“I come from a little country town in QLD called Wondai which means Wild Dog. It’s in Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s electorate so I grew up in an incredibly right wing area. We had a big Indigenous community in Cherbourg, the mission town. It was a very racist town too. It’s probably like Australia’s version of Alabama, poor farming area, a few priviliged here and there. It’s funny, our family were always left wing and we were always told…Don’t tell people who you vote for because you will be ostracised. There were probably only 3 Labour voters in the whole region and they all knew each other. I remember how excited we were when Whitlam got voted in…and out, not long after.
It was an interesting place to grow up in a sense. What I did love about it is that it seeded my sense of community which is why I was always drawn to living in a regional area. I couldn’t live with the kind of values I grew up with.
I have a brother 6 years younger than me. My dad died when I was 6. It was a violent childhood because he was an alcoholic and it was sort of weirdly normalised. It seemed everyone had a violent, alcoholic for a parent. When he wasn’t in that state he was ok but it was a real Jekyll an Hyde situation. He could be quite lovely but he was a violent man when he was drunk. You can really see how women stay in those situations because I remember my own father and how perplexed he was by his own behaviour which is generational. He was part of intergenerational trauma. He had this capacity of making quite a mixed circle of friends as well so we ended up with a very mixed family. I have an Indigenous sister. It was never formal but she grew up with us because her father trained one of our horses and he was a horrible racist man at the time. He would go out to the Aboriginal community, have sex with the women and one woman got pregnant and left the baby on his doorstep so my sister never knew her mother. This man was so racist and yet the people who loved and accepted him were the black community. He was a white fringe dweller. It’s never straight forward. So Shirley was her name and she grew up with us. I from the get go have had a different family. When I left home Mum remarried. I have a Sri Lankan sister too who was also adopted. I have a very multi cultural family yet I grew up in an area that didn’t embrace those values. It was weird that I ended up with my diverse family regardless.
It was a pretty hard childhood though I was a pretty tough kid. Growing up in violence and that kind of trauma kind of changes the way you view the world so I had a very serious way of viewing the world. I remember thinking that if my life was meaningful which is quite a big thing when you’re 6 years old, that my father would just have to go. I could see even then if that the violence would keep going. I remember when he died in a car accident and the Police came to our house. It’s one of those days you will always remember. My Mum was screaming, my aunt collapsed in the driveway and the Police come to your house to tell you. I remember as a child feeling like I had been waiting for this day. I actually had this immense feeling of relief. I had this feeling like, it starts now! So even so in a sense there was some grief there was also the sense of inevitability. In order to have a life I needed to be safe.
My Mum was only 26, she had a 6 month old baby and me. I kind of got…not forgotten, but my mother took solace in my brother. She was a mess so I guess I became a really high functioning kid. I did the housework and a lot around the house. I also developed OCD which Mum never noticed. We have a family full of anxiety. I don’t have anxiety but as a child I had full on obsessive thinking. Hand washing, counting and weird intrusive thoughts that were really strange. I grew out of it after a couple of years. One of my kids has OCD and it was only when I went to the child Psychologist that he read my history and noticed I had the same. I grew out of it luckily.
I was kind of a weirdly lucky kid. As hard as it was I was smart. I did well at school, my teachers liked me. I realised that being a high achiever and getting excellent results was my passport out of the town I was in. I have always been interested in the world and finding out about things, reading, knowledge, information. Creativity has always been a big part of it as well. Education was my passport out. I was really good at sport as well. I was going to make sure I wouldn’t be stuck there. Even at a young age I wanted to leave.
My teens were still in the same place. You never left these places. My mum was a widow, she had nothing, housing commission house and really poor. You didn’t leave, you don’t travel and you work hard. That’s all there is. There was no aspiration. I was one of the first in my generation to go to Uni. Even finishing school was big.”