Farah Mak has a life that has always resisted easy summary. Best known to many as Katrina Marshall on Neighbours, she has also worked as a presenter, an MC, and a keynote speaker, founding The Self Worth Movement along the way. But she says none of those roles matter as much as the one she comes home to: wife to Ray, and mum to their children.
For a long time, she says, those chapters felt separate – acting over here, presenting over there, advocacy somewhere else again, with being a mother and wife the only constant. Looking back now, she can see the insistent pull towards telling stories that help people recognise their own worth was the single thread running through all of it.
That thread has led, most recently, to a picture book. Farah has spent the past year introducing the world to Worthy, a character born, she says, from an idea that started small and refused to stay that way.
Her first book, I Am Worthy, published recently through Hardie Grant, began life as a set of affirmation cards for young girls before the characters and their world kept growing until a book, and then a series, was the only thing that made sense.
The idea took shape from several directions at once – from being a little girl herself, becoming a mother, raising a daughter, and her own advocacy work with women. “I know what it feels like to lose that sense of self,” Farah says, “and I also know the journey of rediscovering it.” She wanted to give children the language for something she had spent much of her adult life relearning – that self-worth isn’t earned or achieved, but already there; in her words, “like a heart-shaped crystal dwelling in our heart space.”
I know what it feels like to lose that sense of self
Translating that into a story that young children – particularly girls – could follow meant building a magical, empowering world they would step into rather than just read about, with affirmations and interactive moments woven through the pages. Farah describes the book as something she hopes families return to instead of shelve. Ideally it would be a way of opening conversations at home about values, identity and the things that make a child uniquely themselves. The first book is dedicated to her daughter, though Farah says she wrote it for her own inner child too, and for every girl who has ever needed reminding of her worth.
I Am Worthy is the first title in what Farah calls the Sparkle Squad Girls universe, and the ambitions for it extend well past the bookshelf. A second picture book, I Am Courageous, is already in the pipeline, alongside an early chapter-book series for older readers and a growing line of merchandise, affirmation cards and school programs. The biggest of the dreams is an animated series. It’s a project serious enough that Farah has travelled to London to pitch the concept to Disney executives, sitting in a room watching characters that once existed only in her imagination discussed as a screen property.
The book sits alongside advocacy work that has occupied Farah for close to a decade. She is a survivor of domestic and family violence, and for more than eight years has drawn on that experience alongside Safe Steps, where she serves on the Lived Experience Advisory Board. She has MC’d the organisation’s Candlelight Vigil for four consecutive years, an evening she describes as one of remembrance and hope. She remembers a support worker holding her hand during a court proceeding early in her own experience, and says it planted in her the wish to one day make somebody else feel as nurtured and believed as she did in that moment.
“I don’t want to be defined by the worst things that have happened to me,” she says.
These days she is more interested in talking about what comes after violence than the violence itself – rediscovering your voice and learning to trust yourself again.
All of that recently found a new backdrop when Farah and her husband, Ray, moved their family to a property on the peninsula. Years of holidaying at Moonah Links when their children were small planted in her what she calls a “maybe one day” thought. Long before the move, Farah and Ray had come across a house on the peninsula while “dream scrolling” as she calls it.
They both loved it, but at the time it felt out of reach. Months later, while Ray was overseas, he stumbled on that very same property again and sent it back to her. “It was such a beautiful surprise,” Farah says, “because it was the home we had previously admired and thought was simply a dream.” This time, it became their forever home.
Life there has settled into something Farah struggles to call typical, split between MCing events, writing, and building the Sparkle Squad Girls universe on one side, and gumboots, vines and the unpredictable rhythms of country life on the other.
What has surprised her most about the move, she says, is how quickly the peninsula has come to feel like home, from the warmth of neighbours to the local businesses she frequents, among them Bio Haven in Somerville, Tully’s Corner in Mt Eliza, and The Studio & Co in Moorooduc.
Approaching fifty, Farah describes feeling less like she is winding down than gathering up everything she has learned to carry into what comes next. She hopes there will be more books, advocacy, stages, and a life on the peninsula she has learned not to rush past.
If there’s a single message she’d want a reader to take from her story, it’s one she returns to across every part of her work – that whatever chapter you’re standing in right now, it doesn’t have to be the whole book.
I Am Worthy is available now in bookstores and online through Hardie Grant.
To find out more about Farah, visit the website.
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