FAMILY AFFAIR
Nicole’s father, Professor Antony Kidman, was an Australian psychologist who established the UTS Health Psychology Unit in Sydney in 1985, to help address mental health issues in children, teenagers and young adults. He was the Director of the Centre for approximately 30 years, until his death in 2014. In June 2018, the Centre was renamed The Kidman Centre UTS in his honour. Twenty-year- old Lucia Hawley, granddaughter of the late Professor Kidman, and daughter of Antonia Marran spoke at the launch of The Kidman Centre UTS. Hawley spoke of the trauma of losing her beloved “Papa” in 2014, followed only eight months later by the “excruciating” loss of her father, 46-year- old Angus Hawley in April 2015. Hawley told guests that saying goodbye to two highly influential men in her life shattered her world. “At 16 years old, processing these events was tough,” she said. “However, despite what happened to me, I feel I am fortunate. Life goes on … I attribute this capacity to get up and face each day as best I could to my extraordinary Papa. I was sad and I grieved but my life stayed on track.” Hawley says of her grandfather that, “He wasn’t a psychologist by day and a Papa by night, he was always a psychologist. A lot of our hangouts involved talking about his research projects because I was interested in them. I used to suffer a lot of anxiety and he gave me some good tools to talk myself down from things.”