"People needed to give me a chance, to be able to show what I was able to do," the 43-year-old says. "That's fine, I've had that shit all my life, every reason why I shouldn't succeed. My whole life I have backed myself. I hope to be able to achieve big things."

January 22, 2013. Gillard, embattled, falling in the polls, announces she has instructed Labor's national executive to install Peris as its lead NT Senate candidate: "Nova was the first Aboriginal Australian to win an Olympic gold medal. With the support of the people of the Northern Territory, I want her to be the first Aboriginal woman to sit in federal parliament."

The announcement is welcomed by former ALP president and Aboriginal leader Warren Mundine, himself passed over for a seat in parliament, who says it will end "112 years of failure" by the Labor Party. Aboriginal scholar Marcia Langton says Peris is "a truly great contender". But in the NT, the storm blows up quickly; as she says now: "A category six cyclone that smashed me from every possible direction." Peris is a retired athlete, a celebrity nominee, a political novice being handed a seat covering 1.4-million square kilometres of some of the most challenging political terrain in the nation.

Outspoken indigenous politician Alison Anderson, a minister in both Labor and Country Liberal Party governments in the Northern Territory, is caustic, saying that Peris will be the "maid inside the house" of the ALP, who will "do the sheets and serve the cups of tea".

There is hate mail, including one that calls her a "working-class coon" conceived by "nigger parents". She has seen mail like this before, as an Olympian. Allegations are made that come to nothing and no one can say for sure which side of politics concocted them.

There are many sleepless nights. "I would wake up at two or three in the morning and my head would be down the toilet bowl, vomiting," she tells me. "It was an unpleasant, sickly feeling. It was hard."

At the height of the unpleasantness, Peris's eldest daughter, Jessica, asks her what her favourite quote is. "Nothing is impossible to those who see the invisible," Peris tells her. Jessica has it tattooed on her shoulder and cries when her mother explains, at the end of her first speech in federal parliament, how the words were written on a piece of paper handed to her before the Sydney Olympics by an elderly man who said it got him through the bad days when he was a prisoner of war.

That speech is delivered on November 13, 2013. Peris is dressed in gold silk patterned with dancing brolgas. It has been printed at a remote Aboriginal art centre at Gunbalanya, in western Arnhem Land, and made by a friend from Dripstone High School.

A Larrakia elder from Darwin, Eric Fejo, has painted her face with white ochre "for love and strength and protection" and so that people can look into her eyes and see that "this is me and we are here and we are still surviving". A kinsman from her father's country, Jimmy Cooper, has played the didgeridoo, to bring the spirits of her ancestors close. "I am Nova Maree Peris. I was born in Darwin in the Northern Territory and I retain my strong cultural and spiritual ties to my country, to Mother Earth. I am a member of the oldest continuous living culture on the earth."

She says that through her mother, she is a descendant of the Gija people of the east Kimberley and the Yawuru people of the west Kimberley and, through her father, of the Iwitja people of western Arnhem Land. She says she has met many people who have inspired her, but none more than her grandmother, Nora Peris, "a proud Gija woman" who was "torn from her mother's arms" and sent to the Moola Bulla mission in the east Kimberley, "a long, sad and painful story".

She tells how her grandmother grew up wearing hessian bags for clothes, and how she was living as best she could in the harsh east Kimberley when she met a young stockman by the name of Johnny Peris, a "survivor" of the Beagle Bay mission, and with him had 10 children, four of whom were taken away and sent to the Garden Point mission on the Tiwi Islands. "These stories are part of the truth of Australia's history," she says. "It is what it is."

She says struggle and injustice and heartache are part of the Aboriginal story and urges members of parliament to become champions for the recognition of Aboriginal people in the Constitution.

Several months later, we fly from Darwin to Pirlangimpi, on Melville Island. Her feelings about this place are deeply conflicted. A part of her feels at home here. When she won her Olympic gold medal, for being part of the victorious Australian women's hockey team at the 1996 Atlanta Games, this was one of the first places she brought it.

