I’ve moved around a lot as a kid, and even as an adult I’ve never been under the same roof for more than 3 years my entire life. I’m 50 next year, so I’ve moved around a lot. I think there’s an aspect of adaptability with that - as a kid you roll with it, you learn to roll. I became quite resilient, quite self-contained. Especially when we moved to the outback in the Northern Territory.
I was born in Melbourne, and then moved to a few places. At the age of six we moved out to the Adelaide Hills. We lived in a couple of places there till I was ten, and then moved to the Northern Territory and lived in the outback on Aboriginal communities until I was seventeen. Very isolated remote locations. Locations that aren’t too dissimilar to the red landscape you might see on Mars.
I remember the day when my two brothers and I landed in Alice Springs. Mum had put us on the plane in Adelaide and dad had picked us up in Alice Springs to drive us to the desert. Mum put us on the plane in our best clothes – ‘Sunday’s best’ kind of thing. We got off the plane and this was 1980, when Alice Springs airport was a shed. There was nothing. I was floored at how hot it was. I remember getting off the plane and seeing my father who was just covered in red dust. I was wearing this pretty little white dress. I had no idea what was going to happen. I felt very wrong in that outfit. It was a hot dusty hour and a half drive out to the community.
I was given my room which was huge – 3 beds, just me and a ceiling fan. I remember dad saying that first day, ‘you just have to make sure before you put shoes on every day, you knock them on the ground to make sure no scorpions are in them’. And I remember thinking, ‘what are we doing?’.
It didn’t bother me not having a television in the outback, because in Adelaide we weren’t allowed to watch tv except for a couple of shows here and there. I was really good at entertaining myself. When I was a kid and mum and dad had the shop in the Adelaide Hills, my brothers and I and my friends would get on our bikes and go riding, play in the creek, go yabbying and exploring because we could. In those days people let their kids just do what they wanted. There weren’t the same restrictions as there are now.
Dad did his best, bless him. The place was as clean as it could be but then when mum came up after the shop had been sold in the Adelaide Hills, I felt like the rock of the family was there. I saw my mother more than my father in my early years. My father worked very long hours, in the city in the public service. He left before I was awake and came home when I was in bed. When you’re that young, I never really saw him, so my mum was a very important person in my life before the age of six. Then from the age of six to ten when they owned and worked in the shop together, we didn’t really see any of them and just roamed free a little bit.
I think I learnt resilience and adaptability. Being able to be content with my own company and not needing to have others. There wasn’t anybody else around except my brothers, and I was a part of the Aboriginal communities too, but I was the odd one out. I was the only white girl. So, it was a bit of a reversed situation than what you have when you see people of different ethnicities in our very white community in many Australian cities. I’ve been lucky enough to grow up in that environment to experience a lot of Aboriginal culture and see difference and not be ‘othered’ in any major way. I was othered a little bit because I was the odd one out, but at the same time that made me appreciate what it’s like to be on the other side.
I really can’t stand racism. I can’t stand people who treat people differently because they look different or they come from a different culture or have different beliefs.
We all do, we’re all different. That makes us all common, and those commonalities we have are our own unique qualities that we bring.
Those years growing up in the outback, there was no corner store, no butchers. I learnt to hunt for and grow my own food at the age of eleven. When I was eleven or twelve, I helped my mother bring up my youngest brother who was thirteen years younger than me. I became quite a responsible individual, partially a young adult at that age. I had a different appreciation of where my food came from, how much effort it takes to grow it, to capture it, to cultivate it. I have a different respect for the environment. The death of something gives life to something else. It’s part of the cycle. I’m quite comfortable eating meat because I have killed my own. I understand that. If you can’t catch a fish and kill it yourself, you shouldn’t eat it. That’s how it is for ALL life on earth.
Life only exists because something else has to die.
People tend to try to remove themselves from that a bit and they think as human beings we are outside of that, and we are not. It’s a case of respecting where we are in that cycle.
My father was kind of like a bookkeeper in the Territory. He was an administrator at a couple of Aboriginal settlements. He helped local industry kick off in a couple of communities. Back in the eighties, he also established the first completely supported solar panel energy system in one of the communities in the outback. My dad was a bit of an innovator in that way. He really made an effort to get things going, to help communities be more resilient and last in the future.
Other than look after us because we were young, my mother did some catering in the local canteen for some of the staff that came to the community like doctors or nurses. I helped a little bit with that when I was able to and wasn’t studying.
I taught myself with books. From the age of ten my schooling was by correspondence. The school would mail me the work, I would teach myself from exercise books and tapes, and then mail all my assignments back. I’d get results eventually, but I’d have to progress anyway and assume that I was correct and just keep going until I got some marks back. It was hard to ask anyone questions because we didn’t really have a phone, and in those days, there was no internet.
I have three brothers. I am the oldest, by two minutes with my twin brother, then the next one down is two years younger than us, and the youngest, born in the Northern Territory, is thirteen years younger than me. There was only the three of us for thirteen years and then along came the extra one! We spent a lot of time together in the outback, and we’re all still pretty close.
