“I’m a born-and-bred Victorian and have always lived in Melbourne. I used to live in the East and made the move to the West 11 years ago as it’s the closest area to the city where we could afford. All my eastern suburbs friends thought we were crazy as we were crossing the bridge.
When I was growing up the western suburbs were seen as dirty and underprivileged. It wasn’t until I came here, and I saw how vibrant and multicultural it was, that I realized we could have a great family life here. I know all my neighbours, my kids go to a great school, we have terrific cafés and shops in our local area.
I haven’t regretted moving here. I wouldn’t live anywhere else.
I grew up as an only child. I was shy, nerdy and I didn’t have a huge amount of friends. I loved school, which of course did not make me very popular. I’m also pretty physically-challenged, so sport was never going to be an interest. As a result, I became a voracious reader. I spent most of my childhood reading books. I could read a book a day.
My mum was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was 14 and passed away when I was 18. My teenage years were difficult in that sense. I was accepted into Melbourne Uni, pursuing Criminal Psychology, but it was right around the time my mum passed away and I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. I left uni soon after and had to get a job to help support my father, who wasn’t working.
I never went back to uni, but got a job in publishing. I’ve been in publishing for 21 years.
My first job in publishing was at Penguin Books. It was this role that took me behind the scenes on how books are made and all the work that goes into them. I knew then that I wanted to work in publishing for as long as possible.
After Penguin, I moved to Borders in the head office. This was when Borders still had massive stores in Australia, and you could spend hours wandering through them. They used to have couches that you could sit on and just read the books without even having to pay for them. I still miss those stores. After Borders, I thought I would take a break from the publishing industry and worked at DuPont for a period of time. I realised pretty quickly I needed to get back into publishing, and moved to Macmillan, in the education department, focusing on primary and secondary textbooks.
I left Macmillan 11 years ago, and that was the last time I worked for someone else. My home is now my own office, and I am a textbook permissions editor for Elsevier. They publish medical textbooks, and I research the medical images and clear all of their copyright for their textbooks. I’ve seen some very interesting and confronting images that’s for sure.
In September 2017, we went to the United States for a holiday and stayed with friends over there. They introduced us to their favourite BBQ sauce. We liked it so much, we wanted to make our own. My husband and I have always made our own jams, chutney and tomato sauce, so we came home and decided to make our own BBQ sauce.
We spent six months developing the recipes until we were happy with them. The feedback we got was really great. Most of our friends and family went ‘Damn, that’s good’ and said maybe we should sell them. And from there Damn Good Sauce was born.
Damn Good Sauce is made in Melbourne. It has no preservatives, no additives, and is a small batch handmade sauce. It tastes real, with flavour and complexity, not fake like a lot of the sauces you can buy in the supermarket. I cook them in a commercial kitchen in Port Melbourne and hand-bottle and hand-label them. It’s a very labour-intensive job, but a lot of love goes into it.
So far, we have been selling our sauce online and are starting to work with some retailers. We are stocked in specialty butchers, one in Carlton (Skinner & Hackett), one in Parkdale (Char Char Char) and also at the Village Store. We can also be found at Harry & Larry’s in Footscray, Happy Maree café, a winery in Nagambie, and also an online shop (Mat’s Hot Shop). My goal for the rest of this year is to see our sauce stocked in more local retailers around this area.
History is one of my other passions. I find anything that has a story is interesting to me. Old things, in particular, such as jewellery or furniture or artwork all have a story. Who owned it before and what happened in their life? I find that fascinating. I have an antique Japanese wooden shoe locker in my hallway, old perfume bottles from France and an industrial time clock from a factory. All those items were touched by the hands of so many other people before they came to me and all those people have a story. I often wonder what those stories might be.
The Inner West, as it gets more gentrified, it begins to lose a lot of its history – what used to be here, and what it used to be like. Everything looks so cookie cutter now, and it’s important we hold on to things that have meaning and speak to the area.
My kids go to Kingsville Primary School which turns 100 years old in August this year. One of the former teachers, Graeme Hodgart (a fellow history buff) had written an amazing history of the school, titled ‘A School at Kingsville, 1919-2009: 90 years of education’. After talking to the school, we came up with the idea to digitise the book and turn it into a website. I have been working on transcribing Graeme’s book and digging up any other historical items I can find, such as newspaper articles and old photographs to go on the website.
I have come across some terrific historical facts about the school. They used to have open fires in the hallways, to keep the kids warm. Swimming lessons used to consist of the kids lying on the asphalt in the yard to practising their swim strokes. Public swimming pools didn’t exist back then. The school also used to have a bugle and marching band. It’s so important to know the history of the area, our history as people and where we are from.
One particular story I love is one school kid decided he’d had enough of being punished by a strap. He waited until school had finished for the day and then snuck back in and stole all the straps from the classrooms. He took them down to Cruickshank Park, which at the time was a quarry and he threw all the straps into a quarry hole. How brilliant is that, the ingenuity and mischievousness of it.
Both my husband and I love the snow. He is a snowboarder and I like to ski, so there is a distinct rivalry there and we can’t be friends on the slopes. As my husband would say, ‘There are no friends on a powder day!’. My favourite mountain is Falls Creek.
You can find me at Happy Maree for my breakfast and coffee. I’m also at the Sun Theatre, and the Sun Bookshop for books, of course!”
