WOW: Wise Older Women
“Wisdom That Grows Louder with Time.”
Welcome to WOW: Wise Older Women a podcast dedicated to raising the status of ageing women and dismantling the narratives that silence them.
Here, older women speak with authority, beauty, depth, and fire. Their stories challenge, inspire, and illuminate.
In a world that too often ignores, isolates, or diminishes older women, we choose to listen. To revere and celebrate the brilliance, courage, humour and tenderness they bring along with plenty of high‑vibration wisdom carried in their words.
These conversations aren’t just stories, each one of them is a teaching. A personal map from the past, forging the way ahead, full of magic, medicine and momentum.
This storytelling series presents ageing not as decline, but as ascent. It’s a platform where older women don’t need to hide. This is where they are honoured, uplifted, heard and held; with reverence, respect, and wonder.
Their voices are powerful, their wisdom is vibrant, and their stories are a gift to us all.
Welcome to the podcast. Settle in. Let their voices guide you.
WOW: Wise Older Women
S2 Ep4: Gabrielle Griffin (GG)
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Today’s episode is the story of a woman who has created a full and colourfully creative life by choice. The choice to seek truth, to choose dance, to say yes when others might have said no.
Gabrielle Griffin aka GG was born in France, raised across Europe, and grew up in a family shaped by secrets, including one that didn’t surface until she was in the throes of teenage life, when her mother revealed she’d had a baby before GG was born. That revelation cracked open GG’s world and set her on a path of rebellion, independence, and ultimately, truth‑seeking.
At twenty, she moved to Australia alone reinventing herself along the way from Sydney to Byron Bay and from the wild tropics of FNQ to Adelaides art scene. She navigated culture shock, anxiety, and the search for belonging in a country that felt both foreign and full of possibility.
Her life has taken her through family lies and discoveries, political queer culture, motherhood, dark postnatal depression, relocating to another state without her son, disability arts, adult puppetry, sexual explorations in her 40’s and put in the hard work of rebuilding a creative identity after everything fell apart. She has lived through rupture and reconnection, including eventually finding the brother she never knew she had.
Through it all, she's followed one constant: Movement, dance, performance and embodiment. It’s the language she trusted even when nothing else made sense.
Today, she is one half of the post punk cabaret duo MUTTON*, a performer whose life experience is woven into every drumbeat, every gesture, every delightful moment on stage. She's also currently an adult puppeteer, a Pilates instructor, an activist, a blogger and a disability dance teacher, and who knows what’s still to come!
This is a story about the search for truth and the courage to keep trusting that your own path will unfold in the process.
*Tune into Episode 6 to meet Simone O'Brien the 'other half' of Mutton!
Find out more about GG's work here - Facebook
Series 1 & 2 were made possible with assistance from the Community Broadcasting Foundation. cbf.com.au.
Support future episodes of WOW: Wise Older Women - here
Contact Host & Executive Producer Rasela Torise - aloha@plantationstudios.com
Music generously provided by Purple Planet Music
S2 Ep.5 Guest: Kara Gray (Carole). COMING SOON.
Welcome to Wow Wise Older Women, wisdom that grows louder with time. It's a podcast dedicated to raising the status of aging women and dismantling the narratives that silence them. Here, older women speak with authority, beauty, depth, and fire. Their stories challenge, inspire, and illuminate. In a world that too often ignores, isolates, or diminishes older women, we choose to listen, to revere and celebrate their brilliance, courage, humor, and tenderness. They bring along plenty of high vibrational wisdom carried in their words. These conversations aren't just stories. Each one of them is a teaching, a personal map from the past, forging the way ahead, full of magic, medicine, and momentum. This storytelling series presents aging not as a decline, but as a scent. It's a platform where older women don't need to hide. This is where they're honored, uplifted, heard, and held with reverence, respect, and wonder. Their voices are powerful, their wisdom is vibrant, and their stories are a gift to us all. Welcome to the podcast. Settle in. Today's episode is the story of a woman who has created a full and colourfully creative life by choice. The choice to seek truth, to choose dance, to say yes when others might have said no. Gabrielle Griffin, aka Gigi, was born in France, raised across Europe, and grew up in a family shaped by secrets, including one that didn't surface until she was in the throes of teenage life, when her mother revealed she'd had a baby before Gigi was born. That revelation cracked open Gigi's world and set her on a path of rebellion, independence, and ultimately truth seeking. At 20, she moved to Australia alone, reinventing herself along the way from Sydney to Byron and from the wild tropics of Far North Queensland to Adelaide's art scene. She navigated culture shock, anxiety, and the search for belonging in a country that felt both foreign and full of possibility. Her life has taken her through family lies and discoveries, political queer culture, motherhood, dark postnatal depression, relocating to another state without her son, disability arts, adult puppetry, sexual explorations in her 40s, and she's put in the hard work of rebuilding a creative identity after everything fell apart. Through it all, she's followed one constant: movement, dance, performance, and embodiment. It's the language she trusted, even when nothing else made sense. Today she's one half of the post-punk cabaret duo Mutton. A performer whose life experience is woven into every drumbeat, every gesture, every delightful moment on stage. She's also currently an adult puppeteer, a Pilates instructor, an activist, a blogger, and a disability dance teacher. And who knows what's still to come. This is a story about the search for truth in identity, family, queerness, reinvention, and also the courage to keep going and going and going through it all. Let's do just that with my guest Gabrielle Griffin in episode four of the CBF grant-funded series Wow, Why's Older Women? Wisdom that grows louder with time. Gigi, welcome. You were born in France and moved constantly as a child. What did that kind of nomadic European upbringing feel like?
