By summer’s end in Whitton, a Riverina town marked by huge steel grain silos 626 kilometres south-west of Sydney, children’s swimming bathers would turn the colour of red dust. Yet Linda Burney, aged four-and-a-half and dressed in her new pair of pink swimmers with a pleated skirt and little bow, lived for the day.

It was 1962 and the little girl would soon enough know she was a “black and illegitimate kid born in the boondocks”, but for now she was just desperate to swim like her friends, so she took herself off to the irrigation channel, opposite the house where she lived with her great uncle Billy and great aunt Nina, a white brother and sister in their 60s who were raising her.

Billy and Nina had told her she was too young to swim, but here she was anyway, splashing about in kiddie nirvana: forget the odd snake and the water so brown you could barely see below the surface; children couldn’t slide down the muddy embankment fast enough.

The next day, she decided to go swimming again – unaware irrigation ditches are regulated day by day, the water levels raised and dropped accordingly, and she nearly drowned: “I was way over my head,” recalls a laughing Burney, now 52 and throwing her long black hair behind her shoulder in her Canterbury state electoral office in Campsie, “and an older boy seriously saved my life.”

Burney, today the NSW Minister for Community Services and Minister for Women, says it was “just that sort of life”; as romantic as it was rough and tumble: Burney and her friends would follow Uncle Billy and his fellow stockmen as they drove the cattle and sheep through town, rescuing lambs and orphaned calves that had fallen behind.

At night, the kids would sneak up to the adults’ campfires and eavesdrop on their conversations. But it was an image, not words, that first set Burney straight: after a travelling photographer knocked on Bill and Nina’s door in Whitton and assembled Burney and her blonde, blue-eyed cousins from the neighbouring house, she couldn’t help but notice she was the “little black kid on the end” when the family portrait was posted back.

In 2003, Burney would be celebrated as the first Aboriginal person elected to the NSW Parliament, but it had taken until age 12 or 13 for Burney to figure out she was Aboriginal, one of those “savages” she was taught in year seven at nearby Leeton High School were the “closest link to the stone-age people”.

Burney began her working life as a school teacher in western Sydney and was headhunted at 23 to work in the first Aboriginal Education Unit for the NSW Government, touring regional areas to unite indigenous elders and sometimes unwilling or unready teachers to introduce Australia’s first Aboriginal education policy. Later, she would become director-general of the NSW Department of Aboriginal Affairs.

A friend and strong supporter in the Labor Party, federal minister Anthony Albanese, says Burney has a “resilience and strength of character – in part, I have no doubt, due to the adversity which she’s gone through; she’s a walking embodiment of the saying, ‘That which does not kill us makes us stronger’.”

In May 2006, Burney famously lost her great love. Rick Farley, the former head of the National Farmers Federation – a proponent of native title rights who was pivotal in writing the Mabo legislation – had been her partner for nine years when he died aged 53, about five months after collapsing with a brain aneurysm at their shared Marrickville house, where Burney still lives.

“The first time I saw Linda,” Farley told Good Weekend in 2003, “she was wearing a black beret, sunglasses and a leopard skin coat. I thought, ‘Watch out’. She looked like a force to be reckoned with.” The same leopard skin coat is today lying on top of Burney’s travelling case; she’s due this day to fly to regional NSW for ministerial duties.

Burney took anti-depressants under medical supervision for clinical depression for several months after Farley’s death. Today, the pills are gone, but a quiet routine remains that is crucial, one senses, to her mental wellbeing: most nights, if there are no parliamentary obligations, she’s straight home and into the trakky daks or flannelette pyjamas, in bed and reading a book by 8.30pm.

What most people do not know is that, nine months after Farley died, Burney’s only daughter, Willurei – one of her two adult children from a previous relationship – hovered closed to death, having been diagnosed with a rare brain disease and ending up in the same intensive care ward.

Burney treads wearily here: Willurei survived, she explains, even recently staging her own art exhibition. “She’s multi-talented,” says Burney of the 24-year-old, smiling though ill at ease about the topic, “but it’s still a struggle for her.” Burney’s 25-year-old son, Binni, meanwhile, is a respite carer for children with autism.

One can “either let grief drown you or it can be something that grows you,” Burney reflects. “It absolutely changes you.” In what way? “Well, you know, it makes you sad. It makes you understand how transient our grip is on this earth. It makes you understand you’ve got no idea what’s going to happen when you wake up.”

Does grief get easier as time passes? “No, not really. Someone said to me when Rick died, ‘You’ll never get over it but you’ll get used to it.’ I’m still not used to it.

