“Mum was born here but left when she was a kid, as her father had a nervous breakdown and her Mum moved with her kids to Tamworth. I was born in Dubbo and we moved to Gunnedah when I was 1. Dad worked for the State Emergency Services. He left my mum, my sister and I when I was 6. He met my Stepmother who worked for the Red Cross. It was just before Christmas, he took the car and moved to Perth to live with her. Supposedly he was moving in with a friend who had a spare room and he told that story right up until my Stepmother died last year. The true story came out at her funeral even though we knew all along.
My poor mum hadn’t worked for years as she’d been raising us. We moved to Werris Creek and rented a little house near my grandparents. Mum got a job at Medicare in Tamworth and I went to the local school. We’d go to our grandparents early morning to get ready for school. My Nan would do my piggy tails, one on top of my head and one on the side and I’d go to school like that. It was hard for Mum. She couldn’t be there for my sister’s first day at school because it was her first day at her job which she asked to start a day later. They said ‘Do you want the job or not? We never saw Mum cry even though it was so tough for her. It was hard for us kids too. I idolised my dad and we never saw him. We went to Perth for 3 weeks that year and that was it for a long time.
Mum found a place in Tamworth. A year later we got a housing commission place where she stayed for 35 years. She’s only just moved out to look after my 101 year old Grandmother. I went to school in Tamworth. I was getting picked on and didn’t really like it there. My best friend had red hair so we had germs. Kids can be pretty cruel. I lived in the Library and my friend and I would write fantasy stories about being girl detectives and pretend to be witches. We even made up our own alphabet and had secret names. We were geeky kids and the other kids thought we were weird. I was really affected by my parents divorce.
My Dad moved to Sydney and married my stepmother. She was pregnant with my little sister. I was angry and running away all the time and taking my anger out on my mum, blaming her for Dad leaving. She was working full time and called my Dad saying she wasn’t coping with me. Dad showed up and took me back to live with him and my Stepmother in Sydney without asking my Stepmother. My sister was born 4 months later then my brother a year later.
My stepmother was difficult at times. I used to pretend everything was ok but it wasn’t. I remember her parents bailing her up for the way she treated me and me totally defending her.
My father trained Trotters so I was lucky to have a horse. He was into me being a horsey girl and I was obsessed with horses anyway. I used to help him with foaling and training. At 11 I got a little pony called Smokey who had just been gelded and broken in. He was a little bastard. He used to scrape me off under trees, buck me off but I learnt to ride well because of him and I adored him.
Dad applied for a job in Scone as the Executive Manager of the Australian Stock horse society and got it so at 14 we moved to Scone. We lived on a big sheep and cattle farm and I got a better horse and retrained rescue horses and competed in shows and stock horse events. I could ride all day and never see anyone which was good because it was really unhappy at home.
My dad never drank when he was with my mum because his dad and his grandmother were alcoholics and Mum didn’t drink. He was in a band and they’d put a glass of milk on his piano. He started drinking with my stepmother and obviously had the gene for it so he went downhill. I can remember getting up at 5am for a ride and seeing Dad sitting there working with a cigarette and a Scotch. It got pretty bad. Dad was big on physical punishment, big on taking his belt off. He couldn’t handle being defied or disobeyed in any way.
I had no-one because I was the spare kid. I think my stepmum was struggling with mental health, they were both drinking too much. She was very emotionally abusive then he’d get physically abusive and I was the obvious scapegoat. I thought my mum didn’t want me because Dad sort of led me to believe that. Dad was a very charismatic man and all I wanted growing up was for him to think I was wonderful. He worked as a Journalist at times so he could write. Dad wanted me to succeed which kind of took the joy out of things I loved because the pressure would be on, like with my horses and my writing. I would basically lose my passion. He wanted me to be the next Jana Wendt whereas I was into writing stories and poetry. It was drummed into me really that I was not good enough no matter how much I achieved. Toward the end it became extreme and people noticed.
We had a Scottish girl come over on a working holiday to stay. My parents went away and that was the first time I got drunk. I was 16 and she was early 20’s. She said they are trying to make you feel like it’s you but this is not you, it’s them! It was huge to hear that. I never talked to anyone about it. I remember checking with a friend once asking if she thought parents should hit their kids and her sort of agreeing with it but she had no idea that I was being knocked to the floor. I think the emotional stuff was worse than the physical stuff though. I eventually retreated into myself and didn’t speak unless I was spoken to at home. I’d hide in my room, do my chores and ride my horse.
At 17 I started to stand up to them. I had a blow up with my stepmother where she hit me and I hit her back. That was the first time and she screamed at me to get out. I don’t think she really meant it but I packed my bags and left. I went to a friends and rang my mum who was hysterical as she’d gone all night not knowing where I was. That was a crazy night. It had been raining and I had to walk for ages through fields of rustling Rapeseed. I’d just been reading ‘It’ so every squelch and rustle was the freaking clown coming to get me. (laughs) Mum told me to come to her place. From there I stayed with an artist and her child which was crazy too. I ended up finding a room at a friend’s racing stable. I was still doing my HSC and I worked in local shops and exercised horses. I did my HSC and got into Uni.
