“ My mother was born in Bangalow in 1951. She grew up with her older sister Vicki on a dairy farm in Newrybar with Jack Pearson and Lois East who were both locals and my Grandparents. They grew pineapples, potatoes, eggs and had the dairy farm. Mum used to ride her horse across the paddocks to Newrybar Primary School. They sold the farm in 1962 and bought a house in Seaview St, Byron Bay. Grandad worked in the whaling industry and was the Byron lighthouse keeper for a while. My mum and her sister lived at the lighthouse for about 6 months when Mum was about 7.
My grandparents separated but stayed living in the same house with my grandmother’s lover Alan Vidler. He was apparently related to King Bill of Byron who was an amazing Indigenous elder. He was a bit of a renegade, into fast cars and managed to get himself a fleet of trawlers. My grandmother became the first female Skipper of one of his trawlers out of Brunswick Heads. They all lived in the same house in Seaview St and raised me.
My mother got pregnant when she was 17. She was a surfer in Byron and a wild child. She was doing her HSC at Mullum High and my grandmother sent her off to Hornsby single women’s hospital with the Nuns where she did her HSC during her pregnancy. I was born and at 2 weeks old my mum and my grandmother looked through the glass window and had to make the decision whether I would stay in the family or be adopted out. They had organised a family to adopt me if they didn’t keep me. I would have grown up at The Entrance with a very different family but my grandmother saw me and I looked a lot like my mother. She said to her…I will help you raise this child but you have to go and do your Nursing degree at Lismore Base Hospital. So I came home with Grandma and stayed with her, my Grandad and my Grandmothers lover and my mum went and lived in at LBH and came home on the weekends on her Yamaha 250.
Grandma died when I was 5 at the age of 49. That really changed my mother’s life. She was 23 at that stage. I never met my father. Mum wasn’t sure who it was. I really wanted to know and I didn’t want to be just like my Mum. Mum was a wild, wild woman but also an incredibly considerate, intelligent and caring person. She was diagnosed with Bi-Polar later in her life but her younger days were I guess, a very similar lifestyle to what I have with lots of dinner parties, lot’s of queer, eccentric artists and musicians and backpackers living with us for years. When I was about 14 we had a heap of Scottish backpackers turning up at our place. Apparently there was a sign up in Glasgow…’For the best accommodation, Wendy Pearson, 24 Seaview St, Byron Bay,’ (laughs) so we had all these backpackers arriving. Mum put a caravan in the front yard, so for about 4 years we had multiple Scottish backpackers with great accents stay for months which was fabulous.
The other thing I loved growing up is Bev and John who lived across the road did the trawlers as well. They had 3 boys and they adopted a couple of Indigenous boys as well. They used to build the trawlers in our front yard and the crane would put them on the back of a truck and take them away. I thought that I imagined this as I was only little but my aunty said it did happen.
I went to Mullum High and finished in 1987. I surfed competitively when I was 12 until I was 21. I had 2 really glorious moments being a competitive surfer. One was when I was 14 and I went down on a train to the TripleJ Junior contest in Manly. I was billeted by an Indigenous family at Manly Corso. My surfboard didn’t arrive and when it did, my fins were broken. This beautiful family, the Pringles, from Cronulla sort of adopted me under their wing. They let me stay with them and use their son’s surfboard. They used to come up here after this and stay with us for the Easter Classic. This particular comp, I got through my 1st heat! The surf was perfect for me, there were 2,000 spectators on the beach, no-one knew who I was and I ripped through all my heats and ended up in the final. Pam Burridge was the surfer I was up against in the final. She was Australian Champion at that stage and a bit older than me. I came second and still have the trophy.
Years later the Byron Malibu Club organised an International Malibu Championship. They flew in some Hawaiian and Californian champions. Mum was a surfer and she used to compete with me. I went in this event and they had flown over this beautiful Hawaiian woman named Rell Sunn. She sadly died of breast cancer. She had this incredible reputation in Hawaii of being the queen of the sea. I was 15 when she came out and I ended up competing in the final and beat Rell Sunn. She was such a humble woman. A few years ago Marie and I went to Hawaii and I researched where she was from. We hired a house and went to that place. It was beautiful to be in the surf where she grew up and surfed.
When I was 19 I went and lived in Auckland for 10 years. I went with my first female partner whom I’d met at SCU in 1989. She was from NZ so we went back and worked through the Kiwi fruit season. It was the first time I’d lived in a city. There was traffic lights and public transport but the biggest thing I noticed was the Maori and Pacific Island cultural asset of that country. It made me feel so embarrassed about our connection to our Indigenous people in our country and how little I knew about them. In NZ it seemed intrinsically that it was part of the whole framework. I decided to stay there and go to Uni and do a teaching degree.
I came back every holiday and worked at Suppertime Blues in Byron Bay which was the Vegetarian institution. I worked there from 14 years old until I was about 23. It was a fantastic restaurant with beautiful food. It was quite difficult leaving the surf so I struggled through my degree. When I had almost finished my degree I met a very famous NZ comedian and her twin sister Linda who I dated for 5 years. They were the Topp Twins. They employed me as their costume designer when they were filming their 3rd TV series. I worked on that for 6 months and then we went to Edinburgh Comedy Festival and West End in London. Channel 3 at that time was doing a TV series called Destination Planet Earth where they sent celebrities around the world to report on destinations. They sent the twins to Paris so we had a week in Paris sponsored by Cathay Pacific first class and we filmed their characters through Paris. It was so much fun.
I met some interesting people in the film industry through working on that set and was asked to join the art department. I came home for Christmas, the Tamworth Festival and Woodford. I had 3 months off before I would start on Jacksons Wharf in NZ. I got here just before mine and my mum’s birthdays in October. We had a mutual friend Amelia who I was friends with for years and she was a tour guide in Kakadu. She was doing her last season and wanted me to visit. I saw Mum for a couple of days. Mum’s birthday was on the Saturday and I was going to be in Darwin for 2 weeks and then come back and spend 3 months with Mum. I flew out on the Friday, Mum’s birthday was the Saturday. Mum was always nervous leading up to her 49th birthday. I had called her on her birthday, she was with my sister having cake somewhere and she was fine. I was like hallelujah, she’s ok. Mum died at her party from a stroke the night after she turned 49. As I said before my grandmother Lois had also died at 49 of a stroke.
That event for me totally turned my life into a completely different direction. I felt a bit weird when I was about to turn 49 and I think that was quite a significant part of me transitioning actually.”