“There are days when things are tough, and I’ll say, ‘Rick, where are you? I need you right now.’ It’s just so sad that he died at the age he did with so much more to do. Sundays are the worst; you just wake up and feel very sad, because that was the day we had together.”

Linda Burney came into the world this way: Rita Burney, a white woman, became pregnant after a brief encounter with a Wiradjuri man, Lawrence “Noni” Ingram. Soon after Linda was born in 1957, Rita gave her baby up and left town.

Mother and daughter stayed in touch, even living together when Linda attended Penrith High in years 11 and 12, but Rita – who died in her 40s, when Linda was 18 – never divulged who the father might be, nor let on the man was Aboriginal. Rita and Linda were never close.

But Linda never actually asked her mother who her father was: instead, she found out his identity by asking relatives and friends, and at the age of 27, in 1984, finally got to meet Ingram for the first time – the wife of one of Burney’s cousins introduced them. “I showed him a photograph of my mother,” recalls Burney. “It took him a while to register, and he just lent over and held me and said, ‘I hope I don’t disappoint you.’”

Ingram, who had 10 other children and had worked variously as a fruit picker and council worker, didn’t disappoint her: he was a warm-hearted man and they kept in contact for the next 17 years, until his death in 2001.

Burney is careful to make clear she was never a member of the stolen generation removed from her parents, but explains: “I met a number of my relatives before I met my dad, and it’s really amazing in Aboriginal culture – because so many children went missing – that when a child turns up a place is made for you; you’re welcomed into the family. That’s been part of our survival.”

Burney is angered The Australian recently described her as “part-Aboriginal”; her office contacted the newspaper and said the phrase was offensive: “I won’t swear, but that was extraordinary, and ignorant,” Burney says now. “Let’s just say that kind of language stopped a long time ago; it shows a complete lack of understanding of what Aboriginality is about.”

The comment was made in an article in the newspaper that reported the suggestion a new generation of stolen children was emerging after 30 indigenous children were removed from their parents at Lightning Ridge, 770 kilometres north of Sydney.

“I’ll say this very bluntly,” responds Burney, her formidable force to which Farley referred emerging, “if the courts believe that a child’s life or wellbeing is in danger because of their circumstances in the home, then I don’t really care if that kid’s Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal, girl or boy, that child’s safety comes first.

“I know why some of those kids have been removed, and I can tell you, for anyone, if it was your child, in similar circumstances, you would probably want the exact same thing.”

Kaye Bellear, the widow of Australia’s first Aboriginal judge, Bob Bellear, argues she has never seen a formidable side to her long-time friend: “Linda doesn’t enjoy conflict,” says Bellear. “She resolves issues in a non-confrontationalist way. She knows the Department of Community Services pretty well because of the Aboriginal community, so the people at DOCS are not dealing with a minister they have to educate.” But Aboriginal elder Millie Ingram, another friend, says of Burney: “I think her Aboriginality is important to her, and important to the Aboriginal people who look at her as a role model, but I don’t think it’s important in the job she does, which she does very well. She has the background and intelligence to do the job; it’s not the colour of her skin.”

Burney is ever loyal to the friends who support her: when academic and feminist Wendy McCarthy went into hospital a few years ago, McCarthy insisted she wouldn’t have visitors. “That didn’t stop Miss Linda,” laughs McCarthy, “she arrived at the end of the bed with flowers on a day she had five million things going on.”

This year, Burney lost a beloved half-brother, Rodney, who suffered schizophrenia most of his adult life – Rodney was one of four children born to her mother and stepfather – and in recent times Burney had been forced to scour parks when Rodney went missing.

Eventually, she had to section him for treatment under the Mental Health Act. “He knew how sick he was,” says Burney quietly. She attended his funeral earlier this year: the 44-year-old took his life. “There was a sense of inevitability in some ways, but he was a lovely person.”

Come 2011, and if Labor loses the state election, would Burney stay on in Opposition if she retains her seat? “Yes, absolutely. It’s not just about winning; I have an enormous commitment to the people of Canterbury, they have trusted me.”

And beyond politics? Wendy McCarthy “fantasises” she’d like to see Burney run an international aid organisation, but no-one believes she has ambitions to lead the NSW parliamentary Labor party. “I certainly don’t see politics as my last career,” says Burney. “I’d really like to live in another country at some point – I just love the Pacific. I don’t have anywhere particular in mind.

“Whether I have another relationship remains to be seen. I have an extraordinary belief in a thing called fate. I think I still have an enormous amount to learn and give.”