SPEAKER_02It felt normal to me because that was all I knew. We lived in France, Switzerland, Rome for a few months, and it was just me and my mum and my dad, so I was the centre of their world, I felt like the centre, so I didn't really mind where we were. It's now that I'm in Australia, I miss Europe being so close. You know, you can get on a train, you're in Amsterdam, another train, you're in Berlin. It's much more isolated over here.
SPEAKER_00You've described yourself as a a child who could feel music and embody it, even imagining yourself as a cloud at one point. What did dance and music awaken in you?
SPEAKER_02I can't really explain it other than it just feels like it's in me. Like I feel like I've always just been a dancer. I love music. I'm so drawn to music. There's only one real style of music that I don't like, which is opera operatic. I guess I was a little bit of a precocious dancing girl. I did ballet and I wanted to dance around the room and dance and music to me just I guess they take me away. I've got a big imagination, so I like to drift off with the music. Were you surrounded by any dance and music when you were young? I have a very clear memory of mum and dad having parties. My brother was born by then, so we'd be upstairs, and I I do remember coming down and so it would have been the 70s, early 70s, and there there was, you know, Artguff Uncle and Kat Stevens and In your lounge room? Yes. Uh They're music anyway. And uh mum said I used to come and stand in front of people and just stare at them and and make them feel uncomfortable. And apparently someone said to her, What is she doing when she does that? And my mum asked me and I said, Well, I'm looking at their soul. Which apparently I said, because mum told me I said, I can't remember saying it. But I remember the dancing and the music and just wanting to be where all the life is. I guess music and dance feels like life. I get attracted like a moth to a flame.
SPEAKER_00Your father was an English businessman who literally helped to change the French car culture. And your mother was Welsh, anxious, theatrical, and carrying a huge secret. How do those two energies you think shape you?
SPEAKER_02They both pass now, so I feel like I can freely speak. My dad he loved the arts, but he had no real art in him or no creative expression in him. And mum was a an actress and acted in theatre in London for a while and did radio plays as well. But she had too much anxiety to keep going. And dad was calm and organized and very motivated, but had no creative impulse. And I feel as though I've kind of got the best of both of the two of them, and it's in me, which I think is a great thing to take, try and take the good bits of your parents and leave the shit behind. My dad, I guess he had a certain cheekiness, and when he had this business idea, he went to America for three months and he trained as a mechanic and then he came back and he had this idea for putting silences on cars in France, and everybody said, Oh, it won't work, the French won't do it, they won't like it, da. And my dad just had the feeling and he just kept going and he just completely changed the culture of mechanics and cars in France, which maybe is a good thing, maybe is a bad thing, I don't know, but that's what he did. I think sometimes I guess I have that like, well, maybe I shouldn't do it, or people think I can't, but I think I'm just gonna try anyway.
SPEAKER_00When you were 17, your mother told you for the first time that she had adopted out a baby before you were born. Can you take us back to that moment?
SPEAKER_02Well, mum and dad broke up when I was seven, and mum took us back to live in England, which is why I have a bit of an English accent, even though I am French and lived there till I was seven and was fluent in French. And mum came into my room when I was about seventeen and she was crying, and I said, Oh, what what's the matter? It was in the morning and vividly I remember, and she said, Today's your brother's birthday, and he's gonna be 18 and he can come and find me. I just felt as though the whole world just opened up and a big hole fell through, and I went, What do you mean, my brother? And she said, Oh, I had a son not with your dad but with someone else, and I had to give him away. And the the weird thing is that I had spent my whole life, poor mum, saying to my mum, I wish I had an older brother. Oh, I really feel as though I should have an older brother. Gee, I wish I had an older brother. And you imagine my poor mum for 17 years not saying anything. Yeah, so that was a big moment, and then I was like, Well, is that younger person? Is that actually my brother? Are you actually my mum? Like, I felt as though I really don't like lies. And because she'd lied about that, I just felt like she could have lied about anything. So that really rocked me. And even now I'll say to people, just don't lie to me. I'd rather be sad with the truth than happy with a lie. So that all came from that moment, I think, with my mum.
