But we all just like subscribe to this like false narrative or something.

“We create the false narrative about ourselves, this psychology. But we all know that it’s not real. We know.”

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Of her first time walking onto campus at Oxford, Brooke recalls the beauty of the buildings and her first encounter with a fellow student, one of the many “over-achievers” she is completing the Master of Public Policy alongside.

“It wasn’t a difficult choice, because I feel like there are some gaps in Indigenous policy and I wanted to be able to help,” she says of her choice of study.

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“And when I looked at the structure of the course, I was like, ‘This is great. It’s got all of the things that I’m interested in, political philosophy, political science, economics’.

“It’s the most diverse cohort of any of the classes at Oxford. There are people from everywhere, because they want to go back and they want to improve and help and make real change.

“They’re all incredible. I feel so lucky to be learning with them.

“As much as the classes are brilliant and the lecturers and the professors and stuff that we have are wonderful, I learn so much from the other people that I’m studying with.”

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