PART 1: Marks the Beginning of Something
I sit in the car and look at the sleepy street lined with white fences and friendly houses, the evergreen overhanging the familiar street corner. So many times, I have driven down this cul-de-sac to the house my parents brought me home to when I was born. So many times, I have sat wondering what my life would be like if my parents were different, if I were understood and welcomed into this world, and had access to an education that enabled me to thrive, to have opportunities I didn’t have to fight for, and access to a support network.
I have left my twenties and entered my thirties. The feeling of not being so insecure is invigorating. As I walk towards what I can achieve, I feel my worries slipping away. My ambition is stronger than it has ever been. A deep, routed desire to help people fills my body. I have many skills that can aid others on their journey through life, but not in the large impactful way I want to.
Instead, I make a lot of money for companies that already have a lot of money. I seem to be ahead of the times in the way I approach business. Either that or the system we live under doesn’t see logic or proficiency as a viable way of running a business. Only through the prospect of a loss of profit does a company really need me. Facing bankruptcy or a sell-off forces management to change the way they do business.
Countering my inner drive is the reality of financial freedom. The sight of endless possibilities and opportunities without the constraints of monetary pressure was not something I experienced for three quarters of my life. Like sharks in the water, nipping at my feet as I frantically swim towards survival. To be in a place where I can consistently pay my bills on time. Helping friends and family through financial knowledge sharing gives me a feeling of achievement.
Let me tell you a little about myself. Melbourne was my home for four years. I’ve called four states home and have travelled more of Australia than most Australians my age. My free spirit leads me to have a genuine desire to experience and understand how others live. I think, at some point, my ancestors must have been Irish travellers. I understand the desire to move is in my blood. My attempts to settle down by getting married were successful, but buying a house was unsuccessful. Realising that we weren’t supposed to buy a house and attempt a life that didn’t fulfil our souls, i.e., living differently, appealed to us.
A drive to come home to my birth city, Brisbane, where the sun warms you from the inside out, the feeling of being able to frolic outside throughout the year, was appealing. I wanted to feel familiarity again, the feeling of being home. So, I packed up everything and moved interstate from Melbourne. Turmoil surrounded this move: I struggled with mental health and did not understand what was happening to me. I would soon realise in the next year what was truly happening to me. When I left Melbourne, my relationship with my brother became strained, and I still mourn that loss today.
I was the cornerstone that held my family together in this life. When I started unravelling, I was no longer able to sustain the façade I had worked so tirelessly to fabricate, one that I had so valiantly kept for my survival. I started to feel the ground crumbling beneath my feet. I could no longer hold on, and the people I turned to couldn’t help.
I stood my ground on domestic violence and fought for it to be extinguished within my family. This, coupled with my deteriorating mental health, created a perfect potion for disaster. I was left abandoned by my brother. Turning to my familiarity with life, I moved. Sitting, left with all the responsibility, abandoned by my blood family, to carry on, I went home, back to Brisbane.
I did not know what would be waiting for me when I returned to my birthplace. Once I had arrived, I realised I was certainly meant to be back. The reason for my arrival would soon be known to me in a mere few months’ time.
I fell back to where I was exposed to the underbelly of a life lived before: housing commission. Being thrown back into that world, I abruptly realised how far I had come. Being surrounded by the most demoralised people, their survival depending on some form of substance. The staircase to the unit I was staying at while I got myself back on my feet was covered with litter, faeces and syringes. I felt the heaviness of the unit block as I woke up and went to sleep, like a spiralling dream I couldn’t escape, seeing glimpses in the screen door of women’s faces shuffling past, trying to turn tricks for the next hit, the stench of urine which permeated my senses, people knocking on the door day and night two doors down, and relentless scurrying down the corridor.
Walking to my new job each day, I reminded myself of what I had: the accomplishments of more than most have while being jerked back to reality upon seeing the homeless sleeping on benches. I would walk into a brand-new building filled with clean, organised, straight desks with matching chairs.
I realised I could get out quicker if I made some calls to loan money.
I lasted three and a half weeks in the housing commission block before I walked into my new rental. What a great motivator it was. I spent four years in the unit, and so many fond memories were made and stored for later years. Norman Park unit was the place I brought my fractured mind, thinking I couldn’t crumble any further, deciding to forge forward to create a life filled with warmth, homeliness and love, establishing friendships and so desperately wanting a community to barricade me from my internal pain.
