‘I did an interview with Kate back in 2017 and we talked mostly about her new business. I really wanted to dig deeper with Kate. You would all see Kate’s work around Lismore. So many fab murals and business signs to name a few…The Levee, Forest cafe, Valley of Craftsmen, Cool to be Kind mural, Benchtop cafe, Decolonise your mind mural at Timbre, Clunes store, Ballina St art project mural, so many more and she’s still on fire with her creative sign writing.’
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Kate – (Part 1/2)
“ I grew up in a little suburb 8kms out of Perth CBD. I was born in 1986. It was a house that my grandparents built, a war service home. They moved in when my Dad was 6 months old so it was an intergenerational house and my Dad lived there up until a year ago, so that was pretty special. I’m the granddaughter of Publicans. My grandparents on my Dad’s side ran pubs around Western Australia so that’s definitely where I got my hosting skills from, and my parents were partiers and there was always lot’s of people around so from a really young age I learnt how to curate a really good party.
I am an only child. My mum confessed on a few occasions that she really didn’t want to be a mum but she decided to because Dad really wanted to have kids. I think that she hadn’t really considered what having children would mean. She was 28 and wasn’t ready to give away her lifestyle and freedom, which they didn’t. I don’t want to paint anyone to be bad because they’re definitely good humans at their core and I was loved. I got everything I suppose, the fundamental needs, perhaps just not my emotional needs, but even in recent conversations with Dad he said, We had a 20 something year honeymoon meaning that they continued in that pocket of being together even though I was around. I was born 8 years after they married so they’d had a fair time. They got married at 19 and 20.
When Mum went off contraceptives she fell pregnant fast and in her shock of finding out she went to the pub and got black out drunk one more time. I’ve done some research and that’s probably why I have a Scoliosis. She found out week 5 and that’s when the spinal column is being formed. She wouldn’t have known though.
I have been doing a lot of work into the Intergenerational trauma and epigenetic line and how that filters through to family systems after a really potent conversation with my Grandma. I knew that she was adopted. At 9 month old she was put up for adoption and she spent 9 months of her life as a ward of the state in an institution in Perth. I actually found an amazing research paper on the exact place and they would put the babies in a cot all day, no touch, no love. They would feed and change them, wrap them and put them in a cot without any human contact. Her name was Emily Oliver but her middle name was Beryl and she preferred that name.
I had a sleepover at my Grandmas aged care facility. She needed full time care in her last stages of life. I went back over to Perth and asked if I could have a sleep over. It was the end of the night, we’d been to the dining hall, with music and people who’ve lost their memories and causing a ruckus, it was really cute. We were in bed and I don’t know what prompted me to ask but I said, Ok Grandma, what’s your biggest regret in life? The next thing she said floored me and has put me on this path. It was, I suppose it was not talking to my kids when they were babies. I said, What? She said, they’re just babies, you don’t talk to them. I thought, Holy shit!! She then fell asleep and left me with that comment in the darkness. In that moment I really understood my Mum who I believe had a cognitive disability in that, she would start her sentences half way through and get frustrated because we didn’t know what she was taking about. We’d interrupt her flow and we had to labour to understand her. From her mind to her mouth there was literally a processing problem. I never understood her and I feel like she went through her life being misunderstood and not expressed which for me feels like torture.
My epigenetic manifestation of this is that I am really uncoordinated. During sports day my Dad would be on the sidelines, come on Kate! having a laugh under his breath while I came last in every race. I always felt like my limbs were trailing behind. My heart was drawn to music which you need to be coordinated for. It was such a frustrating challenge when your body is not participating. It’s wild how it manifests through generations in different ways. I’m really dyslexic. I don’t see spelling, I see shapes and colours so I spell things wrong all the time, which is an occupational hazard for a Sign-writer. Sometimes when I’m writing I can feel like hiccup in my hand and I know I’m going to put letters around the wrong way but I can’t stop it.
It’s been interesting researching the impacts and also the women in my family didn’t have access to that kind of info so they just thought they were broken which then impacts relationships and self worth. That’s when the self medicating comes in. Also in my bloodline there’s a history of really challenging menstrual cycles and now I understand some of the behaviours were from really bad hormone imbalances and women were just painted with a brush that’s she’s a psycho. Mum had a voluntary hysterectomy in her early 30s as she couldn’t handle the pain.
