“I was born in Sydney at the Mater Hospital in 1966. I spent my first 12 years in Lane Cove. A lot of that time was spent in the bush. I’ve always loved the bush.
At the age of 8 my mother left suddenly. We got home from school one day and she was gone. That was a really significant time in my life. I think 8 is a big developmental time. My sister was 10 and my younger brother was 4. We were shocked and I remember the trauma when that happened. As a child you blame yourself. My mother went to Greece with her lover and she’s since travelled the world. Mum left for a year and then came back for a little while which I found traumatic, seeing her again after that big gap in time, unexplained.
Dad was incredible. He worked full time at the Commonwealth bank in North Sydney and he was also a Barman at the Lane Cove Businessmen’s Club at night so me and my siblings were left to our own devices. Looking back on it now, I can’t believe how he kept that house clean and tidy, spotless actually, and he put a meal on the table every night and he worked full time. He drank a lot to cope with it all but he still looked after us to the best of his ability. He was a functional alcoholic I suppose.
My mother was a big drinker too. Prior to her leaving I remember she was always drinking wine when we got home from school. I guess she was just unhappy so she left the situation.
I got to high school and stuff started to unravel for me. I went to North Sydney Girls High which is right next to the hospital where I was born and my grandfather had the funeral parlour directly across the road on the Pacific Highway called Bruce Maurer (who was Mum’s father) Funerals. My grandfather is German and Gomeroi. For three generations we still have that funeral parlour in the family. Bruce grew up in Armidale and his mother grew up on Bengerang Station which is near Mungindi and that’s where I now return often but I’m jumping ahead here.
I started smoking dope, sniffing glue and sniffing lighter fluid with a group of girls at school and we were hanging around with North Sydney boys who introduced us to more drugs. I went down this road of substance abuse. I was a total black out drinker from the first drink I had. I just thought I was having a good time. My sister gravitated to heroin at the age of 16 and became a heroin addict. My brother was sniffing glue from an early age so he was very young when my mother walked out as well. I was trying to look after him myself as a kid as well but miraculously I finished school with all this dysfunction going on.
My Mum had returned and settled in a little rental in North Sydney and the neighbours on either side were gay couples. This was the early 80s when AIDS was starting to happen in Sydney so a few of those people in the wider social group died. My sister and I left Dad’s house feeling guilty but my sister orchestrated the move so we moved in with my mother and it was party central the whole way.
There was an incredible music scene happening in the inner city of Sydney so we gravitated to that. My sister moved into a terrace house in Darlinghurst. I was in Year 9 at the time. I’d go and stay there and party. I met people who were at East Sydney Tech which is now called the National Art School. I knew I was an artist from the word go and I wanted to go to art school. I did one year of the Art certificate and left because I was so busy just taking drugs, drinking and partying. I dropped out and was just hanging around inner Sydney.
I met some incredible people living in the squats at that time. I met artists who were at Alexander Mackie who is now part of the NSW University, but they were all just hanging out and some of them were using heroin. I remember when someone first stuck a needle in my arm. I wanted it. I wanted to be out of it. I mean I’m an addict and I didn’t know that for a long time.
Someone told me about a squat in Glebe with a spare room. I became really good friends with one of the girls who now lives in Perth. I applied to do a semester in glass at Sydney College of the arts. I then did a minor in Ceramics and I loved it. I still have the first 2 pieces I ever made. I switched to Major in Ceramics and jumped in with a bunch of party animals in the Ceramics department. I obviously rose to that occasion (laughs).
This is when my my Uncle Stan who is an incredible Genealogist, had been doing a massive amount of research through the 80s with no computers or technology. He dumped all this paperwork on our laps of our history in 1988. We’d always known Pop was Aboriginal but nothing was spoken about but there were hints and things he talked about… we used to go up the Hawkesbury in his boat to Dangar Island. This is memories that included Mum back then. Pop had some Maori friends up there who he fished with but the boat was called Bengerang and that was the name of the station his grandfather owned up near Mungindi. His grandfather was a convict who was freed in 1836 at Warialda and travelled to Gomeroi country where he met my Pop’s grandmother, my Aboriginal ancestor and they married there. My Grandmother was white so my mother came from black and white. My Grandmother’s relationship was toxic. She was suicidal. Pop had broken her jaw at one point and they’d split up when my Mum was very young and she had pretty much parented her younger brother. Nanna was a pharmaceutical drug addict so we’d steal her drugs from her bathroom cabinet.
In my lifetime I’ve been in a big decolonising process. It started with Uncle Stan because we had a lot more info than a lot of people in the missions out there. I’m a descendant of the 1% Gomeroi people who survived. It’s huge! I’ve had such an identity crisis. I continued using drugs through the 90s but I was still functioning.
I finished art school which was incredible that I finished my degree and had a studio in Darlinghurst with a girl called Christina. We worked and partied well together. We moved over to this great rental in Newtown living above this art deco service station. It had corinthian columns and this big ball room, incredible. We were there for a couple of years making stuff and there was a ceramics place down the road that had kilns so we could fire our work there. We started doing the markets at The Rocks and a gallery across the road took our pieces and they kept selling.
There was this great shop I’d always loved up Enmore Road. It had been a junk shop with 1930s deco round glass windows with an incredible flat upstairs. It was for rent, really cheap and across the road from the Enmore Theatre. We moved in and made the shop space our studio. We got given an old gas kiln which we plumbed into the back yard and worked. We started selling from a window display and people started buying. It was called Chowk Ceramics which is a Hindi word meaning the intersection of many crossroads, and it’s only in reflection now that I was really thinking of intersectionality which is a thing now. That whole binary thing that I grew up in, black, white, good, bad, it’s all broken down for all of us in all sorts of ways. My identity was breaking down. As I was producing this work, I had people asking — Is this Aboriginal art? It was in my blood. People kept identifying it before I even could.
I was still partying a lot so I had big hangovers working and because I was making money I kept doing it and I got away with it for a very long time. I eventually put down alcohol because I was so out of control with my drinking and I’m really glad I did. I’m lucky to be alive and I haven’t had a drink since, that was 26 years ago. Problem is I found Ecstasy and was using it as a really strong antidepressant. I took that daily for the next 3 years before I ended up in a complete psychosis and was put into Missendon Road Psychiatric facility because I was threatening to kill John Howard. I had just read the stolen generation report which came out in ’96 and we were all waking up to it then. I’ve talked to a lot of people who were taken and no-one knew it was happening on such a mass scale. The people I talked to only thought it was happening to them. It’s just been a huge learning curve for me, like everyone, black and white.
One day this black couple walked into our shop. It was Alana Rose and Gavin Flick and they are Gomeroi people from Moree and Collarenebri. They had a successful shop in Darling Harbour called Gavala which was an Aboriginal cultural centre and they were doing really well through the 90s. The work in our beautiful deco window attracted them in. They wanted us to do some work using her designs for the Sydney Olympics that was coming up. She said to me years later, I felt like I found you. It was so great to share my families story with her. Since then I’m still friends with Gavin’s family.
My grandfather was aspirational. He was Aboriginal looking, so sometimes more than others. He copped a lot of racism but he just swallowed it. His nickname was Palacco. He was a Funeral Director and at the end of his life he came into my shop and bought one of my vases because he wanted an Aboriginal peice. It was for my Grandmother to make amends for what had gone down. She had that till the end of her life and Mum has it now. I understood why he never talked about anything, because it was f#*ken hell to be black.