At the small community school, she is introduced as an Olympic gold-medal winner and a senator. The 50 children sitting on the concrete at her feet want to know about winning the gold medal. "Do you know what a dream is?" she asks them. "Have you ever read the book about Cinderella and the glass slipper? It was like a dream come true. That's how it felt."

But it was also in Pirlangimpi, at the Garden Point mission, Our Lady of Victories, that her mother, Joan, spent seven years of her childhood, from the age of eight. Standing in the old church, her mind is filled with images of half-caste children separated from their parents and brought here on the mission luggers.

"What goes through the mind of a child when they are taken away from their parents?" Peris asks. "How do you comprehend it? There has been so much injustice and so much pain and so much hurt. But you can't go forward while you're dragging the chains of the past."

In Darwin, Joan Peris tells a more complex story of growing up in a tin shack in Halls Creek with one big bed built on 44-gallon drums, then moving to Darwin, where the family lived in a tent and then an old army hut. One day, "the welfare" came. Her father, Johnny Peris, who worked hard and never drank and ran like the wind, was away working while her mother, Nora, was in hospital with typhoid. At the age of eight, Joan had been left to care for her two younger brothers and her sister: three children aged six, four and two.

Joan says her life at Garden Point was "lovely", that three meals a day and the opportunity to go to school were "fabulous", and that when the time came to leave the mission, she chose to go to live with a foster family in Adelaide - an English couple who treated her lovingly - rather than return to her parents in Darwin, who by then had another two children. "It took me a long time to reconnect with my family," she says. "I just wasn't ready to go and live with them."

Christmas 1974, Cyclone Tracy. Nova Peris is huddled under a mattress at her grandparents' house at suburban Rapid Creek with her sister and their cousins and dogs, holding onto one another, the wind screaming. In the morning, they walk out to a Darwin almost blown away.

Later they have Christmas dinner with their friends, Alberto and Serena Gonzardi. The latter, Nova's godmother, doesn't speak much English but tells Peris's mother one day, "Joanie, your little daughter ... she can really run" and starts taking her to athletics on Saturday mornings. "Nova, vene ... vene!"

An old newspaper cutting. Nova Peris is running, barefoot. She is nine years old and fast, winning everything, breaking records: "Nova Peris ... can she bring home gold for Australia and the Territory?" asks the article. She begins to dream about the Olympics. The next year, she is photographed playing hockey and writes on it, "Me playing hockey for Australia."

Her mother is "my Uluru ... the rock", while her non-Aboriginal stepfather, a tough Darwin cop, dishes out discipline with some "monumental floggings". Her father, John Christophersen, a traditional owner from the Cobourg Peninsula, 350 kilometres east of Darwin, is a shadow. She will not know him until she is 22, when he takes her out to his country.

At 17, she falls for a good-looking Australian rules footballer by the name of Sean Kneebone, follows him to Queensland, and falls pregnant. She takes the long, slow trip home to Darwin on a Pioneer bus, a frightened kid. Her mother asks her what she's going to do. "I'm keeping my baby," she replies. People shake their heads and say that's that, she could have been someone.

Two years later, following a dream, thumbing her nose at the doubters, she arrives in Perth with daughter Jessica on her hip to join the hockey program at the Australian Institute of Sport. There she finds mentors who believe in her, including Ric Charlesworth, national hockey coach and a former federal Labor MP.

Atlanta Olympics, 1996. Peris sits in a corner of the changing rooms, before the gold medal hockey game. She reaches into her bag and fishes out a tape her sister Venessa has told her to play only if they make the final. The song is Slim Dusty's We've Done Us Proud, the favourite of her grandfather, the only man she ever called Dad. She sits in the dressing room crying so hard her team-mates think someone must have died, then walks down the tunnel into the warm evening air. She becomes the first Aboriginal person to win Olympic gold and promptly quits hockey to chase the first of her childhood dreams, to run in the Olympics.

At the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur in 1998, she runs the race of her life to win the 200 metres, then the 4x100m relay, becoming the first Australian to win international gold medals in two different sports. In winning the 200m, she runs the favourite, fellow Australian Melinda Gainsford-Taylor, into the ground. Gainsford-Taylor falls at the line, injured, and Peris does not look back.