My Dad’s a really beautiful man and he loved my Mum endlessly, with all of his heart to the end and beyond and he was a really good friend to me in balancing out that tricky situation, but he was an enabler because he loved her. We also have very different memories because they were often drunk, high and partying so that’s challenging because he remembers her in this beautiful light and I don’t. I think at the core my Mum didn’t get the love she needed because her Mum didn’t get the love that she needed and they were both doing the best they could and they both had their own challenges that they weren’t able to navigate in this lifetime.
My Grandad died when my Dad was 16 of a heart attack in front of him when they were working together in a bottle-shop on Christmas Day, which is why I believe I was born on Boxing Day, was to bring joy back to that time of the year for him. After Grandad died, my grandma was heartbroken and drank more and more and by 19 Dad was living in the house alone because his Mum was in a home with alcoholic dementia. So he was 19 and the house was pretty wild, like dirt bike tracks in the back yard. My Mum and some friends went around to buy some weed. That’s how they met (laughs). Dad reckons he knew straight away that he wanted to marry her. He asked her every week and in the end he gave up so he said if you want to marry me you’re going to have to ask, she asked him and they married 9 months after they met.
My Dad’s parents were madly in love. They both went off to war and they lost each other. They came home from war and had other families. They accidentally chanced upon one another at a dance and found each other….What? You’re still alive and basically they left their families and ended up together. Dad was their only child. My Aunty was 12 years older coming with my Grandma from her first family and became his babysitter while they worked in hotels. They talked about their one day off being Publicans and they’d be at another pub on the other side of the bar while the kids sat in the car with a cracked window, the burger rings and the can of coke waiting for their parents to finish, then being terrified on the way home while they were driving drunk through the hills, arguing and swerving hoping they’d make it alive. Dad grew up in Pubs and then he found someone who loved to do that and they just kept doing that.
I feel like I’ve always been fiercely independent because in a lot of ways I’ve had to. We didn’t grow up very wealthy, my Dad was on a disability support pension and my mum was his carer so I started working at 13 and 9 months at Hungry Jacks. I finished Year 12. My teen years were wild and messy trying to navigate growing yourself up emotionally. I was always a lot younger than everyone else so I graduated high school before I turned 17 so then you have that weird year, can’t get your license, haven’t turned 18, so I went to Tafe and did a business course which would get me into Uni if I wanted to. I did Business Hospitality and Tourism and got really good marks which looked good on my CV.
I think the last time we spoke we were just about to open Dusty Attic which was just before the 2017 flood. We were all ready to open when the flood hit. We’d started big reno’s and gathered lot’s of furniture and things but lost it all, as everybody else did We were still determined to make it happen. We weren’t eligible for any grants because we hadn’t officially opened. I don’t know how but we got there and we were open for 18 months in total.
With Council challenges around approvals and the development process, it was really difficult. I’ve never worked that hard in my life to get it happening. There was such a huge community support. I’m really proud of it though because I created a space I felt was missing, a very inclusive space and a space where a lot of female artists felt safe and nurtured performing because that doesn’t really exist in the music industry. We had beautiful food, Sam is a wizard in the kitchen, I was so blessed with all the treasures who worked with us. It got to the point that the front part was not sustainable as I was only allowed 23 people in there, which I risked every night having as many as I could.
I had so many meetings with Council. I went in to Council and said, this is a tricky one but we can work together and there were people in the Planning team who have since been fired but we had a meeting that I had the pleasure of paying for by the way. I had to pay $650 to have this meeting. Once the GM at the time had left one man wrote something on a bit of paper and handed it to the man beside him. They both laughed and I said….Would you like to share this with the class boys? I thought, this is ludicrous and I realised I was fighting a battle I did not want to fight. It was not worth every penny I had in the world. I never paid myself the whole time. They never approved the back section on fire safety alone. I was too frazzled to fight it.
The other part of that story is the week before we were to open my Mum called me and told me that she was terminal so I was juggling this while she was dying, back and forth to Perth. Her Cancer was a rare, aggressive cancer that started as an undiagnosed melanoma but it mutates and gets into your lymph nodes. It’s quite rare, so there’s no research really.
From diagnosis to death was 6 months. I got the call the week we were opening that she was terminal and the Oncologist said to her that she should go see her kid. Dad and her came over and it was a hectic time in navigating it all and because I was doing Dusty largely by myself. My parents have always been avid AFL followers of the West Coast Eagles and The Gollan said they’d put the grand final on for them in town. We got quite drunk and Mum wanted the deep convo we needed to have, always when she was pissed. I said Mum, I’m not doing this at the Gollan Hotel, let’s wait till you’re sober hey? Seriously? (laughs).