SPEAKER_00So do you feel like mm maybe you had a realization that your entire childhood had been built around this secret? Because it's a a big secret to keep, isn't it?
SPEAKER_02It's a big secret and explains so much of my mum's anxiety and sadness. I mean, imagine she had the baby till he was six weeks old, so she breastfed him, but there was no welfare system, she just couldn't keep him. And so, you know, a a wealthy doctor offered to find a couple to adopt him. So it was just this huge secret. And my mum and dad were friends, and my m my dad apparently said, Look, let me take you away from all this, let's get married and go and live in Europe. And my mum just said yes. And so that's kind of how we ended up in France, and they had me. And then I found out that she'd been married before as well, and then I found out that my dad had been married before. It, you know, once you start digging, you find things out. That's why I'm just so not into lying.
SPEAKER_00So left with all of these feelings of of mistrust. Did that create some kind of rebellion in you? What did that look like for you? And consequently your mother.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, poor mum. Poor mum. Yes, I learnt to drive immediately and I just started going out. So I just went out nightclubbing. I just wanted to go dancing, I just wanted music, I wanted people. I still don't really drink and take drugs, so I was always the designated driver. I would just go out nightclubbing sometimes five nights a week, and my poor mum, she would wait up for me to come home, which gave me the shits even more than if she'd just been in bed. I guess I was trying to make my way in the world in a way that was different to her because I didn't like what she'd done, I didn't like the choices she'd made, I didn't like how she'd been treated, and I wanted to be the opposite of that. So I just was very determined and, you know, quite honestly, selfish and you know, pretty thoughtless for my poor mum. You know, she'd already lost one child and then she saw me just going out every night. And then, of course, at age twenty I announced I was going to live in Australia. So as far away as I could get from my poor mum because I had an auntie and uncle in Sydney. So yeah, I gave mum a really hard time.
SPEAKER_00Was there ever any talk of of meeting him at that stage?
SPEAKER_02No, that was never on the table at all. She expected that he would try and find her as soon as he turned 18, and he didn't. And that caused my mum an incredible amount of pain, and so she just concreted over it. You know, because that was really that was the second time she lost him because she didn't hear from him. I guess it felt like a ticking time bomb to me that he was gonna try and find her and he was gonna shun up and he never did. So um so then I just kind of went, Oh, this is all just a big mess. I'm getting out of here.
SPEAKER_00And at 20, you did move to Australia alone, although you said that you had family here. Do you feel like you were running from something, or maybe even running towards something at that time of your life, or both?
SPEAKER_02I was definitely doing both. I was definitely running away from dramas with mum. I don't like England, I've never liked it. We just had Margaret Thatcher, you know, politically England was screwed. So many of my friends couldn't get a job, everybody was on the dole. It was England was very down and dark in the 80s, you know, the coal miners' strike and all of that stuff. And I came to Australia and it was so hot, I couldn't believe you all lived here in this heat for a moment. And then I realized you could be anything you wanted. I could be anything I wanted in Australia. You can reinvent yourself, there's space, there's opportunity, there's adventure. Australia has a very different energy to England, and it took me a couple of months to kind of tune in, and then I realized, oh, I could become a different person. And I don't want to just be in England being a secretary or I don't know what I didn't even know what I was gonna do. I just was a little bit lost for sure. I didn't want to go to uni. I didn't know what I wanted to do, and then Australia made me kind of go, well, I can just have adventures in this incredible nature. And so here I am.
SPEAKER_00Was there any cultural changeover? Any moments where you were amongst all these new Australian people in this new environment where you thought, what have I gotten myself into?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, I left England in the snow in December, and I arrived in Sydney in a heat wave and just thought, oh my god, I'm gonna die. My cousin, my darling cousin Joey, took me to a gig, an open-air concert in the domain in Sydney, and Australian crawl were playing and gangajang and pseudo echo and the cockroaches and all these famous Australian bands, which I had never heard of. And all the Aussies were just sunburnt and drunk and dancing like weirdos, and I just stood around in my slightly British, restrained, inhibited, critical manner with my huge sun hat on, going, What who are all these people? It was such a different energy. I do remember thinking, oh my god, can I live in a place where people dance like that? I don't know. You know, my two favourite things about England really are the music and the fashion. And we do have great music, and I'm so into reggae and then all the disco and the Aussie rock, it still hasn't got me. So that was a little difficult. And the pub, you know, the pub scene in Sydney was very big, going to see bands, and I love music, but some of the music was terrible. Just that cock rock thing.
