Lynda Forbes is a great-great grandmother now, and introducing herself as one is one of her greatest joys.
Her generations of grandchildren are her pride. But she fears for the world they will inherit.
She wants them to have a better one than she grew up in, cast in the shadow of a war that scarred the world and the bomb that sent shockwaves still felt now more than 80 years after it detonated.
At 8.15am on August 6, 1945, a blinding light swallowed the sky above Hiroshima. The force of the explosion was more devastating than the world had ever seen.
The blast created a firestorm that levelled the city and killed more than 70,000 civilians.
At the weekend, to mark the 81st anniversary of the bombing, Ms Forbes and a group of Hunter union representatives gathered at Tighes Hill in the Peace Park to commemorate.
"We started about 10 years ago," Ms Forbes said of the Hunter Peace Group, in which she serves as the secretary and the organiser of the annual Hiroshima Day commemoration.
The group of women who comprise the group had become concerned that, around the 70th anniversary of the bombing, vigils to the disaster had begun to wane.
The event was unforgettable. But, as is common with such colossal events, the memory of the blast had drifted into sterile and disconnected history; a date and a horrific number but somehow detached from the concerns of the present.
That was why Ms Forbes said it was important to gather and commemorate. As the world shifted perilously towards conflict in different corners of the globe, the shadow of turmoil took on an all-too-familiar theme.
"There's too much of this bandying around. I mean, you hear people who vote Liberal think everyone on the left is a communist and the people who vote on the left think the right ones are fascists," she said.
"I don't think anybody understands what it really becomes."
Ms Forbes, now 82, grew up in the shadow of the Second World War and remembers the war wounded carrying their lifetimes of injuries and trauma from the factory near where she lived in Scotland. Missing limbs and countless more invisible scars.
Her first protest was at 13, when she rallied to oppose the British government turning one of Scotland's vast lochs into a nuclear submarine base.
"The rhetoric that has been going around for the past few years - really, Trump time - I remember my parents talking about rhetoric when Hitler was coming up and it was very similar. It was all this horrible phony patriotism."
Ms Forbes is opposed to the encroachment of defence industry in higher education, and in Australia's involvement in large-scale defence projects including the AUKUS deal. She accepts that Australia, like the world, will have a defence force, but her pacifism dictates that the world cannot have peace while it continues to make bombs.
"I'm a great-great grandmother now. And I'm very proud to say that," she said. "But I worry for the kind of life and jobs, the country and the world that these boys and girls will grow up in."
Ms Forbes said she knew the world was a big and complicated place, but she said the devastation of the bombing she had come to commemorate at the weekend was still painfully felt, almost a century on.
"I acknowledge that it is a big thing," she said. "But the maiming and the pain and the death is still happening."