The last couple of years of school mum and dad wanted to send myself and my twin brother to boarding school in Melbourne. Even though we were doing fine with correspondence they wanted us to learn to socialise with other people. I would just do my work and study in my room. My twin brother was a bit different. He’d go out playing and do everything at the last minute, where as I methodically worked away. Mum always knew where I was – I was in my room writing and reading. I was a self-sufficient kid.
When I lived in the outback, and even earlier than that as a very young girl in primary school, I always knew I was gay. Always. Always knew I liked girls. I knew when I was six or seven but didn’t realise it was different until I realised that nobody else did. Then I knew. And when I moved to the outback – the outback in the Northern Territory, you can’t get any more heteronormative than that. I felt extremely isolated. I was already living in a remote environment, I was the only girl in that sort of situation AND I was gay. I felt like I was the only person in the world like that. I didn’t know anyone else. We didn’t watch tv, so there was no modelling of what life for me could look like if there was someone else growing up like me.
I felt really really isolated. I didn’t know what my life would look like. I wasn’t the least bit interested in having children. I didn’t want to be married with kids. I had seen it in my mother – I love my mother, she was a wonderful mother, but it wasn’t a life I could see for myself and didn’t know where I fitted in, in that sort of sense.
My folks sent me to boarding school in Melbourne when I was fifteen and I remember the first day I arrived. It was an all-girls school. Firstly, I was culture shocked, because I lived in isolation and remote locations for so long sitting in a room all by myself, and then there is this school with about 1000 screaming girls on their return from holidays. I was so used to silence that the noise and the clammer was just overwhelming – it hit me in the face. I thought ‘oh my god’. It was like the first day I arrived in the Northern Territory.
Because I lived in the outback where I did, I dressed differently. I had a cowboy hat, I had boots, I had really heavy jeans because you sunburn through your clothes up there, long sleeved shirts – I looked like I came off a ranch. But you wouldn’t have seen that at school because we had uniforms, except when we had casual days. I didn’t realise other people didn’t dress like me.
I turned up in my stuff and I looked so different, so different to anybody else. Here I am again, the odd one out. I felt awkward to start with, and then I kind of just owned it. There’s nobody else here like me so I just have to be me. I wasn’t going to go home to get changed – I had nothing else to get changed into. I’ve got no other clothes but these, so this is it. I had no option really. We didn’t have the money for me to go and spend it on frivolous fashion. I didn’t understand fashion. I didn’t get it. Because I’d never experienced it. I didn’t understand why they were screaming about ‘this and that outfit’. It meant nothing to me.
I couldn’t connect in that way and felt like I didn’t belong in some ways. Here I was, not just a gay girl – my family’s not there, I’m all by myself - and now I don’t fit into this new community I was supposed to be a part of.
The way I dealt with it was that I thought ‘you’re here, you've got to go with it, you just have to do your best’.
I never felt like I belonged to any groups per se. You know how everyone has their own little cliques? I never belonged to any cliques. I had friends, to start with they were the people who also didn’t belong to particular cliques, so we just floated together a little bit. Then I just floated between groups. I didn’t realise till many years later that people thought I was actually quite popular – I never saw that at all. I thought I was actually the opposite. But everyone just welcomed me into all of their little groups which I didn’t realise doesn’t usually happen. I think maybe because I was my own different-self.
When I was about eighteen or nineteen, when I had my first girlfriend, I eventually told my parents I was gay. And they were fine. When I was twenty-three, I told my youngest brother (he was ten) that I was moving interstate and explained why. I explained that I was moving to Adelaide to have a relationship with a woman and that some of his friends might tease him a bit because of me. His response was ‘I don’t care, it’s none of their business’. And that’s kind of the family’s attitude – they love me for who I am not because of anything else. I’m very lucky there, I’ve always had that support from my family. But I was still always a bit scared to tell them initially – to come out.
The turning point and moment when I became curious was in year twelve during religious education. One of my teachers said it was okay to be gay - that it’s not against the bible. It was the first time I felt accepted, even though I didn’t know anybody else like that, I was validated. My difference was ok. I was curious why we can’t just be ourselves, and from then on, I never really hid my sexuality. I just allowed myself to be me. I’ve never hid it as part of my candidature of Mars One. If they don’t accept me then it’s not going to work is it? This is not changeable. It is who I am. It doesn’t mean I’m going to hit on other woman in the crews, because they’re quite likely straight. And I’m not interested, I’m very happy in a relationship.
It’s always made me curious why people respond in certain ways to gender issues or ethnic diversity. Why do they hate particular people or not understand them? Why don’t they just accept them? I’ve always been curious to understand that. And see that in myself too, I know I’m far from perfect. We all have our little biases that we don’t always see and that raises their heads with something we say or how we respond to something. When that happens, I want to know why. Why do I think that, what is that? I try to explore it instead of running away from it.