SPEAKER_00Well, you didn't stay in Sydney because I guess everybody wants to have a little look around this huge country, and you arrived in Byron Bay on Bungelung Country, where we're broadcasting this from in 1985. It was probably still a one-street town then. Tell us about your memories of arriving in Byron then.
SPEAKER_02Well, my cousin Joe, as previously mentioned, and I decided to hitchhike to Byron Bay because I'd read On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and I just wanted adventures. So we hitchhiked to Byron from Sydney. We had to walk in from the highway all along Ewingstale Road. There were no houses, no cotton, the BP, no, it was all just fields. And we got into Byron, there was one street, there were three youth hostels, that was all. And there was only one room left in the youth hostel, so we had to share a waterbed, and I got seasick because every time my cousin turned over, I would get seasick. We went to the top pub, there was just the the top pub, the northern and the rails, and it was all just scruffy, fibro, no restaurants, it was just one street, which is hard to imagine. But I got it. I stood on Main Beach and I looked at the lighthouse and I just realized okay, this is a place of healing and finding yourself, and people are still coming for that. I still see backpackers now standing on the beach, and I go, I know what's happening to you because that's what happened to me. And this place still welcomes that, and we're all so lucky to live here and to be welcomed by the Araqua people and to get that energy and to heal ourselves. I feel as I'm still doing that.
SPEAKER_00It's never-ending, isn't it? So some of that healing might be connected to the anxiety that you said that you inherited from your mother. How did that anxiety show up in your own life in your early 20s?
SPEAKER_02My mum was really good at orphalising. That's the term I use. So if something happens, she can make it into an awful thing. My brother missed the bus once, and my mum said, Oh my god, he's missed the bus, he's gonna stay in London, use heroin and become a drug addict. That was my mum orphalising because he got on a bus an hour later. So I had some anxiety around, well, I missed all my friends. I didn't know anybody in Australia really. I didn't have any family or friends. I mean, I had family in Sydney, but it's different when nobody knows who you are from before you're 20. And I underestimated how hard that transition would be. And I thought, oh, I'm English, it's kind of an English culture, I'll be alright. I can't imagine how hard it is for real refugees who've come over on a boat and oh my god. So mum's anxiety or capacity to ruminate, I definitely inherited. But that is one of the great things about the menopause is that I feel as though that really stopped. So hormonally, definitely a worrier. And I didn't really have a path. I'd sort of swapped countries, but then what? And I didn't really know. So I was just kind of travelling and having a good time and adventuring, which is great and really valuable. But I definitely didn't have a path, and then I worried about not having a path, and then I worried about what the path might be, and then I worried about what I'd do if I found the path. You know, like it's easy to just go round and round in circles, give myself a hard time at not having a path, you know, like it where do you stop?
SPEAKER_00But you did have a radical Australian boyfriend along that path. But inside, did you feel a bit more introverted or or perhaps unsure? What was that internal conflict?
SPEAKER_02I did have a lovely Australian boyfriend, and we're still friends now. I love him dearly. And he had a great education, and then he went to university and he did his degree, and he was very clear about what he was doing. He was really smart and he was educated smart. And I am pretty smart, but I'm not educated. Like I left school when I was 18 and I didn't continue my studies, and so he kind of pushed me and pushed me, sort of, what are you doing? And I didn't know what I was doing, so that was stressful. But he was very clear that I had a lot of potential, which was lovely, and also made me feel bad because I wasn't doing anything with it, and I didn't know what I wanted to do. So I was working in cafes and sandwich shops and different things, but not really living my potential for sure.
SPEAKER_00Throughout this time, were there any thoughts of your adopted brother? Did that sort of pop into your periphery at all, or had do you feel like you'd really left that behind?
SPEAKER_02Uh I feel as though I'd left it behind, but I guess at the same time it's always lurking. Once a truth like that is out, it is lurking. My poor mum back in England, she was going through a period of depression. It was something that I knew at some point was going to be dealt with, but I wasn't dealing with them because I was, you know, I was a self-obsessed young person trying to find out what I was doing in the world and find myself.
SPEAKER_00You did end up trying to find him, didn't you? At the age of 24, you decided that you would take it into your own hands to find your adopted brother Richard. How did your mother respond to that?
