“ I was born in Wollongong but moved to Collaroy on Sydney’s Northern Beaches when I was 3 years old. My childhood was magical. We weren’t wealthy, it wasn’t a wealthy place to live back then, but it was also comfortable and you didn’t really want for anything. We had bush and caves and beach and beautiful rock pools. I remember going to Sunday School which most of us did back then. I used to wag and spend my donation money. I lured my brother into the scam but he had a wave of guilt and dobbed us both in. It was going ok for a while there(laughs).
It was the most magical place to be a child and a horrendous place to be a teenage girl. It was hard and I didn’t really feel that I fitted into that culture. It really was a Puberty Blues existence. It was such a mysogynistic, racist and homophobic culture and it was quite brutal. We’re hearing now about teachers pet and Barrenjoey Rd but all that stuff was no normalised. I had some really scary experiences, because public transport was so bad, we’d hitch up and down the peninsular. I look back and think how shocking some of that would be if those things were happening now and how shocking it is that we didn’t find it shocking at the time.
Because I really never fitted in I kind of leaned into shaving my head, going out with the punks and then I was kind of scary, which is ridiculous. You get a mohawk and suddenly you’re terrifying. I didn’t want to be scary either so then I went the other way and joined the Christian City Church. I was trying to work out who I was. I stayed with the church for quite a while. I went to Narrabeen High and then to Sydney Girls to do my HSC but I ended up meeting the father of my children and at the age of 16 loaded up the Ford Escort Panelvan and headed north.
I’ve recently been diagnosed with ADHD and I wasn’t going to share this in my interview because it just happens that so many people are being diagnosed, especially women in their 40’s and 50’s. Apparently the onset of Menopause can exacerbate the symptoms. So as I look back on my youth I can see so much of my life was affected by having that.
I had this idea to live in the country and be self sufficient. We stayed with my Uncle for a short time in Newrybar and then landed in Cawongla. We married in Sydney when I was 18 and I fell pregnant with with my first daughter and I really wanted running water after the camp showers in the bush. I bought a little fibro cottage out in Ettrick. I had two more girls and that’s where they grew up.
I needed to get my licence and I knew my eyes weren’t great. I went to the Optometrist and I couldn’t read any of the letters at all. I could see the light of the screen but nothing was helping. They tried different lenses, still nothing. Finally he said, Let’s try this! He put a hard contact lens in my eye and for a second the world became crystal clear. I remember looking at my husband who was holding our baby on the other side of the room and it was like I was tripping. It was so weird to have that much clarity, I couldn’t even speak. I was told to go to an Optomologist so I saw Dr Noble who I continued to see right up until his rooms washed away in the flood. That’s where I was diagnosed with Keratoconus and can still hear his words in my head…Naomi, you are legally blind. The problem is keeping contact lenses in as Keratoconus causes the eyes to bulge too. I had two corneal grafts which helped and I could wear glasses so I tried to get my drivers licence but that didn’t work.
I went back to Uni and my sight started to deteriorate again but I’ve been able to wear a contact lens in one eye which has kept me going. I was having problems with my sight when the floods hit so I stood there in the kitchen knowing the water was coming up the stairs and the power points were under the house so I knew I would lose my light. I couldn’t risk losing that lens. Actually if any of you are reading this who rescued me I’m sorry if I don’t acknowledge you on the street and say thank you because I don’t know what people look like and I don’t know who you were but I am so so grateful. I’ll come back to that.
We lived in Ettrick for a while and the relationship with my husband was not great. I had started getting educated again and studying Arts Law and I became more aware of my situation which wasn’t good. There was so much manipulation and so much head f#@kery that went on with the kids. I remember seeing a chart on a hospital wall with the cycle of abuse and it’s the first time I realised, this is what I’m living. It was a volatile last year of uni. I moved out into Kyogle to try and keep a distance but I needed to be close to my girls and because I don’t drive I was so dependant on him. It was a horrible separation. He left the house and didn’t tell me. I had poured myself into that garden and house and had inheritance go into it. Eventually we came to an agreement where I paid rent in Kyogle and he paid the small mortgage. I wanted my kids to have stability. He enrolled the kids in a Christian school in Lismore without telling me. The control never stopped because I then had to move to Lismore away from my support network so I could be closer to the kids. We were week on and week off. I couldn’t drive to their school so I looked like the bad Mum. It was so awful.
I ended up giving up because my kids were suffering and I agreed to having them on weekends which was heartbreaking but then he used that against me. I didn’t see any other way. I tried to hide it and remove myself from situations that were getting violent so they wouldn’t see but all my children saw was me running away and deserting them. He wasn’t hurting them, the hurt on them was how angry he was with me. The one that terrified me was he would be angry and start driving like a maniac over the Ettrick range. It was one of his ways of terrifying and getting to me. I would make him stop to let me out because my kids were in the car. If I got out, it would stop. I would have to leave them in the car because I couldn’t make them walk 10kms home. I needed them to be safe so I would have to make those decisions…all the time. People say, I could never leave my kids in that situation but I had to be logical. It was me he was punishing and if I took myself out of the equation he wouldn’t do it. Basically the heart-wrenching dramas continued until they were all living independently.
So when I moved to Lismore it was into my Grandmother’s house but when she died I had to move out and I was about to be homeless. My Mum’s partner John helped me buy my house I’m in now in North Lismore by helping with a deposit. I feel like I’m in the country, I could have a garden and chickens, it’s close to town and it was perfect. That was in 2008 and my 2 youngest were with me at the time and in 2009 we got our rescue puppy Sadie. She’s still with me today.
I was working for Community Housing and then I worked for the Union for the last 10 years. At the end of 2021 when I got my diagnosis of ADHD I realised why I’d been struggling. I took a redundancy and payed off the last of my mortgage. People have always said, you should sell your cakes. I’ve always made wedding and birthday cakes for people. It would be my gift and Ive done some bake sales for fundraisers which have gone really well. As a trial I got a little shop in the Embassy Arcade called Season and Whim It was originally the old ballet shop. I had to bake at home for a few months and it was quite promising. Joe from Doughboy Deli next door was leaving for Melbourne and let me know as his shop was fitted out. Joe left his stuff in the shop for me and was about to fly out and then on Sunday Feb 27 he was helping me move the stuff upstairs because of the rains and the flood warning. Most of my new equipment was still unpackaged in boxes as I wanted to wait untiI I opened. I’d booked a removalist but he didn’t want to risk coming into town in case he couldn’t get home.”
