MUCH of the world was shocked when grandmother Sekai Holland was tortured by Robert Mugabe's thugs but few people know the story of where she found the love of her life.
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Memories come flooding back to the 70-year-old, now a co-minister in the Zimbabwe government, as she sits overlooking Lake Burley Griffin.
Ms Holland is just days away from seeing a historic referendum in her country, which she and hundreds of thousands of other Zimbabweans have spilt blood for, but she has not forgotten the importance of Canberra in her life.
It was here she met her husband of 44 years and began a life of activism.
In the first half of the 1960s at Australian National University she rebuffed a ''young, long-haired man wearing Mexican boots'' who asked her if she needed help during a political science lecture.
Weeks later, she approached the man, Jim Holland, a diplomat's son - and the man she married some years later - and asked for his help because she could not understand the lecturer.
''He is still very handsome,'' she said, adding that her mother-in-law still lives in Canberra.
As students, the two lovebirds protested together outside the South African embassy, honking horns, singing Leonard Cohen songs and making life irritating for those who lived and worked inside the building.
Ms Holland was in Canberra this past week to take part in a seminar for International Women's Day at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS).
While the theme of the day was to stop violence against women, Ms Holland said the overall objective should be to get rid of all forms of violence.
She said Australia had come a long way in the advancement of women.
''You have a female Prime Minister, female Governor-General, female Chief Minister (in the ACT) and a female mayor in Sydney,'' she said.
''Women in Australia have done it without acclamation.''
Ms Holland is a co-minister in the Zimbabwean unity government and holds the portfolio of national healing, reconciliation and integration.
Formed in 2009 after Mr Mugabe led a political campaign laced with vote-rigging and violence in 2008, the three-part coalition is made up of Mr Mugabe's party, Morgan Tsvangirai's party (of which Ms Holland is a member) and Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara's Movement for Democratic Change faction.
In 2007, police detained and beat Ms Holland. She sustained a broken arm, a fractured knee and had a leg snapped when hit with an iron bar. She spent many months in hospital.
The referendum is for a new constitution recognising free and fair elections. Without reprisals.
