LEUT Kate McGregor (Lisa McCune) -
[Cached Version]
Published on: 1/23/2009
Last Visited: 2/4/2009
This is the professional Kate, the one who was nicknamed Princess Perfect at ADFA, the one who aimed for success and won the Sword for best Navy cadet in her final year.
But this is not all there is to Kate, for she is a woman of secrets, a woman on the run from her own past, a woman who has reinvented herself and never wants to go back to where she came from.
Born in England to a wealthy landowner, Kate's young life quickly unravelled when her mother followed a charismatic but hopeless opal miner out to Australia, where she soon found herself abandoned and alone.
Too proud to return to her homeland, Kate's mother found herself living on the wrong side of the tracks in a country town with a nine-year-old daughter to care for.
Kate learned early what can happen to a woman who is too kind to dangerous men.
Her mother had a string of boyfriends, some of whom were abusive.
Kate had things going for her: keen intelligence, an aptitude for sport and a drive to succeed.
She washed and ironed her own school uniforms, she organised the household, she was mother to her own mother.
And when she graduated dux of her high school, gaining entry to ADFA, she left that town and her mother behind and has never looked back.
None of this has made her at ease with her sexuality and when other girls were learning to socialise, she was hitting the books or was in the gym or on the track.
She is her own creation, which means that beneath the perfect exterior she can be fragile, vulnerable, easily hurt.
But she hides all this, just as she hides the secret of her past.
Professionally, she has had postings as junior warfare officer to big ships; she was on HMAS Anzac when that ship fired on Iraq in the second Gulf War in 2003.
Kate is the sort of officer who gets fast-tracked and for whom the sky is the limit.
Once, just once, her upward trajectory faltered, when she had a brief, incandescent affair with an instructor named Mike Flynn.
In other circumstances they might still have been together and for Kate, whatever happens in the future, he'll always be the one with whom it might have worked.
Now she's been posted to serve under his command as his XO.
The desire is still there but she will fight it.
She has no intention of getting involved and she will damn well make him respect her.
Kate comes to the cramped life aboard Hammersley from the relative comfort of a big ship and is having to learn a whole new set of skills.
As XO on a patrol boat, she will lead boarding parties onto stinking fishing boats, work closely with non-commissioned senior sailors like the coxswain and buffer and share a cabin with the navigation officer, that hellraising little sexpot from ADFA, Lieutenant Nikki Caetano, who seems to think she's the CO's favourite daughter and that Kate is her wicked stepmother.
If it all gets too tough, she can escape into yoga or foreign language tapes, the first for relaxation, the second for a future she's already planning.
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Series 2:
Executive Officer Kate McGregor is propelled through her arc by the stabbing of Charge.
She was the boarding officer; she was responsible.
Her need to bring Charge's attackers to justice will draw her closer to a likeminded Buffer and an unlikely friendship will develop between these two.
...
When Mike is injured and has to be medi-vaced back to the mainland, Kate gets her first, brief taste of command and conducts herself brilliantly.
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