I never imagined I’d be the kind of person who wore a suit to work.
When I was nineteen, and a family friend offered me a job—customer service in a corporate call centre in the industrial suburbs of Melbourne—my first reaction was laughter. Me, in a suit? I had a nose-ring and long half-dreadlocked hair. I barely wore shoes! Sandals, if you insisted, but not a suit! I wore the only clothes that a girl my size could find in the shops in those days: flowing hippie dresses that went swish in the wind. Wearing a suit wasn’t really my vibe.
Then again, neither was it my vibe to hang out in the dole office every week being told by some aggressive knob-jockey behind a glass partition that because I was not filling out my job-seeker diary correctly I would not get paid this week. Apparently, writing songs and stories were not jobs, they were hobbies. I needed to ‘get a real job’, and I tried, and kept trying, but Australia was still in the grip of the recession we had to have and a job was not an easy thing to come by, even for someone like me, who had been working in retail since I was fourteen years old.
I was nineteen now, and already worried that I’d left my dreams far too late as it was. Did I really want to work in a call centre?
Let’s just say that things hadn’t gone terribly smoothly since finishing school.
I did not end up staying at Star of the Sea Catholic Ladies College. Couldn’t explain at the time exactly why I needed to leave; just that I did. Something about the uniform, the rules, the bitchiness, the lack of autonomy, the lack of boys—who can say? All I knew was that I was ‘naughty’, getting ‘naughtier’, and although I couldn’t tell you exactly what I longed for (besides a ciggie), I knew I longed for more. Much, much more.
It’s still a mystery to me exactly how my older sister Anna eventually convinced my parents to allow me to attend a school that, at the time, had a reputation for being one of the most progressive alternative liberal-thinking schools in the whole of Australia. Preshil, it was called. Independent, secular, co-educational—everything a girl like me could want. Established in the 1930s by a progressive young lady called Margaret J.R. Little, Preshil was a small but proud school, founded on the motto ‘Courage’. Nestled in between the more conservative private schools in Melbourne’s inner east, it would take me three hours a day on public transport to go to and from Sandringham to Preshil, but after a slightly bumpy start (turns out, contrary to what I’d heard, there were rules at Preshil, and attending classes was one of them), I truly did find my place there. My people too. This is where I met my best friend Defah (pronounced Deeee-fah) and my second family, the Lubitzes. It’s also where I met my first big love—Joffa. The experience of self-determination, the creative support from the teachers, the music program, and the small classes (some of which were held in trees) really did suit me.
Three years later, when I graduated, it was on a high. I’d aced my exams, and I had a mark that would have allowed me to do just about anything I wanted. And what I wanted was to save the world. At the very least, I wanted to do something that mattered, something significant, something that made me feel I was living up to the promise I’d made myself as a child: that I would use my life to make things right.
Given this, it remains a mystery both to me and to my family exactly how I ended up studying … ahem … public relations. I loved my years at Preshil, but let’s just say, careers counselling wasn’t its strong suit, and I believe I may have thought public relations had something to do with … social work? Oh dear. In any case, I was the one who ticked the box, and I was also—three months after beginning the course—the one who signed the papers to defer.
Now free, I decided what I wanted to do was travel, and a rather fabulous year of adventure followed. I spent most of it travelling up and down the east coast of Australia with my guitar (which I could barely play) and my kindergarten friend Zandy in her little Mazda 323, and then did it all again on Greyhound buses with my boyfriend Joffa. We volunteered on organic farms in exchange for board, picked bananas for cash, snorkelled on the Great Barrier Reef, jammed in Byron Bay, slept on the beach in Newcastle, had close encounters with crocodiles and snakes at Cape Tribulation, made pipi chowder on Fraser Island, whale-watched in Hervey Bay, gathered coconuts on Magnetic Island, ate oysters out of a can, drank cask wine out of plastic cups, read Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, wrote the whole book out by hand for fun, learned how to play Cat Stevens songs … this was living. That year was my first taste of true freedom.
But my money soon ran out, and now here I was, broke, and being offered a job.
I already owed my parents much more money than I knew how to earn. They never asked me to repay it, but I was determined to. I wanted to start again. I wanted somewhere to anchor. I wanted my life to begin. And vibe or no vibe, the call centre was the best offer I’d had in quite a while. So after I stopped laughing, I said, ‘Yes, I’ll do it.’
The only catch was this whole ‘You need to wear a suit’ thing, because I wasn’t even sure they made suits in my size. In 1994, in the era of the first true supermodels, off-the-rack clothing stopped at a size 12, or size 14 if
