“ I was born in Murwillumbah on the 27/10/66 and lived with my family at Sth Tweed Heads until I was 5. We then moved to Kirra. I’m the youngest of 8 kids, big Catholic family, well my father was Catholic, don’t know about the rest of us. I did my first 2 years in the local Catholic School at Coolangatta.
My dad was a professional net fisherman. One season when Dad went up north to fish Mum pulled my brother and I out of the Catholic School and put us into the state school. I got bullied a fair bit, racist remarks and it was awful but my older brother Matthew used to appear out of the blue and pull the boys off me and cover me. I actually left school half way through Year 9. I didn’t like school but my mother wouldn’t let me leave till I had a job. At that time my brother was working for Thiess Bros Earthmover’s. I begged him to get me a job so it got me out of school and I worked there for a while.
I started dabbling with drugs and alcohol in my teens. I stretched a few friendships. My father was a very violent man. There was a lot of violence in the home, yes a very tough man…so I went down this other pathway. I look back now and I’m kind of grateful to be still on the planet to be honest. I lost a few friends to overdoses. The law was involved sometimes and I was in a very dark place for a long time. Leading up to that I lost my mum in 1991 from a heart attack brought on from her diabetes. She was 63. It was pretty hard for my mum which I can understand today but I couldn’t understand that when I was younger. My father was a very heavy drinker.
My father was a white man but he employed Aboriginal men. He grew up with a lot of the older Aboriginal fellas and I think he gravitated to them. My mum was Aboriginal and they both grew up in Tweed Heads. My dad was born in 1921 and my mum in 1926 and they got together after the Second World War. It would have been very difficult when my parents got together back then. A white man and an Aboriginal woman wasn’t kosher in those days at all.
A few of my mates played music. We’d party and get on the grog and sing and music was something I really wanted to do. A cousin had been doing the contemporary music course at Adelaide Uni and the faculty had been running a program for Aboriginal people since the 70’s. A lot of bands like The Warumpi Band and No Fixed Address went through there in the late 70’s. I was in a pretty bad way and my cousin suggested I go check the course out so I auditioned and I got in. I was there for a couple of years till about 96. In 1993 my son’s mother had just come straight out of Kadina High School from here in Lismore and gone down to do this same course as well. I met her a year after I was there and we got together.
After graduating we came back here to Lismore. This is her tribal land. We stayed for about a year and she was doing a drama course here at The Con and thought there would be more opportunity at the TAFE college for Indigenous people in Chippendale. I was doing the music course but I was still doing my thing with the drugs and drinking. We had a big bust up and she took off. A couple of weeks later she told me she was pregnant so I came back and I tried to get my act together.
Rory was born in 1998 and I just couldn’t do it so she told me to go. I look back and I’m glad she did because I used to go on binges for a week and come back and plead with her to take me back and she always would. The last time she wouldn’t so for the next 18 months I was out of control and I was in a bad state.
In March 2000 I booked myself into Namatjira Haven at the back of Alstonville which is a rehab for Aboriginal men. My father passed away while I was in there. I left and I went on a raging bender for a couple of months. I had been estranged from my father for a long time.
At the end of 2000 I was sorely missing my son who was only 2 so I came back to Lismore. It was my birthday and I went to The Workers Club, same old thing, got drunk, woke up at these people’s place down at Wardell, got on the grog with them, ended up at a doof at the back of Kyogle. I don’t know what happened. I walked out of some shed and I sat in this woman’s car with her two little kids and I had this moment of clarity. I could see my whole life up to that point and I said, ‘Look if there is a God out there, help me please’ and it was a real heart felt prayer. I must have passed out. The next morning I woke up and I woke that woman up and her two jarjums and I said, ‘Get me back to Lismore and you go home and look after your kids’. I went home and jumped in the shower and I felt so dirty, scrubbed myself down and I went to an AA meeting and that was almost 16 years ago. I’ve been clean and sober ever since.
I look back and I see I was hellbent on killing myself in some strange way. Over these last 16 years I have had counselling and other things. We did try and get back together but it didn’t feel right. I think there was too much water under the bridge. I look back on my life and everything was done drunk and stoned. Some people can get on it on the weekend and that’s it but I didn’t. I did it every day, all day for a long time. I didn’t know how to interact with people on that other level. I never felt 100%, emotionally, physically or spiritually.
I’m very close to Rory, he turned 18 in January so we have him week on and week off which is great. I didn’t want to be like my father. I wanted to be present for my son so I have tried to do that over the last 16 years. He’s been a blessing in my life and in my recovery. I also suffer from depression, just from stuff from my childhood but I have things I put into place for that.
After I got sober I started my art. Initially for fun but in 2005 a good friend of mine, Penny Evans, saw some of my work and said, ‘brother some of this is really good!’ She told me there was a local project for Bundjalung artists that Uncle Digby Moran was organising. One thing led to another and she kept pushing me to call this lady. The lady came up and saw my stuff and I made it in. It was called ‘A special kind of Vision’. Since then I’ve done a few more shows. I then met Justine Barratt and she set up a gallery in Alstonville in 2009. She liked my work and we had my first exhibition. I had 18 paintings in that exhibition and 12 sold on opening night. In 2012 I started working on ‘The Saltwater Series’ and that was about my father and his story around his fishing. It was really emotional for me because of my history with him. In 2014 Brett Adlington from the gallery asked me if I’d like to have an exhibition in The Lismore Regional Gallery and I ended up getting in with Judy Cassab which was amazing.
My art has been a really healing process for me. Art for me is about telling those old people’s stories and to make sense about that personally for me. It’s part of my spiritual journey around my culture and my identity, how I make sense of their world and how I make sense of my world now. The values they passed on to me when I was little and how I can use that in my life in a positive way. I’d like to think that when someone buys a piece of my art they are taking a piece of my family in spirit and that goes with them.