Upon fostering a home and turning it into my sanctuary filled with plants, my mission was to walk into my unit each day from work and feel relaxed, to feel peace. I fell in love with my unit. The longer I stayed, the more I loved it. It was mine. I found it, paid for it, turned it into a home and maintained it.
In my eyes, an example of success was being able to pay all my bills and rent on time. I could buy fresh produce if I chose to. I had the money to buy meat and seafood. If my car (moped, I sold my car and bought a moped) broke down, I would have savings to fix it. If I was sick, I would have the money to buy medication. These are examples of things I struggled with over my life, at different times of my life, I didn’t have the money. I know others also struggle with these things as well. I say this to my husband constantly because we see the world differently. We are successful because we can live without financial pressures. This means so much to me; it gives me the freedom to flourish.
Moving from the housing commission into my own rental flat gave me an opportunity for a new beginning. The flat was a two-bedroom bathroom place. It was a ground flat that had a sweeping balcony, which connected to a beautiful sanctuary at the back, with palm trees hanging over the retainer wall. It was my sub-tropical paradise. I enjoyed every moment. I did not take it for granted.
I lived an enjoyable year in Norman Park before the blocked memories reconnected within my brain. My path was always going to end up there, like a wicked destiny that returned me to the place where it all happened. Here, I was forced to face the dark past my mind had so cleverly hidden away to protect me for my survival. Driving down familiar childhood streets, the houses lined like shots fired straight back from my memory.
It was a dark night of events that I was forced to return to; I had lost so much I could easily fall into a concoction of self-pity laced with disaster. Instead, I just chose to lose my mind every so often and hope I would come back stronger.
The trauma of my life still cloaks me like a heavy scent of psychosis. It is always never far away.
The flashing sun that peeks through the gaps in the fence still haunts me. I refuse to go under Queensland houses now. (Queensland (QLD) homes are renowned for their unique architectural feature of being elevated on stilts, serving as a protective measure against frequent flooding. It is also common for people to use slates of wood with sizeable gaps, which not only allows sunlight to enter but also provides storage opportunities underneath the houses). The slates under QLD homes evoke a strong sense of fear within me, stemming from the traumatic experience of the first abuse that occurred in this location. Consequently. The burden of my memory still strangles me into panic.
I let myself daydream; I let my imagination take over as I watch my younger self play in the front yard. I experience a flashback of the tricycle and my large, effervescent smile taking up the lives of my parents. As I allow myself to drift back, images, like photos, flash through my mind, creating the world I lived through but using what Morningside looks like today. The suburb is a combination of houses constructed in the 1970s and new homes in place of old.
I come back to our family home, and I sit in the car. The house we lived in was a mixture of brick and wood. I smile, thinking of myself on the patio, a huge grin on my face as I ride my tricycle. I observe each detail as if I were living it, bringing a world I can’t remember into reality. The house sat on orange bricks perched over the ground with a crawl space beneath it. This style of house litters Brisbane suburbs still. It had wooden floors covered in off-cream carpet and a little veranda with terracotta tiles enclosed by steel bars to keep my little self in and the world out. A concrete path led to the street. The house sat under a beautiful, lush green tree which fell around it. Garden beds filled with sub-tropical plants and paw-paw trees lined the path, making the house a very welcoming place to visit. The stories told by my mother were that when a big downpour of rain would happen, the water would come up to the floorboards.
I sit looking at the new home which has been built in place of our family’s first home. It is a white, new, double-story house raised a meter above the ground. It is a big rectangular house with no character. It looks weird, nestled alongside all the other homes. An enormous box four-wheel drive sits in the driveway.
The suburb has gigantic trees with fanned green leaves on street corners, which makes it look sleepy and peaceful. I sit and look down the street, imagining the stories told to me as I was growing up, wandering away with the neighbourhood looking for me, and my parents finding me at the corner store eating lollies, or what my life might have been like if my parents never moved and stayed for an ordinary life of stability.
I am always filled with joy when I think of myself as a small child, of the innocence and laughter I brought to everyone’s life. People say you are a by-product of your environment. I have proven that old tale so wrong. That young girl still lives inside of me: she who talks to everyone who passes smiles at strangers and loves unconditionally. She gets excited about life’s little pleasures.
