“I had a spiritual experience there which changed my way of looking at everything really. There was a certain spot along the path to the rock where I would get very teary. A bit further on I would be ok. One day I was walking along with a guy and I thought I was getting a migraine because I had tunnel vision and couldn’t see anything down the path. It was like a tiny circle. I didn’t have a migraine and the friend said that’s the elders who don’t want you to see them either side of the path. I thought..oh Yeah. Another day I helped the Moree Lands Council organise the burial of a skull which had come back from Edinburgh. I got all the permissions and organised the plaque for them. Three holes had to be dug so no-one could find it. I was out there and the man came to do the burial of the skull. I was pulling the weeds out and I heard voices singing to me. It was the voices of Aboriginal women calling out and then singing. Then it stopped. The man came over. I said nothing, thinking it might have been the LSD I took when I was 20 (laughs). We had the reburial the following morning which I was invited to.
A few months later I was driving through town and saw Susie Blacklock and her daughter. I told her what happened and she took off. I found out later that where I heard the singing was where the secret women’s site was. I went to the opening of an Aboriginal film and I saw Lizzie Connors who is an Elder from Inverell. I told her I wanted to talk about what happened and she also took off. A year later I saw Lizzie and she apologised for running off. She said it frightened her. She also said the spirits were thanking me for what I had done. It was amazing. People have since told me similar stories when they went out there.
Getting back to divorce. My husband was getting remarried, I was menopausal, my son was working as a Chef, my daughter was in uni and I decided to go on a trip. I went to Europe and I met an American man whose name I won’t mention. He wanted me to meet his family and move over there which I did. He came back here and helped me pack. Two days after packing up my house and moving over I discovered he had a girlfriend. It was a little town in South Dakota. It was like having my guts cut out and stomped on the ground. Here I am on an island in the middle of the Missouri River thinking if I knew where I was I’d have taken off. It was a long story but I stayed on that island in a tipi for a while. I lost a lot of weight, kayaked everywhere and people were so kind in that little town. I was helped by everyone and had some amazing experiences. People cocooned me because they all knew what he was like.
I travelled to DC and stayed with my friend Carol. She introduced me to her friend NIck who was charming, handsome and read poetry. He liked a cup of tea. He’d lost his wife to a Cerebral Haemorrhage. Nick took me to NY and lot’s of places. Nothing was going on. I left and spent a month in Kentucky living in a horse shed. Nick had been sending me poems and I came back. I wanted to go to Mexico so I took off again for a while. I had Spanish lessons and travelled around Mexico for a couple of months and the whole time I stayed in contact with Nick. When I came back he proposed. I was 51 and I said Yes. We moved to Martha’s Vineyard.
I contracted Lymes disease and was ill for a year. I would sleep a month at a time. It was the worst time. When I was well I started stitching quilts, entered competitions and won prizes. Years before I had lost a baby at 6 months and had to carry it for a month. The way I dealt with sadness was through art. There was a project in the UK called finish it and I’d been trying to talk about the baby I had lost years before. I had made 150 embroidered foetuses so I packed the lot up and sent it to the UK. The next thing I know it was in a book and on tour through the UK. I was beginning to get known in the textile world but I couldn’t stay in America so I returned to Australia.
I was in Bingara catching up with family and Immigration asked where I wanted my container sent when it arrived back from the UK. I said, send it to Lismore. We had gone to Woodford once and I loved that there was water filling stations in the street. I really like that and I wanted to live where there was a Uni. We bought a car, drove to Lismore and bought a house the second day. That was 2013. It needed a lot of work but we were happy. I enrolled in Uni in 2014 and spent a year there. The following 2 years I spent at Tafe. I finished my degree last year.
I currently have an exhibition at The Lismore Regional Gallery. I’ve always stood up for social justice and art is the way for me to resolve issues. My first year at uni I did work on the effects on women in war. The second year I focused on how women are seen through the history of art. I was looking at the war in Syria and the refugees on Manus Island and how many had died. I did a big installation where I stitched all these men. I made a boat from an old chair and made 60 ceramic pieces. My art has to have some meaning to it.
When Eurydice Dixon was killed in Melbourne I made a little textile sculpture of her. There had also been a murder of 2 children by their father. The mum was a solicitor and I thought how devastating for her. At the beginning of last year she took her own life. It was too much to bear. Some things are just too hard to bear. I ended up making a house because women are killed in houses, in their own homes, the place where they should be safe. I bought a commercial cutting machine and I saw all the pretty paper for weddings. I thought people get married, spend all this money and time on their weddings and then they get killed. Obviously not everyone but what goes wrong in that time?
I started making houses and fences. I went back to 2013 and got the information from Counting Dead Women, UTS as they had been recording the women who were murdered. I wanted those women to be remembered. It’s like every week, another woman killed, another woman killed. They are just passed over in the paper. Often on the outside looking in the relationship might look perfect but you just don’t know. Paper is strong and beautiful but it can be crushed very easily. That’s why I used it. I made 85 houses all with the names of women who have been murdered. They all have a story. There is also unnamed women which I tried to make the most beautiful. They might be unnamed for cultural reasons or sometimes family might not want the names mentioned. Sometimes the trial might still be going. The majority were killed by partners or ex partners, then sons, then random street attacks. I put a lot of beer bottles at first because alcohol was often involved but at the end of the day It’s about the control a man has over a woman. It’s about his power trip. That’s why I also did blue singlets. Those first few years in a child life are so important. If a boy see’s his dad treating his mum like that, he’ll learn that’s what you do. You have Alan Jones derogatory comments like, ‘Give her a back hander’, the Wicked Campers with all the crude comments driving around town. Words are very important.”