Some of the worst people I have ever met are celebrities.
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Starlight and stardust fell from heaven, illuminating him. It was one of those rare wide-open spaces in London, We were far from the wide lavender-colored Jacaranda-lined streets of Sydney. We were lost and trying to find a venue. People were laughing and skylarking. Someone jumped on a fence; there was laughter. It was high summer, and our spirits were higher. The air embraced us with its warmth. Back then, we all seemed to get along.
Of the six or seven men there, he drew my attention. He was an alpha male drawing on palpable strength as he spoke his existence into being. As he spoke over his life, he spoke he dreams into being. I knew he would do amazing things. I knew, I just knew. I just knew. He was in danger though and he didn’t realise. I had to sabotage all attempts for help to save their shot at making it big.
They epitomized the elegance, beauty, and cool alternative vibe of the time. If I had a moment to take a snapshot, this would be it. I was walking forward laughing, enjoying myself, but I could sense someone behind me. As I turned around, I looked back instead of looking forward. He beckoned me over to him. He had a baseball cap on and was walking alone. To the outsider, he looked like an outsider, like a loner. I felt sorry for him. I walked back to him to see if he was OK.
Before earning my master’s degree I had earned a degree in poetry and literature. Mine was a pure degree in poetry and literature, with only one language course and Philosophy 101. This was Sydney University, where the next generation of writers, poets, editors, and people who wanted to be in the publishing and music industry earned their degrees. It was the height of grunge, almost everyone appeared to look poor, and there were ripped stockings and bluestockings in Woolley Lecture Theatre.
I was wearing a tiny nineties hipster skirt that was so short that you could see it grazing my cheeks. I used to wear it at university with tights. I purchased it from an indie brand on the top level of the Strand Arcade. I bought everything from the shops on level 3. What I didn’t know was that you could glimpse my backside as I walked. Back then, women were forced to be waifs, heroine chic was in, we had to be rail thin for men to think we had attractive bodies, regardless of our ethnicity. Curvy wasn’t considered fashionable. I was a tiny 57 kilos, but I was told that I should be 43 kilos. What they sought and admired was an idealized Anglo-Saxon fair-skinned look with blue eyes and tiny features. No one liked exotic. It was as if men had universally decided that what Anglo-Saxon men saw as beautiful was the only body type and look that could considered to be desirable.
I had travelled through Paris a couple of years before with a friend from Australia who is mixed race. She was admired in Australia, but as a gamine and darker-skinned woman Parisian men went crazy for her. For me it was Italy, Greece, and the Middle East. Paris too, even though I wasn’t rail thin. Parisians were used to seeing other women who looked like me, and I was mistaken for them. Highly educated women from Eastern European countries flocked to Paris, newly free after the recent fall of the Berlin wall. They wore glasses, and dressed in sophisticated muted colours, they rented tiny studio apartments while studying at university. They weren’t overdone. Now my race is equated with sexiness, back then it wasn’t.
I fell into a sophisticated crowd there, with some Australian’s who I had met at the Embassy. I wish I had stayed in Paris. I should never have returned to London after Venezuela. There was a man there, two men, who wantonly destroyed my life so they could get away with stealing my work. To them I was just a random Australian. Like a backpacker who goes missing when a sociopath murders them. One of the ostensibly rank-and-file women who is attacked abroad. I was held hostage one night. It was easy to inure a woman who was travelling and far from home. I didn’t have family there and had no one to check up on me, I didn’t have anyone to enforce the law on my behalf or to ensure that I had basic standard human rights. The one who made all the money from the music and forced labour he attempts to spread the blame now. Of course he does, stealing pays well, stealing makes people rich. He pretends he told everyone. Everyone in music knows that a line comes from here or there sometimes, or a song name, but not entire songs, entire verses, not hundreds of them and they don’t prevent people from being protected under labour laws, in our country you can’t prevent people from joining a union. You can in England.
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I wasn’t the only woman he inured. Even though it was just him and he is the sole beneficiary now. He made millions from forcing me to work against my will. I did the work, had a degree in literature and poetry, I finished school, I read growing up, I worked while at university and I am the one to pay my university loans. The man who agreed to lie for him, is dead now. It became more dangerous for me once the man who agreed to lie for him died. His alibi agreed to lie for him. His alibi and the man he was going to blame it on, he’s dead. He is now caught, and he can’t scapegoat the person with less power anymore.
Paris had a place for me, I had context there. Australia only had one type of look, one type of beauty, England had a couple more so these men imported their racism from the colonies. The men would not allow the woman of colour who I was in Paris with come to England to the music industry. They only wanted white women and trashy white women from poor backgrounds at that. They once asked a woman from Toorak if she would do the orgies with them. She was tapped on the shoulder as if it were something she should be proud of. She was very attractive and well spoken, but dressed in funky 90’s fashion. She tittered and covered her hand with her mouth, politely declining the offer. The trash would do their orgies for them, and because they did, they got the most exciting thing that had ever happened to them to happen over and over again, to go backstage at gigs and do whatever the men wanted. They knew what it took to get backstage. One asked me to do the orgies, the other said I was too special. I was revolted and couldn’t wait to escape the slime. It felt like there was slime on me when I left. They discussed me as if I was not even present, when they wanted a private conversation they tried to abuse and traumatise me first so that I dissociated; it was dissociation for control. Abusive people, people who demand a certain, they are known for dissociating women who are traumatised. Its been 30 years now they will never pay and they evade being charged with bribery, extortion and fraud, and paying the requisite taxes in Australia. This has come at the cost of the Australian taxpayer.
