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On Darwin's rural outskirts, a group of Cambodian refugees-turned-farmers have turned the Northern Territory into a land of opportunity.
Mango farmer Muy Keav Ma's family migrated to Australia in the 1980s, fleeing Cambodia's murderous Khmer Rouge regime, and her personal story is extraordinary and humbling.
Readers are advised this story contains distressing content.
"We [have] been through the war in the killing fields, all that," Ms Ma said.
"So since I was born, we move from place to place, been through war, been through starvation. When I tell people, they just say, 'Is that real?'"
She was a girl when one and a half million people were killed in an explosion of violence by the Khmer Rouge.
Her father was captured while working in gem mines, but when he saw men being rounded up and shot, he escaped and was lost in the jungle for a month.
"My mum thought, 'Oh, he died', and everyone thought he died," Ms Ma said.
But they were reunited.
Haunting memories
The family escaped to the Thai border but were immediately put on buses and sent back to be dropped on a hill in the middle of nowhere.
"[There were] landmines everywhere," she said.
"So they die just like ants. It took us, I don't know, maybe one and a half days [to walk] from the top to the bottom. By the time we got to the bottom of the hill [there were] just dead people everywhere."
Her memories are deeply haunting.
"I have a flashback about this lady. She stepped on the landmine — what happened [next] is like 'boom!'" she said.
She still gets upset talking about how some old people were abandoned.
"Some old people, they cannot go," she said.
"The children put a net, you know, the mosquito net for the old people, put water, put food. [They] left them, you know. They've got no choice."
Eventually, her family made it to a refugee camp and spent years applying and hoping for resettlement.
With just one box of possessions, they came to Australia.
Ms Ma's family spent years running a suburban milk bar in Melbourne before deciding their hard work wasn't paying off and headed north.
"[My mother] took a look around, and she liked the weather. She saw the opportunity … like they open up for horticulture in the '90s," she said.
Land of possibility
Through backbreaking work and sacrifice, they turned a block of land with no running water, electricity or clearing into a 30-hectare mango farm.
"We started from scratch, cleared the land, put [a] bore in, put irrigation in [around the] baby trees," she said.
[It was] a lot of resources to start with and took us nearly five years to produce any crop."
Now they have 3,000 mango trees as well as vegetables, herbs and fruits sold at Darwin's popular Rapid Creek markets where other quietly achieving Cambodian farmers also sell their crops.
But she hasn't escaped hardship in Australia.
In 2019, bushfires burned nearly 1,000 trees on her farm, and a year later another fire destroyed her home.
"We lost everything," Ms Ma said.
"And from now on, we just start from scratch. Start building our farm again."
That hasn't been easy.
"Fertiliser now go up soon after COVID [and] labour. So everything. You spend more and you're not getting any much better. So it's [a] tough life," she said.
But far from being gloomy, Ms Ma is constantly laughing and joyful and regularly prays at a Buddhist temple built on the family mango farm.
"I'm trying to be happy in life. If you're not happy, you suffer, you see?" she said.
"So the meaning of life [is to] be joyful all the time. You enjoy every minute you got, enjoy, love someone, love someone every minute because you don't know when you [will be] gone. That's what I'm trying to do."
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