“What I want to say about being a Journalist in Lismore is that I was a fairly young woman who with a lot of chance and a bit of skill found herself with a voice in this town, which meant that I was completely bullied, trolled, cut down, vilified, and abused but I kept on going and I’d do things like take my photo off the editorial for safety. When new younger women would come into the newsroom I’d sit them down and say…Just don’t read the comments, this is the norm for Lismore, if you want to survive here, stay strong and don’t read the comments. I really regret that and feel I should have been stronger but at the same time you are so busy and stressed to get the job done, you are on crap wages and you just do what you have to do. I had death threats, weird limericks sent to me with awful pictures of me in nooses, just horrendous stuff, from men in Lismore. From the left and the right.
I felt I couldn’t tell people because I feared they wouldn’t believe me. If you are a woman in Lismore, particularly a young woman and you deign to say…I want to be a Councillor, I want to be an Editor, I want to be a voice in this community….You won’t just be bullied and cut down like usual. I think that there is another level that is happening in our town which is criminal, it’s depraved and it’s so excessive that’s it’s almost unbelievable. I’m leaving this town and what I want to say before I leave is, as a community we need to address this. If we don’t we are stopping emergent young women from finding their power just by turning a blind eye and saying it’s too hard, it’s too frightening, but we need to all rise up and say it’s not good enough. Until you are in that position it’s very hard to believe. If I didn’t go through it myself I may think that these women are hysterical with their stories.
Lismore is incredible and it has so much going for it but there’s this shadow that lurks which is stopping it from being a really great town. During this time of trolling and abuse I’d split up with my kids’ dad and I was struggling to find housing. I was couch surfing and my best friend Nadine pretty much saved me. I lived on her couch for a while. I lived in some inappropriate places because I was so desperate and I can really identify with a lot of the people right now, particularly mums who come through Resilient Lismore, which I loved working for, who are displaced and homeless. Until you are there you actually don’t know how traumatic and stressful that is. It almost changes you on a physical level. It’s almost like your cells never recover from that amount of housing stress. I went back to the Northern Star and it was at the time newspapers were failing and it looked like the Northern Star was going to be bought by Murdoch. I wasn’t brilliant or perfect but I felt like I did a good job at making change within the mainstream and giving a bit of colour and progressiveness to your everyday reader. Because I was so desperate for money I feared I would be made to go against my value system, so I felt like I would definitely go down that chute if I worked for a Murdoch paper so that was the point I had to step out of the boiling pot of water to save myself.
I didn’t have a job to go to so I cleaned houses, lived on chick peas and started a solo content marketing business. I got some clients slowly. I was just starting to get somewhere when the 2017 flood happened. I was living in the lowest house in North Lismore. Again, the community helped me and I was lucky to have good friends to go through that with. When you live in North Lismore you flood all the time. It’s just part of your culture. We would all go house to house to lift up all the washing machines, etc. People who don’t live there don’t know that we live in flood vigilance constantly and that’s why we have such a connected community. We do Landcare and when we’re not helping each other we are working on planting out the river bank so it’s not such a turbulent force. I had some beautiful years there.
When I was at uni all my friends got to go to the Jabiluka mining protests while I had to stay home and work. I grew a real chip on my shoulder about not having access to what I saw as a largely middle class environmental movement and turned my back on it all. But when I moved to the Northern Rivers I was able to soften that side of me and gain more ecological literacy. I joined Landcare and later worked for the National Landcare Network, organised climate justice actions like the student strikes, got political, met and loved some incredible activists, started growing food, and was able to deeply connect with the living world and make up for lost time.
I’ll back track to 10 years ago, before I moved to North Lismore, my half-sister from my dad, Meg, was in a pushbike accident and she very nearly died. It was at Lord Howe Island so it took a long time to get the chopper in. She had a lot of oxygen deprivation to her brain which caused significant brain damage. She was in a coma for 18 months. My sister is one the most strongest and brilliant persons you would ever meet. Before her accident she was as very well-respected Gay rights activist in the 90’s in terms of parental rights. She did policy work and was an incredible sister and role model for me. At the time she was in an almost 2 year relationship with Kerrilie. Kerrilie stood by her as her partner and carer and is still with her to this day. Before the accident Meg and Kerrilie had discussed wanting a child and by the time Meg had enough skills for that to be an option Kerrilie couldn’t get pregnant with her own eggs so they asked me to donate my eggs to have a baby. Long story short their little girl is now 4 years old.
Three weeks before the 2022 flood I got a phone call to say that Kerrilie (my sister’s carer and girlfriend) was in an accident and it was looking like she would lose her leg. She did lose her leg above the knee. Then the Lismore flood happened and I poured all my energy into my community but realised my family needed me. I had a really great job at Southern Cross Uni who are doing great things with regeneration and resilience which I was a part of and it was very exciting. When the flood happened I stepped up into a communications role with Resilient Lismore to help out. I realised though that my sisters needed me and I needed to be there. My sisters are the reason why I am leaving town, not because I’m over it. I will always love Lismore.
In 2019 I got glandular fever and ended up with chronic fatigue that was really bad. I also have this thing called POTS which means when I stand up my heart rate goes up 40 beats more per minute. It’s something I live with and maintain. The whole Covid era for me was a gift. I feel for everyone who had a hard time but for me … I had to give up one job and felt I couldn’t hold on to the other with the fatigue and the brain fog. But during Covid I could do my work from home in bed and then the government said we could take our super out. I’d been saving for a house and had been working 2 jobs for years. To be a single parent and save for a deposit was epic. I was so worn down but Covid happened and I could buy my house in Lismore above the floodplain.
Then I met my current partner and I was like… Don’t get into a relationship with me, I have chronic fatigue, I’m really shit and boring but he loved me anyway. He said we’ll just start slow walking in nature and slowly he helped me recover. We’ve been together 2 years. In terms of relationships for the last 8 years, I’ve been really lucky and have had some beautiful partners and lovers who have helped me grow. I have utmost respect and gratitude for those men and my current partner is one of the most generous and kind and loving and caring people I’ve ever met and I don’t think I will ever meet anyone like him again.
The thing I do know about myself by now is that I’m incredibly independent. I’ve had to be but I just like being the main protagonist in my life. I think I always will be and I think that’s something that’s not conventionally valued. I just want to tell women if they feel like they are a failure for not living up to some conventional model of womanhood and relationships, if you’re the main protagonist in your life, that’s all you have to be and if you have beautiful relationships along the way, that’s good too. Boys or girls, platonic or sexual, it doesn’t matter. But be the main character in your own story.”
