“Adelaide has a great puppetry scene and good Arts funding. They also have Restless Dance Company which is a big company for people with disabilities so there were a few reasons to move to Adelaide. Alby’s Dad had remarried by then and they had a little boy and one soon on the way so Alby was really into his little brother and didn’t want to move to Adelaide. His Dad and I agreed I would go to Adelaide for a year, fly up and down and pay maintenance, sort of do what the man often does. I knew that his Dad and wife and family could offer Alby stability and routine and I really wanted him to have that. What I offered was the excitement of travel, tours, culture and art which is just as important I think. I went off to Adelaide, was there for a year studying, and realised I needed another year of supervised teaching to be a really good Pilates instructor…
And then my Dad Lawrence died, shockingly and unexpectedly. He was only 73 and he’d just been to visit us all. We hadn’t seen him for 3 years. He and I had flown to Sydney and we’d had a great time. He had a massive heart attack hiking a volcano and was dead before he hit the ground. He swam and played squash every week. That loss really threw me, Dad and I were super close- we spoke on the phone every two weeks. It threw the whole family. He died overseas without insurance. He died on Kauai, a little island off Hawaii. We had to fly over to ID him because he and his girlfriend weren’t married and the rules in Hawaii are that a family member has to ID him. Then they had to do an autopsy because he died so suddenly they worried it may be suspicious? That was very stressful. Then, because he had no insurance we had to cremate him because we couldn’t afford to fly his body anywhere. Then you have to get permission to fly with ashes. Dad would probably have found this story quite funny! We had to split up his ashes and smuggle him back to Canada where he had lived. We had to go to his house and tell everybody and have a Wake. Then we found out he had no Will. It’s a good lesson to everyone: make a Will. It was very stressful.
When I got back to Adelaide, I got hit by depression. My boss Leanne was so kind, she gave me 6 weeks off work. I felt as though I was behind a glass window and I couldn’t reach anybody. I love my food but all the food in my mouth tasted like sawdust. It went on for a few months and I went to the Doctor who said, Yes, you’re depressed, you can go on medication. I said, give me 3 months to try and get through this naturally. I knew it was losing Dad and I knew it was hormones. I had great friends who rang me weekly and I did get over it but everything was different. I wanted to finish what I’d started in Adelaide: I was getting funding for my adult Puppetry shows, I made three solo shows, I was teaching for Restless. I was going out and trying to have a good time as well.
My son was really happy at the little Byron Community School and then he started high school at 12. His Dad rang me up one day and said, he’s struggling at the new school and needs his Mum. I flew home, took one look at him and knew he wasn’t coping. My heart cracked open, I was so relieved, I’d done what I needed to do away and I knew I had to come back. I said goodbye to everyone in Adelaide, left my job, and then I was back in the Northern Rivers.
When I returned, I thought Ok, I’m a performer, I’m not going to just sit around in Mullum and luckily for me back in 2003 a great woman called Valley Lipcer had moved up here from Melbourne. One day I’d hitched from Lismore to Byron, (as we did in the old days), and Valley had picked me up. We were just chatting in the car and she said, I’ve got this idea about this act with clouds that I want to do and I’m trying to get hold of this woman called Gabrielle. I’ve heard she’s a good improvisor. I said, I think that’s me (laughs). She said and I want to do it with Claudie Frock and Simon Adams who’s now in Nimbin. We also had Emma Newman and Peter Notley in Byron. We formed a group called Flotsam and we did festivals, etc. So I had those connections to come back to.
Valley had lots of great ideas, she wanted to do the Clouds and she wanted to form Roundabout Theatre. She asked me to join Roundabout with darling Claudie, so the three of us worked and would pull in other people when we needed them. I’ve been doing that ever since and teach Pilates part time in Mullum and during Covid I started classes online. I’ve just actually returned from Perth performing with Roundabout and our pink Lollipop Ladies.
Two weeks before the Covid lockdown in 2020 I sold my house in Mullum and moved up into the rainforest behind Goonengerry on a share community. The lockdown happened and all my work dried up so I got to sit at home in the rainforest with my veggie garden. I actually had a nice lockdown and I still feel a bit guilty about that because I didn’t want it to be over in a way. I still do my Pilates classes online.
In between all of that I decided I was way more Queer than I thought I was so I’ve had a series of girlfriends in a row and in 2022 when the flood came my dear, now ex-girlfriend’s house flooded 12 metres high in South Lismore. Never had water through it before. Horse hair plaster and all…that was a renovation mission. I’d just had Covid and I was really sick, the mud and the sludge was too much. I thought, How can I help Lismore and not get even sicker? I heard about Resilient Lismore doing online social media moderating and the call centre, booking volunteers, etc. I started volunteering and I stayed full time for 6 months. I’m an early bird so I could do the morning shift and check in on everyone.
In one of my Improv classes I had this golden beam of light come down onto me, when someone asked me what I hadn’t done yet? I thought, the one thing I haven’t done that I want to do is play the drums. I was 56. The next day I bought a $400 electric drum kit, put it in my bedroom like a teenager, played every day for 2 weeks and thought…I love this! So then I bought a $1500 second hand electric kit, played that daily for 2 months and thought, I want a proper acoustic ‘rock and roll’ kit. I bought one for $500, played that for 2 months and thought, Right I want a big proper, noisy kit and I found one in Lismore for $1500 I bought from Lisa Gough who’s a photographer in Lismore. I put it in the middle of my living room.
I’d read an article about a woman in England called Ruth Miller who unfortunately has just died, she was only 61. She’d started a project for women who wanted to be in a band or should have been but never got the chance. So I also offered a free workshop to women over-45 who wanted to be in a band or used to be in one. 20 humans turned up to The Metropole and out of that 7 of us now meet at Nedlands every Monday. We do a bunch of covers and now we’re writing original songs. We have a dedicated bass player called Cathy, my newest friend.
Then I said to my dear friend Simone O’Brien, we should form a rock n roll band, just two old ladies rockin’ out. She said…Yes and we should call ourselves Mutton. I said Yes, Mutton dressed as Mutton. It’s taken off! We’re performing at the Circus Festival this weekend In Mullumbimby. We’ve done fundraisers: we did the Vagina Conversations, The Darling Muffs of May launch, the recent Save Wallum fundraiser.
The National Circus Festival is this coming weekend. All these fantastic circus people are training new techniques this week; it opens this Friday 4th at 4.30pm and continues all weekend at the Mullumbimby Showgrounds. It’s fantastic fun! The Spiegeltent is there. They have a Big Top, outdoor stages. It’s on every 2 years. Mutton are performing on the outdoor stage Saturday afternoon and we usually swear a lot so we are completely reigning ourselves in for the kiddies. We’ve written a whole new song about lollies and we’ve written a great song called ‘Biodiversity Forever’ because we are not going to let developers cut down every tree. We are also in the Over-50s Cabaret that night with my humorous ode to online dating. People come from all over Australia so it sells out pretty quickly but you can get a family pass or there’s individual shows. It would be great to get more Lismore people there. It’s only a 45 min drive.
I love Lismore! The Tinnie Army sums up Lismore. The ‘Don’t tell us what to do…We are going to look after our community’ attitude. They were just amazing. Till the day I die I will be loyal to Lismore- it’s full of loving, caring people and I only live half an hour away.