She is pilloried for it. In an interview five years later, she will comment: "Mel is blonde and beautiful and a media favourite, while I am an Aboriginal from the Top End. It's never quite stated, but I did sense some racist undertones in some of those articles."

June 8, 2000. Peris runs the first leg of the Olympic torch relay in Australia, at Uluru, on bare, frozen feet, to pay homage to her ancestors, with Jessica by her side. When Aboriginal actor Ernie Dingo, running the second leg, learns she is running barefoot, he also takes off his shoes and an Aboriginal boy runs beside him.

At the Sydney Games, she reaches the semi-finals of the 400m and is part of the team that finishes fifth in the 4x400m relay. She is in the stands cheering as Cathy Freeman runs to glory. The following year, an Australian athlete calls her a "nigger". She makes a formal complaint to Athletics Australia and he apologises, saying, "I never thought ..." She cuts him off. "That's just the thing ... that's how the whole racism thing works."

Peris had married Sean Kneebone, Jessica's father, in 1995, hoping "everything would be rosy". It never was. They split after the Sydney Games and divorce in 2001.

In March 2002, she marries runner Daniel Batman, a descendant of Melbourne founder John Batman. They have two children, Destiny and Jack, and for a while she feels as though her life is perfect. But they divorce in 2011, and he dies in a car accident the following year.

Peris's third husband, Scott Appleton, 13 years her junior, proposes to her in March 2012 in South Africa, on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was jailed. She says people clapped and cheered seeing "a white man getting down on one knee to propose his love and devote his life to a black woman". They marry five months later, in her grandmother's country.

She is barefoot and wearing white. Appleton, who is preparing to join the police force, wears Aboriginal colours: black, red and yellow. Just before the service, a crocodile comes up out of the water, which Peris takes as a good omen because it is her totem. Some people say it is the spirit of her great uncle, "Big" Bill Naidjie, old man Kakadu, come to look.

All of Peris's husbands have been non-Aboriginal men. "I don't see colour," she says. "I see the man I love."

Trish Crossin is in Melbourne on Sunday, January 20 last year, talking about selling the family house so her mother can move into a nursing home, when she receives a message from ALP national secretary George Wright telling her that Julia Gillard wants to see her at The Lodge. Crossin, a 15-year senator, is preparing for a preselection challenge from Marion Scrymgour, the first indigenous woman elected to the NT parliament, the first indigenous female cabinet minister, and a former NT deputy chief minister before quitting NT politics in 2011.

Anxious about being summoned to the Lodge, Crossin phones allies within the Labor Party, including Kevin Rudd, whom she is supporting to return to the prime ministership. Rudd, viewing the meeting through the prism of his ambitions, suggests that Gillard may be about to try to buy her support.

A former teacher and union official, Crossin had come to the Senate in 1998, beating 10 other candidates for preselection, including prominent Aboriginal woman Pat Anderson, who nine years later would co-author the Little Children Are Sacred report that sparked the Howard government's "emergency intervention" in NT Aboriginal communities. She has seen off challenges from Anderson - by a handful of votes - in 2001, and by young Aboriginal leader Kim Hill in 2007.

In May 2001, South Australian ALP powerbroker Mark Butler sat in the bar of the John Curtin Hotel in Melbourne, opposite Trades Hall, rehearsing the arguments he would put to the national executive for Anderson to be preselected. Two people were with him: long-time NT MP Warren Snowdon and Julia Gillard. Butler did not succeed, but he did not abandon the idea that Labor needed to preselect an indigenous candidate for federal parliament.

What Crossin does not know when George Wright texts her on January 20 is that Wright and Butler had flown to Darwin in December to talk to Peris and that she is already in Canberra.

Crossin arrives in Canberra on Monday, January 21. It is hot. At The Lodge, Gillard gives her a glass of water and tells her that she has decided not to endorse Scrymgour, but that Crossin's career in the Senate is over. It is time Labor had an Aboriginal person in parliament and she will ask the national executive to install Peris. "What, like a captain's pick?" Crossin says, giving Gillard a line she will use later.