I am more and more comfortable in my skin as I have gotten older. I have learnt to accept more about myself. Become more aware. When I was younger, I felt things but didn’t know how to process them the same way. I’ve now got a language and a lot of that has come from meditation, journaling, reflection, spending time with psychoanalysts, counsellors and so forth. It’s really given me a language to understand myself. As soon as you write the words down or say something, it’s out. And you feel so much better and different. It releases so much to actually give a feeling a life.
And some of my journaling is research. My experiments, because I’m curious.
I meditate every day to switch off. I do things in my day that are joyful and when I’m most joyful I’m very very present. You’re not thinking. Your conscious mind moves away when you’re so focused on what’s pleasurable to you. Whether that’s when I’m lifting very heavy weights, leg pressing 250kg – I’m not thinking about anything else but leg pressing 250kg. I’m not thinking what I have to pick up when I go home because I would drop that 250kg and hurt myself.
When you’re completely focused on something it’s a very easy way to be. I don’t analyse it. While it’s a competitive mindset in some ways, when I don’t get a personal best, I say ok, lets back it down to a much lighter weight and let’s work on technique, let's improve the how, not the what.
I do that with my own personal development as well. You’re not kicking goals every day. You really aren’t in life. So those are the days when I meditate more, or journal around the personal stuff. That’s when I break it down to the how and why, not the what. The what will kind of work itself out if you can get the other ones right. That’s the approach I take.
I think having that sort of philosophy is useful for problem solving, but also fantastic for being kind to myself. If you’re constantly not achieving something, you can bash yourself up, but why? There could be many reasons why – a bad night’s sleep, other things affecting your life, a personal tragedy, relationships. I think this came from exploring my own self-worth. I used to beat myself up a lot more when I was younger, for not achieving, and then I realised I was doing other things that helped me become better later. And some of it was organic.
When I applied for the Mars One mission, I’m not an astrophysicist, I don’t have qualifications in the hard sciences. Yes, I have four university degrees but none of them are chemical engineering and that sort of stuff. I can learn that. I will learn anything I really want to learn. If I’m interested enough, I’ll learn it. If someone is willing to give me a shot and trust that I will apply myself, I’m there.
I remember very clearly the moment I found out about Mars One. I was at a mate’s place, a good friend of mine. She and I used to get together once a month to have these lavish meals we’d cook together. She’d plan a three-course menu, and we’d spend all afternoon and evening cooking food and eating food together. In between when things were cooking, we’d flick through food magazines or our iPads. I remember sitting on her sofa when she was putting something in the oven, and I saw an ad in a science blog on my iPad.
It was complete clickbait. I was so fascinated by it and curious. What is this, this is not NASA? I hadn’t heard of Mars One. My friend had heard about it. She was a real science fiction techy nerd. She was telling me all about it. And I thought wow, that’s amazing. Especially when she was telling me about the one-way aspect. It was technically feasible – there have been over fifty missions to Mars since the 1960’s and they’ve always been one way. And they land. It is possible to land things on Mars. It is not possible to bring things back yet. They’re still working on that.
That was logical to me. It reduces risk. You’re going to Mars with technology that is known. I was fascinated by it and really curious of course. I started asking all sorts of questions of myself - how will they do this?
I learnt that Mars One philosophy was to establish the first permanent settlement on Mars to show that we could share space as a united humanity.
We could do this in a way that’s not about nationhood, because Mars One is an a-political international organisation. Out of the 100 of us who are left in the selection process, we’re from 34 different countries. Their concept is to send people from different nations in the crews. As a result, we’ll become multilingual multinational international a-political… everything.
This is what a melting pot of our society is going to be like but in such a way that we are reliant on each other for survival. It’s not about building walls, closing borders, deciding who’s going to come in and who’s not.
We need each other. We have to. It’s starting over, and it’s in a positive way. Humanity 2.0.
Photography by Maya Sugiharto | Written by Aviva Minc
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Dianne McGrath is one of the 100 Mars One Astronaut Candidates.
"Mars One aims to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars. Mars is the only planet we know of that can currently feasibly support human life and will be humankind’s first step to become a multiplanetary species. Before carefully selected and trained crews will depart to Mars, several unmanned missions will be completed, establishing a habitable settlement waiting for the first astronauts to arrive. The Mars One crews will go to Mars not to simply visit, but to live, explore, and create a second home for humanity. The first men and women to go to Mars are going there to stay." – Mars One
THANK YOUs
Dianne McGrath – for trusting us and allowing our lens to capture your presence; for your generosity, honesty and openness in sharing your story to inspire others to follow their own dreams. It's been an amazing and insightful experience. It is truly an honour to be a part of your journey.
Emma Sledge, Mars One Communications – for providing us with information and images of Mars One, and for being so helpful. It is much appreciated.
Jessica Curl from Project Better – for your flexibility and generosity in allowing us the space to capture Dianne's story.
© 2026 Agent Morphe
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