“I want to start by saying I feel very humbled by this. I think everybody has extraordinary lives within ordinary life and that’s how I see mine. I feel I’ve been luckier than some and that’s always a good thing.
I was born at the Mater Misericordiae Catholic Hospital in Crows Nest and I was one of six. It was Cammeraygal land. As a kid I watched the city growing around me. We lived in St Leonards so our play area was North Sydney, Balls Head, Waverley and places like that. Just this week I’ve been thinking about the different carvings and structures around at that time that indicated the traditional people. We went to St Leonards Church for Mass and I started schooling in Naremburn then onto Our Lady of Dolours in Chatswood as did all my sisters. The boys went to Saint Pius.
Life was simpler then as in weekends you were hunted out the door in the morning and home when the street lights were coming on. This was middle of last century and because there was a lot of building and development happening around the city life was a great adventure. The holes in the ground drilled out for the foundations were filled with water so that’s where we swam. It was all very dangerous and risky but that’s what we did. My memory of that time was coming home dirty on a blistering hot day and we’d have a sun shower of rain to cool things off. We don’t really see that anymore.
We walked to school and by the time I was 8 I was walking a kilometre to catch a train to school on my own carrying my little Glo-bite suitcase with blisters on my hands. Now I wouldn’t let my Grandson cross the road on his own. As much as life was simpler, I think kids were mostly seen and not heard. I think we weren’t as cared for as we could have been.
Home life was not a happy place. My father worked away including overseas so he was absent a lot and my mother was trying to manage a lot of children and not well. I guess It’s suffice to say that now as a mature age woman I can view all of that in a more compassionate lens but not so much then and the years following.
I know it’s almost a cliche now but I think what made life so much more difficult was being schooled by Nuns. The majority were quite harsh and quite cruel women so you couldn’t complain about what was happening at home because they’d smack you for being disrespectful. You couldn’t tell home about the Nuns because that would cause blame or shame so as a little child I was caned. I wasn’t a naughty kid, I became a naughty teenager but as a little girl if you didn’t know how to spell something it was a reason to be caned or humiliated….…So home was a lot of intimidation and put down and school was the same. I’ve thought a lot about this too — all the bullying that happens now for kids. For me in that time I have no recollection of any of us being mean or nasty to each other as kids. I’ve often said, I think it’s because the Nuns were our bullies and we as kids had to protect each other. In the late 60’s the Nuns were instructed to stop beating us so then we were just smacked around the legs with rulers. You had the fear in you always.
I finished high school, left home the week after and found work immediately as we did in those days. I worked in a funky boutique and it was the 70’s so it was wild times. It was then that I started to learn about womens liberation which is now what we call Feminism. That was ringing true for me and it was also a product of the times. We left home and school being treated a particular way and then we had women speaking up about the treatment of women. We were always at risk of being picked up, being assaulted, relationships were like that because you only saw it from that submissive point of view. Needless to say I didn’t last long in a number of those relationships. I didn’t like the way the fellas were treating the girls so I was trying to get the girls to speak up for themselves so then I was labelled as Lesbian. I couldn’t win there so I thought…Why not!
I remember going to Oxford St, you could sneak into bars at 15. I met my first real life Drag Queen at a little bar called French’s and ended up at a party at The Crown Hotel with a lot of Gay boys and it was so fun. There was so many fantastic bars and there was drugs, sex and rock and roll if you wanted it. Alternative to that was a lot of hanging out with the Hippies form the Northern Beaches. I remember parties where the bands would play in the garage. Some of those band went on to become huge like Midnight Oil. I remember you’d be smoking big doobies in the car and the car would be full of smoke. It was like a Cheech and Chong movie. Unless you were erratically driving, no-one pulled you over. I loved those days. Meanwhile I just kept working. Life was full and fun but it was tough too because there was that sense of having to look after yourself from an early age.
I had a couple of babies. I had my first at 21. I was what has been, and is described as a Lipstick Lesbian because I had long hair and I like to wear makeup. I liked women because I like women. I was somewhat confused by what I viewed as Lesbian in some ways. To jump into now it’s a wonderful and exciting time because we have more fluidity with sexuality which I rejoice in. We can dress anyway and we can identify in a number of different ways. For such a long time it was closeted or you could only name yourself in one way. For me, I looked a particular way, I had a boy child and I had Lesbians saying to me…Well you’re not really a Lesbian which sort of messed with my head. All I knew was I didn’t want the Hetero life. I’d tried it and I cared for him deeply but I couldn’t be somebody’s wife. I had to leave and that didn’t go down well with everybody but that’s a whole other story.
I left with a bag of baby clothes and the clothes on my back. It wasn’t nice. I moved to a little flat in Roseville, worked part time and moved to the Eastern Suburbs. I had my second son a few years later. He and his Dad have a good relationship. Consequently I have one son who is a very manly man and one son who is very gentle. They are great guys and good men. I feel proud of both of them. One son is here in town with an 8 year old and the other son and his partner live in Sydney. They have 4 children so I’m a Grandma to 5.
I started to study so I could get better paid jobs and I fell into community work. I remember having a young child and walking into a family service and saying…Please give me something to do. That woman became a Mentor to me. I ended up running a womens group and teaching jewellery making. I found babies and mothering quite boring and laborious. I think I was a good enough mother with my first and I was much better with my second but with my first I didn’t have a clue. I wasn’t mothered particularly well so I didn’t know what that meant. It gave me an understanding when I got into that work about what young parents need. They need to be taught how to parent because if they haven’t had it, they don’t know. Threaded through all of this is guilt and shame that we were fed on by the Nuns, that you were never good enough and that you’d never amount to anything, again which was part of the rhetoric of the 50’s to the 70’s. You were just expected to get married and have children. My father initially found that difficult because I didn’t want to marry and I’ve never wanted to and the irony is I’m a Marriage Celebrant now. I think it’s great for others(laughs). It’s just never been my mojo.”