Crossin is confident she has the support of a majority of the 250 or so ALP members who will decide the ballot and urges Gillard to allow the NT branch to make its own decision. According to Crossin, Gillard says she will not because Crossin will win.

The meeting lasts an unpleasant half hour. After it, Crossin goes back to her flat in Canberra, reflects for a while, then begins calling family, friends, colleagues and staff. The post-mortems go on until 2am, Crossin sleeps until 5.30am, then flies to Sydney to chair a joint select committee on constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Scrymgour receives a call from Gillard that morning. Gillard tells her what she intends to do and asks her to withdraw her nomination. According to Scrymgour, she tells Gillard she is a bitch and expresses her hope that Rudd "f...s you over", which he does five months later. Gillard replies, "A girl's got to do what a girl's got to do."

Of the 21 members of Labor's national executive, 19 support Gillard and vote for Peris.

A year on from Gillard's "captain's pick", the storm around Peris has abated to an uneasy calm. Gillard is gone, federal Labor is defeated. Scrymgour has become chief executive of the Wurli-Wurlinjang Health Service in Katherine and has no involvement with the Labor Party. Crossin, who as NT party president restored the branch from the brink of bankruptcy, is preparing to leave for Melbourne, where she and her husband, Mark, a former union official, are building a house in what was Gillard's electorate.

Last month, the Northern Territory ALP met and passed motions congratulating Peris on her election, but expressing disappointment at the interference of the national executive in its affairs.

Aboriginal Australia remains, as ever, watchful, although in Darwin, Eric Fejo, who painted Peris's face with white ochre, tells me: "She is ours and us mob are hers and no one can take that away from us. People who bag her are not just bagging her, they are bagging us. That's what people don't understand. We have finally got a voice in this government."

Since her maiden speech, Peris has spoken in the Senate about "the appalling levels of domestic violence in the NT and the clear links to alcohol", a theme of tragic recurrence. In a role that may define her time in politics, she has also been appointed deputy chair of the joint select committee on constitutional recognition, now chaired by indigenous West Australian Liberal MP Ken Wyatt. Previously a "treaty ambassador" for the defunct Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, she says it is "crazy" that the Constitution is silent on the first Australians.

Within Labor, she's factionally unaligned and is being gently courted by both the Left and the Right. A Catholic, like her mission-raised mother, she attends a small church named after St Martin de Porres, the illegitimate son of a Spanish nobleman and a freed slave who became the patron saint of mixed-race people. The church was founded in Darwin in 1988, "to encourage Aboriginal people to restore their faith in God".

But she is not a conservative Catholic. Asked about her stand on abortion, she replies: "I believe in a woman's rights." On gay marriage: "The world is not going to end if two people in love get married." She is more conservative on the question of Aboriginal rights and responsibility: "We have inherited responsibility in every area of life - responsibility as a parent to raise your children and give them a good foundation, responsibility to country as an Aboriginal person. On rights versus responsibility, I am for responsibility."

On a brooding summer's day at Pirlangimpi, we sit talking about the stormy journey that has brought her here. "I dreamt big," she said when she arrived in the Senate. "Most people would have looked at an Aboriginal girl from the Territory, with its statistics of alcohol abuse, youth suicide, domestic violence, imprisonment rates and substandard education, and point to every reason why I should not succeed. But I was determined to be successful."

She says she has gone into politics to make a difference and if people say she is a novice, then that's fine. "In order to play 100 games, you've first got to play one game," she says. "You've got to take the small steps to climb the mountain. I climbed mountains in two different sports. I find in politics, you have to move the mountains that are put in front of you - and that is possible. Stone by stone, you can move a mountain."

She says that sport has taught her endurance and "at the end of the day, I have the ability to pick myself up, dust the dirt off and keep going". I ask her how being a senator compares with being an Olympian. "In sports," she says, looking out at a sky not quite done with the monsoon, "you knew your opponents."