I grew up in the northern rivers of New South Wales during the 1990s, a time and place characterized by stark contrasts. It was a unique mix of utopian dreams, alternative culture, and social disadvantage. Reflecting on my upbringing in this extraordinary place, I have gained valuable insights into how it has shaped my adult life.
In 2014, I embarked on a journey to capture my past through photography. I witnessed firsthand the devastating consequences of addiction, poverty, and discrimination, and realized that I had been carrying the weight of these burdens throughout my life. Fueled by nostalgia and a longing to reconcile with my history, I repeatedly returned to my hometown, using photography as a means to reconstruct my narrative as an adult and as a mother. The unresolved grief from my youth laid the foundation for my photographic practice.
My ongoing series, “In Australia,” focuses on the lives of adolescents in Lismore, as I remember them. It explores the lasting effects of colonization and the Aquarius era, characterized by drugs, free love, and political rebellion. From a young age, we had an inherent sense of existing outside the boundaries of the law.
Lismore is nestled in a basin on unceded Bundjalung country, surrounded by valleys, dairy farms, hippy communes, and the ancient Gondwana rainforest, before meandering towards the sea. Growing up, my friends came from a myriad of backgrounds that shaped the region, including the original Widjabul Wia-bal people, working-class residents, and alternative hippies from the surrounding hills. Bonded by turbulent home lives and a shared restlessness in our small town, we formed a diverse group, each with our own complex and tender stories.
My memories of those adolescent years are now filled with a sense of freedom that most of us were ill-prepared for. The hippy movement, which many of my friends and I were born into, rejected the conventions, values, and expectations of middle-class society, embracing peace, love, and drugs. Growing up on communes offered idyllic aspects, with unlimited freedom in nature. However, it also meant navigating the fine line between free love and dysfunction, freedom and neglect, and drug use and abuse.
Our parents intentionally rejected structure as a rebellion against their own traumatic childhoods, leaving us unequipped to face the world. With the “ganja” capital of Australia, Nimbin, just down the road, we often found ourselves under surveillance by helicopters and facing police raids on our community. From a young age, we were acutely aware that we lived on the fringes of the law.
Those adolescent years were both liberating and overwhelming. Alongside our typical teenage experiences of smoking, drinking, and skipping school, we also faced darker elements such as domestic violence, addiction, incarceration, and death. Transitioning from the freedom of communes to the excessive and, at times, self-destructive freedom of small-town suburbia was a challenging journey for many of us. But amidst it all, there was a strong sense of belonging, friendship, intoxicating first love, and rebellion against authority.
In 2014, I began incorporating self-portraits into my photography, capturing scenes that loosely depicted my teenage experiences. I also started casting individuals to feature in my photographs, recreating scenarios inspired by my memories. The images were taken at dusk, using the symbolism of sunset to represent the shift into newfound freedom. The landscapes resemble the places where my peers and I discovered our autonomy in the 1990s.
Through this series of images, I explore adolescence while shedding light on how the ideals of the counter-culture movement collided with the boredom and social disadvantages of small-town life. Looking back now, I have gained a deeper understanding of how our childhoods and the environments we inhabit during our adolescence shape who we become.
I have come to realize the profound connections that can emerge from adversity and that beauty and pain can coexist.
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