“Well, I’m going to start strong! I was supposed to be born with 2 heads. My Mum didn’t have any obstetric care when she was pregnant and some very stressful stuff happened at the beginning of her 3rd trimester. My dad was in big trouble with the law and she started bleeding. Mum went to doctor and he said, “Oh, I can feel the two heads”. He thought that Mum knew that she was having twins, but she didn’t, so Mum thought she was having a two headed child and fainted. Mum told us she couldn’t put her panty hose back on after she fainted because she kept toppling over from the shock of nearly having a two headed baby. She had to put them in her handbag. I think she was only slightly happier to have twins. (laughs).
So my identical twin sister and I were born premature. I was born first and I was the runt of the litter. I was the little one and my sister who is now smaller than me was called Big. My parents called her Big as her name right up until she was a teenager. They would shout it out anywhere, Hey Big! Her real name was Laura. They called me Ding because I was a poor little ding. They rarely called us by our real names. School was a bit of a transition.
Mum was a really hard worker and worked as a typist back in the day and essentially she needed to make money not only to support us but to be independent. Mum’s background is that she was a street kid in Fitzroy and she was a foster kid a lot of the time, and she was completely neglected. She had a big thing about making sure we had clean clothes and all the stuff that she never had. I have a half sister and brother who were Dad’s and Meg my sister features later in my story.
Because Mum worked so much my twin sister and I were pretty much kept in our room happily for all the time before primary school so we created our own language, which can happen with twins – especially identical. It was only brought up when the teacher said to my Mum “Your children are retarded” because of our language skills. It’s pretty ironic because I work in words. We were talking to each other in sort of a Pidgin English from Sesame Street and whatever we made up together. I still feel I kind of write and think in neologisms and then I translate it into English. I really struggle with English still and I always have but it’s also been a challenge. I think that’s why I’m a writer. An obsession with overcoming a perceived deficit but also a love for creative storytelling.
I loved school. I went to Seaford Park near Frankston. Everyone bags out Frankston but there was incredible freedom. Basically I grew up in a new, cheap housing development where lots of new roads and gutters were made to create the new suburb so essentially we were raised in a giant skate / BMX park and at the end of that was bushland so we had incredible freedom. Every single house had a young family. I feel incredibly lucky to have had that. I was born in 1978. Dad got a job in an advertising agency and we were then comfortable and living in multicultural Bulleen. The recession happened and we all moved to Sydney and rented a house.
I just need to say this about my Dad. I could say a lot and have these dark, riveting and stomach-churning stories about what happened but I feel like I don’t owe anyone my story and I want to be safe. What I will say is that Dad was a drinker and a gambler and he gambled all the equity in our house in Melbourne. Mum tried to separate for a long time and there were a lot of escalating AVO’s that happened. Rather than focus on Dad, I will just say that during that time Mum was a very strong woman. It was really hard to start again financially and it was really hard to be safe because we couldn’t get rid of him without feeling endangered.
I got a really high TER and went to Uni. I didn’t really know what to do but I had won the SMH Writing competition. To gain approval in my family you had to achieve in sport. There was no value in being creative, it was just about sport. I wasn’t great at sport but I was the ultimate try-hard and I think that comes from being a girl with undiagnosed ADHD and always feeling like you were a failure and you just have to try really hard. I joined the Rowing Club and fell in love with waking up before dawn, being on the water and being part of this group of powerful woman, working as one unit gliding through the water leaving a wake of symmetrical trails of bright phosphorescence. It was like a peak state which was probably the gateway drug. The endorphins when you are pushing yourself to extreme limits in this glorious way on water was indescribable. We won lots of trophies, went to Nationals, but that was the end of my sporting career, I just got into other peak states in my 20’s (laughs).
I got the marks to get into Communications at Macquarie Uni. I don’t think I was a particularly great student, I struggled with money a lot. I was managing restaurants in Paddington and Surry Hills and doing all that party girl stuff and having a great time. John Howard just got in and he ensured that no-one under 22 could get Austudy or anything. Obviously I was not going to live with my family with what was going on so I needed a job. I got a job in a publishing company at the bottom. It was like the Devil Wears Prada story. I was doing the absolute shit – filing, coffee, but I was so determined. This is when magazines were king. We did a lot of industry magazines so I was waiting for the Editor of Packaging News or Bacon Busters, the pig shooting magazine, to have a sick day… I even curated the Babes and Boars calendar (laughs) that was one of my jobs… and I appeared in the magazine as well..hahaha. I was hanging out with these really progressive, warehouse, arty type trust fund kids and meanwhile I was working as a secretary for Babes and Boars magazine (laughs), anyway I finally got noticed and eventually I scored a job at Ragtrader magazine which is a fashion business mag.
I learnt a lot about news and I got the Journalist bug. I went overseas and taught English in China with my kids’ Dad. It was so full-on and I don’t think I would have arrived at the kind of value system that I have without going to China. We were living in a satellite village of a city that made all the plush toys and mobile phones for the world. I was teaching kids who ended up jumping from their roof because they didn’t get the score that was high enough. The parents paid so much money for them to go to a public school so they could get a high score and not have to work in the iPhone factory. These kids were working from 6am to 9pm in a boarding school. The pressure! I was like this white foreigner where anything goes and I provided a safe space where kids could laugh and be silly. Students would come up to our living quarters with head wounds for us to fix because if we didn’t, their parents and teachers would know they were playing basketball out of hours. We were a safe place for these kids and I got special letters from everyone and I felt like I changed their lives a little where everything was so controlled. I stayed a year but I was pretty miserable to be honest.
We were so relieved to come home to Australia and have a hot shower and a milkshake that we conceived Ivy on our first day back on home soil. We were safe. That was 2006. My kids Dad was a Lismore boy, second generation Aquarius and we were living in this falling down shack in Erskineville and I was heavily pregnant. I nearly fell down the rotting, mouldy stairs and my nesting instinct had kicked in and I wanted out of there. I went on holiday and went the The Channon market where I saw all these little girls running around in this hippy paradise and I knew I wanted to come here so I landed in Lismore. My younger daughter Elsa was born 2 years later. Both girls had the same due date and we laugh that it must have been the Mardi Grass weekend. They are brilliant, lovely kids and I’m so happy and grateful to be their Mum.
I got a job at The Northern Star doing the ad features for a while. I had a few other jobs. Eventually I was promoted or demoted or sideways promoted to the editor of The Echo when the company had kicked out all the staff. So who are we gonna get to do the job of 10 people?…Melissa! It was super political and really hard. I was so lucky though because I got to tell the people of Lismore’s stories. It was so gratifying to get to know this complex and diverse tapestry of people. Bentley blockade happened during my time as Editor. When you are working in media during the sinking ship years with no money and it’s pretty desperate, there are no other staff so you can kind of do your own thing. No one was checking or censoring. So there was incredible freedom. What other tiny, little regional paper could you cover historical blockades and floods and momentous stuff?”
