Anne Aly can swear like a trooper, as the saying goes.
She also has a look in her eyes that says, "Yeah, what else you got?"
It is a look she says was forged in the schools of Western Sydney and Queensland, where she was often excluded as the "brown girl."
It is a look tempered by two failed marriages and time on welfare, when she had to care by herself for her two sons, a three year-old and an infant.
And it is a look sharpened in the arena of Muslim relations in Australia, where the "de-radicalisation" researcher often receives abuse, including death threats.
But that look quickly becomes one of mischief when she becomes, like many mothers to their kids -- in this case, her son Adam -- really annoying.
Anne Aly and her eldest son, Adam Rida, have a great relationship.
It is possibly much better now the university lecturer has become the new Member for Cowan, taking it off Liberal incumbent Luke Simpkins, who held the seat for nine years.
Adam Rida was the one who signed his mother up to the Labor Party.
"I, personally, didn't want to be seen as pushing her into it, or anything like that. You know, she asked me, and asked what I thought, and I said, 'Look, I think you'd be great at it, but, ultimately, you've got to make the decision that you think is what you'll be best at."
"You were jumping up and down!" protests Aly.
"I was jumping up and down, but I didn't necessarily want to be seen as pushing you."
"No, but you were very happy."
"Yeah, oh, I was, because I thought you'd be great at it. And, you know, I think I'll be proven right, to be honest, in three years, hopefully!"
But as Anne Aly says, she still has to win over the Cowan electorate.
She won the seat with a 5.2 per cent swing, but it is still Western Australia's most marginal seat, with only a little more than 1100 votes in her favour.
"What the election is is a job interview. That's all it is. And now I'm on probation for the next three years, so I've got to prove that I can do this."
Anne Aly says she did not set out to be the first Muslim woman elected to Australia's parliament but recognises the significance of it.
The 49 year-old says she will not be pigeonholed as a one-issue politician and is hoping her parliamentary colleagues will also be willing to look at all issues from different angles.
"It is a very interesting time in politics in Australia, and we see this trend around the world where we're having more of a polarisation of political views and ideologies. And I think that we're going to see this come to a head in a paradigm shift, where people are going to be forced to come to the middle. I think this is the start of it. Because we have such a diverse parliament and, in many ways, a coming together of some very extreme views, we're going to have to find middle ground. We're going to have to come back to the centre in order to achieve things."
Anne Aly was born in Egypt to an engineer father and a nurse mother and came to Australia when she was two years old.
Her family, including an older sister and younger brother, lived in Western Sydney and Queensland while she was growing up.
It was a challenging period, and she says she sometimes felt excluded, which drove her to work hard.
"It comes from, as a child, growing up in predominantly white Western Sydney. At the time, you were never good enough, because you were the brown kid, often mistaken for Aboriginal as well. Often mistaken for Aboriginal. And I remember Year 2, I was seven years old, and I had a best friend who I used to play with every single day, and, one day, she just stopped talking to me. I didn't know why. And her cousin came up to me at the end of the day, and she said (it was) because her parents had seen me and they had told her, 'Don't talk to the blackie. You're not to play with that girl, because she's Aboriginal.'"
Anne Aly returned to Egypt when she was 17 years old to study English Literature at the American University in Cairo.
She would be married and pregnant by the time she graduated.
The couple came to Australia, settling in Perth, but the marriage broke down.
She left her husband, taking her then three year-old Adam and one-year-old baby boy, Karim.
Desperate for money, she went on welfare at the age of 26 in 1996.
"For me, it was just so embarrassing to have to go there in the first place. And I remember walking out, turning the corner, and just leaning back on the wall and breaking down, just breaking down in sobs, just in sobs, breaking down. Because, I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do, no idea what I was going to do, how I was going to make ends meet."
The money came through in time, and she began life on welfare.
But determined to improve her family's lot, she completed a Masters of Education in nine months instead of the usual two years.
She taught English as a Foreign Language for years before finally securing full-time work in government policy and the beginnings of financial security for her children.
Adam Rida is full of praise for his mother.
"I think what she was very good at was that we never felt like we were poor. Like, I think there's an idea that, if you're poor, you don't have the best clothes, or you don't live in the best house or this, and I never really felt that at all. I felt like I was just like everyone else."
Anne Aly says she was strict with her sons but they would accept her explanations if they thought they were fair.
She describes the two, now in their 20s, as good kids, but says she let them down when it came to explaining the 9/11 tragedy.
"This is a generation that grew up with 9/11 and the aftermath of 9/11, so this is a generation that's grown up with war. And we've neglected that generation. We've neglected the impact that that has on that generation. I believe my generation has let that generation down, in terms of understanding the impact that that would have. And maybe because we were scared, and maybe because we didn't know how to, but we need to rectify that."
She says politicians also have to restore the trust in their roles and political institutions that they have lost with the Australian public.
She says the recent election and the rise of more untraditional parties demonstrates the public has lost faith.
But she warns not to expect her to rush out to counter the claims from the likes of One Nation leader Pauline Hanson just because she is a Muslim MP.
"Absolutely not. I don't think it's my role at all. I think it's Malcolm Turnbull's role. I mean, as the prime minister of Australia, I think there is an expectation on him. And the fact that he created the opportunity for such a diverse Senate in the double dissolution, then it is squarely on his shoulders to manage that diverse Senate."
Anne Aly says she will be busy representing her constituents in Cowan.
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