The funniest thing about this is everyone knows he can’t write his own lyrics, every time he does the critics pan them. The hilarity begins with looking at his early work and how pathetic it is when compared to work he wrote all by himself. All on his lonesome. It isn’t easy to have hits across multiple artists, multiple years, multiple songs. He hasn’t but he is the one who lied and took the money from all them while holding under duress.
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In Australia, only Anglo-Saxon people become internationally famous. It is all they look for, this was before movies, television, and music started to reflect the many colours and cultures of society. It is fairly well known that Australia’s lower class Australians harass foreigners, being so far away from the rest of the world, it is just not considered to be normal for them to be acquainted with foreign culture. Some, and those poor women, were certainly of that ilk, just didn’t understand it. They liked women who didn’t understand things.
As for me, it was lovely to be away without someone enquiring every day or two, “Where are you from?” Australians even tease our top sports stars if they don’t fall into line, they can be racially harassed and abused and given outsider status. Race can always be used against someone in Australia. Anglo-Saxon is “right” and “better.” Even if someone is wealthier, from an Asian dynasty, European aristocracy, or Middle Eastern royalty if they are not understood, they are not recognised. People here used to feel compelled to “teach” other cultures to be like them. To be like a superior culture.
I wasn’t bullied at school at all, it was fairly common to have other ethnicities around at Dural. These were gentry, the horsey polo-playing people or racehorse breeding families. Double-barrelled, or highly connected in Sydney, top professionals, top two hundred, top one percent. There was nothing showy about Dural. I dressed in jodhpurs and riding boots on the weekend, before donning Sunday best for church.
There were very few racists at our school because the area was well-heeled and the others were Christian and didn’t believe in racial harassment, on the whole. It was always the lower class people or the poorer ones who lived in the poorer areas, their families weren’t very sophisticated. A few outliers were racists, but they were generally the poorer people, who hadn’t traveled outside Australia. I was an accepted member of the student body. I had never had any trouble at school until one of those girls, she wasn’t from Dural, she was a non-descript suburb. She was jealous that a daughter of a old money Russian refugee had the gall to have Arabian horses. She was determined to not finished school and said her family was going to find her someone rich to marry.
Her dad is an ideas man she said. On her first day she asked for me for a large of money. She was universally disliked, disparaged, teased daily, called a nerd, trash and an outsider, but as she regarded herself to be a “true Australian” and that others weren’t, the little outsider started harassing people from other countries.
As the wealthiest girl at school, she decided that I needed to hear that Australia should bring back its White Australia Policy, which was abolished in 1972. I was born here but was told to go back to Ukraine. She hailed from a poorer area, a nondescript suburb on a train line. She wasn’t happy that someone like me lived in one of the best streets, with most powerful people in all of Sydney.
The people in our area were highly educated, well-traveled, world citizens. She was the very worst of what Australia had to offer. She despised me because I lived in that area. My old money Russian aristocratic grandmother had taught me to be like her and not like parochial Australians. People from Dural more or less understood, they knew about the revolution. They knew my great-grandfather had been put up against a wall and shot.
I had very good examples everywhere/ My grandmother taught me to think outside Australia, to not be parochial and to not be provincial. It was a protected area. It was easy there; I didn’t really know that other Australians weren’t as sophisticated. We were all naïve. I had language lessons just down the road at a Ukrainian woman’s house, her daughter had now left home but her horses were still there. When I was very young my pony had escaped when we were in Europe and my grandmother found him at a Ukranian’s house, in the next street. Her property had been owned by a famous botanist. There were beautiful gardens.
I think that is one of the reasons that I stood out. Some Australian’s just couldn’t stand being usurped by foreigners. She told me daily to “give Australia its money back, refugees shouldn’t have money, you have taken Australian money,” and that now her father had to work harder because “you foreigners work harder and now we have to work hard like the rest of the world.” It was the 80’s, the dollar was being floated, she added that Keating was “ruining the country making Australia like the rest of the world” instead of “easy for some” and “difficult for the foreigners.” “We don’t like that it is changing, now its equal and we have to work hard, and you foreigners work too hard for our liking.”
She boasted in the hallway between ethnic slurs, the N word, aboriginal slurs and every vile word that a racist could say back then, that “Dad has said to not say anything racist outside the home anymore because there were so many talented “black” people in the music industry now.” I didn’t think I looked a bit like a woman of colour but I was asked if I am quite a bit. I like anything that gives me context and a time and place and I was taught to respect the culture so I thought it was kind of cool. My grandmother had a term, it was “original inhabitants”, she saw Australia as being a little like South Africa, she couldn’t understand why The Stolen Generation happened, saying what if the government came in and said that they knew how to raise her daughter better than she did. As a refugee, she said things like this, “a child should always be with their mother.” She later expressed her devotion and thanked Prime Minister Bob Hawke personally. I have a photo of her standing next to him drinking tea from a teacup. “You don’t what a country like this means to someone like me.” “Thank you.”
She kept begging my family for money, as my father was supplying money and invested in the fledgling movie industry at the time. Her father was in TV, and “had some ideas” they weren’t accepted in our circles and they didn’t like that. Their racism alone would have precluded them from being accepted, as you have to do something very well to get into those circles. I wondered if they would make a racist show with the money so said no and refused to make any introductions. They were making racist comments about the kids show that they were making at the time. You don’t give money to people who are harassing you.
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I am ethnic and had an exotic look when I was young; it wasn’t the typical look; it was just me, and it wasn’t the in thing. They kept othering me due to my ethnicity and my look. I had fooled myself into thinking that wearing skirts low slung on my hips would hide the dramatic difference between a tiny waist and the butt that women now work hard to achieve. I wondered why I seemed to be getting so much attention. I didn’t realize that when behind me, everyone could see the bottom of my butt peaking out from under my skirt. It seemed strange to me, that the men of colour in that group kept asking if I was a woman of colour.