About Ilsa I was raised in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne (two parents, three sisters, assorted pets - great childhood) and, after failing matriculation in quite spectacular fashion, joined the RAAF at the age of seventeen. Blissfully unaware of how bad my hair looked, I enjoyed three wonderful years (what more can one say about an institution where the male-female ratio was about 500 - 1?) before marrying and moving to Adelaide. Shortly afterwards the marriage ended (Adelaide can do that) and I returned to Melbourne with my young son. There followed a wide variety of jobs while I completed a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in medieval history (which shows how in touch I was with the local job market). At the same time I also joined the Army Reserves and spent part of the next fifteen years running around in camouflage gear whilst trying to master the intricacies of the M60 machine gun. By 1995 I’d negotiated my way through another marriage and emerged at the other end with two more children in tow. So finding myself relatively housebound, I decided to return to tertiary studies and completed first a teaching degree (why, I don’t know), before deciding to focus on men’s violence against women. I completed my honours year at Monash in 1998 focusing on media representations of domestic violence and then spent the next few years doing a PhD on the long-term effects of DV on survivors.