My best friend and I moved to Redhead to go to Newcastle Uni. I was doing a Communications degree. I felt so free. It took me a couple of years to unpack what had happened to me. You think that stuff is normal because its all you know but then you realise it’s not normal. Dad lost his job and ended up in Tamworth working as a Photo Journalist. He eventually had a heart attack and two strokes. He’s still here but he’s no longer himself. I went through my 20’s hoping for a relationship with him but that took that away. We talk on the phone for a couple of seconds now and then and he tells me he loves me. I did talk things out over a bottle of scotch with my stepmother eventually and when I went to Tamworth to visit Mum I would stop in and see them. My stepmother always sent Christmas presents to my kids. I think they just weren’t really handling this whole life thing and I was the collateral damage.
I didn’t do great at Uni. I met a lot of people who were like me and people who thought in ways I’d never thought of thinking. People who were doing things I’d never been exposed to before. I had always hung out with the music crowd and was writing poetry but to land in Newcastle in the 1990 recession, everyone was a uni student, or unemployed. Everyone was political and creative and there was an amazing live music scene. I moved into a crazy terrace house in the inner city with a guy called Jake. We were all taking lots of acid and ecstasy, smoking cones living right on the beach, deep into experimenting with drugs and all this music I’d never heard before like The Smiths, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Stone Roses and then Nirvana and Sonic Youth. We were like, let’s try everything, let’s do everything and I totally bombed out of uni. Jake was lovely and anchoring through all of this for me.
At 19 I got a job with a travelling sales crew. I was working at the time as a rose lady, dressed in a Victorian dress selling roses in restaurants and night clubs. That was a crazy job. I was young and gorgeous and had to deal with all the dickheads groping. I’ve still got scars down between my breasts where they grabbed roses out of my basket and stuck them down the front of my dress. They had points on the end of the plastic cones. It wasn’t a romantic job you had to be pretty tough. Anyway, I went off travelling selling Spray Kleen which was a random job but we got to see Melbourne, Darwin, Cairns, Mt Isa, lots of places. It was a great experience. I went back to Newcastle after travelling for a year and ended up moving in with jake again on Church St and resumed working for the rose business for the next 12 years. Eventually I ended up taking over the business.
Thinking back I think I had PTSD because I remember saying to friend that I don’t think I feel things properly. It was all in my head and not my heart. Even when I was sad it felt like I was acting sad, not really feeling sad. I started having anxiety attacks. My friend and I bought some pot while we were tripping which was really strong. Newcastle pot was all hydro and it messed up lots of peoples heads. Heaps of people had mental issues from it. The girl we got it from said – Go easy as it’s super strong! But we thought we were invincible and smoked a lot of it. I had my first anxiety attack and after that the attacks came randomly and I couldn’t breathe. I’d get stuck places thinking I’d pass out. I’d hallucinate and see things that weren’t there. One night my sister took me to hospital because my lips and finger tips were turning blue due to lack of oxygen. They hooked me up and said I was having a panic attack. I’d never heard of them before. I went to a counsellor who said — ‘The first thing you need to know is no-one has ever died from a panic attack’ which was the most important thing anyone could have said to me. I would feel like I was dying. I learned how to accept the feelings and not fight it and they were never as bad after that. Gradually the space between got bigger so it’s been years now.
I met David who was the little brother of a close friend and he was in a band that I was really into. I lived in a basement flat in Church St and he moved into the upstairs with some mates. We sort of knew each other and at my sisters 19th birthday party we struck up a conversation about music and we never stopped talking. I was still living with Jake but David and I were hanging out all the time. I totally had a crush on him. I loved his hands. We would make little recordings together on a four track and write and talk and talk. We decided to become pool sharks and got pretty good and would go out and play for money. We discovered so much music together like Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart – stuff we were really excited about. Jake was really lovely but he couldn’t go where I needed to go. It was awful hurting him but David and I connected strongly.
I was seeing David and early on in that relationship I fell pregnant. I decided not to have the baby and it really messed me up. I was full of grief and guilt. I was 22 and I had no-one to talk to about it. Heaps of my friends had terminations and had gotten on with their life but I wasn’t fine. It took me 15 years to reconcile myself with that.
Lot’s of my friends were using smack and it was around then that I tried it for the first time. I was always the try anything once girl but it just did it for me. Everything I was going through from childhood to then, it just made me comfortable. It’s not like you get addicted straight away so I just dabbled in it. I was back at Uni doing a BA majoring in English Literature and Creative Writing, minoring in History and doing lots of other stuff. It gradually snuck up on me over a year or so. Obviously the more you’re doing it the more you are hanging out with the friends who are doing it and the whole lifestyle we were all living was pretty rock and roll.”