I let my imagination run wild; I have learned that my imagination is my sanctuary, the place I hide away from life. Often, my mind wanders to my younger self — the little girl with a blonde bob and a huge smile. I possess the ability to converse effortlessly with strangers. I enjoy human interaction, and my inquisitive personality enjoys connecting with other humans and finding out about them.
The reality of life has been very different. I found out the hard way. It is all how you look at it, never how you play. Dad’s profession was a steel fixer. It is a tough job, back-breaking. What a steel fixer does is tie and lay all the steel before the pouring of concrete into any structural building. In buildings, it gives the support to the concrete that it needs to stay up, not fall. Anything with concrete requires steel to be laid to give it strength.
Once my dad decided hard work wasn’t his thing, my father went into being a con artist like the old tricksters back in the day. With access to any drug he wanted, alcohol poured from dusk till dawn. The reality of worlds clashing with one another, blending like water and oil. I can still hear my father’s voice echoing in the still of night, “It is all in the threads,” as he laughed and swiftly left. I took his wisdom and used it in my way. A real player in life, my father was.
While on a job, my dad fell down a lift shaft, falling three stories down a high-rise building, unfortunately hitting the ground. I am amazed he lived through the fall and walked away. He sustained many injuries from the fall. I am unsure if he fell on purpose or not. I know he got a considerable payout from it, though.
We were living in Bundaberg when my dad received his insurance payout from the fall at work. People primarily know Bundaberg for its farming of sugarcane. You can drive in any direction and have field after field of four-meter-high green cane.
Bundaberg is where my first brother was born, a little bundle of joy; my two-and-a-half-year-old self was so excited when he was born. I was a big sister. I ran down the hospital hall in my pink tew, telling everyone who would listen, “I have a little brother”. This love for my brother still exists deep within me. I have always enjoyed being an older sister who loves and cares for my four siblings.
When it came time to harvest, the farmers would ignite spectacular infernos to burn off the unwanted trash or smut from the sugar cane. A roaring fire of burning cane fields could be seen. These were images of subtropical rural Australia. The burn off would cause large black clouds of smoke, covering the township with each burn off season. Leaving the town covered in ash and cinders and whatever second-hand pollution the smoke and ash contain.
A combination of realising how polluted the town was from the burn off season and coming into the payout prompted my parents to decide they would leave Bundaberg.
1. Travelling Around Australia in a bus
With money in the bank, my free-spirited parents bought a bus decked out for a living. We were excited to find bunk beds, along with a double bed tucked away in the back, a kitchen, and a small bathroom. The kitchen was lovely; it had a four-burner gas stove, a sink and a normal-sized fridge. Under the benches were shelves that we used for storage, with curtains for doors. Every space was useful and used. I vividly remember the steps at the front of the bus, which led to an old glass-paned door that folded inside because I fell down them so many times. We called the bus Aussy Crawl. Shaped like a big white rectangle, Aussy Crawl looked like it had been driven out of the ’80s. Midway along one side were three big stripes coloured red, light blue and navy blue; on the other side, those striped colours ran vertically down the middle of the bus.
My parents also purchased a Nifty Fifty, a little moped, that my dad and I went everywhere on when we stopped in towns. This was in the early ’90s when it seemed normal to take children on mopeds. Today, you can go to Asian countries and see people carrying entire families on mopeds. While I was zooming around with my dad, my mum took my brother with her on her push bike. My mum and dad loved this time; they both still speak fondly of our travels, and our family had a lot of fun.
Even though we were constantly travelling and moving from place to place, my mum always made sure that I went to playgroups all over Australia. She would call before arriving in the next town. Most times, the mums from the local playgroups would come and pick us up and drop us back at the bus, Aussy Crawl. The mothers across Australia were fantastic to my mum and me, a testament to a mother’s natural nature.
Whenever I sat in the front seat of the Aussy Crawl, especially when I was a little girl, it felt like I was flying. I would be sitting so high on the bus. I remember going down the steep hills, thinking we would fall into the depths of the Earth, as both sides of the road were covered in Australian bush. It was magical driving through the hilly green Australian bush as a child.
It took our family three years to travel around Australia. We ended our trip on the Sunshine Coast. I was three years old when we started off on our journey. What a way to start life.