SPEAKER_02Well, I stayed away from England for a little while. I'd gone to live in far north Queensland and I'd read a whole bunch of books up there, and I felt as though I was getting closer to truths, to truth, which is one of my motivators, I guess. And so I went back to England when I was 24 and I said, Mum, I'm gonna find Richard. And you know, in that determined, entitled way that young people have. And she just looked at me and said, No, oh my god, if you do that, I'm gonna kill myself. Which was a very dramatic response and also typical of my mum. I love my mum, but she was very emotionally volatile, and it was another one of those awfulising things, and I just kind of went, Okay, well, I'm just gonna write the letter anyway. I mean, it was scary, I was scared, I did think, oh shit, but I also knew that I had to do it, and I knew most importantly that it was gonna be better for her. I knew that it was gonna be healing, opening up a wound sucks, but that's the only way you can get out the other side and get into the scar tissue and then heal all of that. So I just I got a bit bloody-minded, I guess, and just went ahead. And my mum would go, Oh, you're so like your father. And I would think, Yes, thank God. So I'm doing it. So I wrote a letter. There's an organization in England called Jigsaw, which kind of matches people. It's before the internet in the old days, so you had to write a letter. So I wrote a letter, and then long story short, the agency said, Your brother wrote a letter a week ago, which is pretty crazy, but at the same time, it didn't surprise me. I did feel as though that was a possibility, and that's why I I ignored my mum because I felt as though the energy was there. I can't explain it like with words, but it's like I just had a feeling that that might happen. And then when it did, I wasn't that surprised. And I remember feeling elated that I was clearly doing the right thing. I was causing my mum a lot of pain, but I felt as though that was a price to pay that was going to be worth it in the end.
SPEAKER_00How did it unfold? You wrote the letter, he'd written the letter. What happens next?
SPEAKER_02Well, then I went back to Australia and just left mum to deal with the mess that I had thrown up. So bless her. She joined a therapy group for people who had given up children or had been given up. It was like a support group. That is the best thing she ever did. In that group, one day she stood up and she said, I have three children. And for the whole of the rest of her life, she'd only ever said she had two. That was a huge moment of healing for her. I mean, if I think about it too much, I get teary because I'm so proud of her that she could say that and that she did that work and that she could acknowledge that. So that was a big shift for her. And then they arranged to meet at a train station so that they could each get on a train away. If it didn't work. I mean, it was so stressful. We had no internet. Like I couldn't FaceTime her or, you know, it was just letter writing and, you know, a phone call once a week, whatever, because I was broke and she was pretty poor. So we couldn't even talk on the phone that much. But uh when she talked about it, she said they met and she said he just looks so much like his father, who had just disappeared to America when my mum told him she was pregnant and said, Oh yeah, I'll send for you. And she never heard from him again. So I cursed that man. And then I think the next time I came back from Australia, he and I met in London at a pub, and that was weird because he looked a bit like me and he looked like my mum and he looked like someone else that I didn't know. You know, he didn't look like my actual full brother. But we were both very nervous. He was more nervous than me, and I I wanted to really like him, but I sort of didn't. And that was a bit disappointing, and I think it's it's more common than you think. There wasn't this grand sense of being reunited. It was like, oh, oh, okay, you're kind of that kind of person, and we wouldn't probably be friends if I met you out with other friends. So that was strange, and I he kept calling my mum mum, but at the same time he hadn't been really putting much effort into his relationship with her. You know, she had told me that he didn't always return phone calls and he hadn't always connected with offers that she'd made for connection. So I sort of felt as though he was wanting to use the term mum without actually doing the emotional labour, and that is a bit of a trigger for me. I don't like lazy people. So yeah, I definitely felt protective of mum. And I know she's so soft and was so wanting to have her son, you know, quotation mark son back, and he wasn't really offering that, which is fair enough. He had his own mum and dad and his own life. The tricky thing is that they told his adoptive parents had told him a lot of untruths, and so he had to recalibrate a lot of information, and my mum was not who they told him she was. Lies, I mean I'm going back to it again. It's people telling lies. You know, it really screwed him up, and he is still a little screwed up, and you know, maybe we all are.
SPEAKER_00Did it bring you and your mother closer together because you had sort of opened this wound and you were going through it together in some way?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think so. I think my mum never really understood where I got my feisty courage from. I can clearly remember her looking at me sometimes thinking, oh, in some ways she probably wishes I hadn't stirred the pot, but I did, and then she had to deal with all the flack of it, and I left her to do that. But ultimately she was grateful. And you know, my mum and I got on better and better as the years went by. In the last five years, ten years before she died, we got on the best we ever had. But I definitely gave my mum a run for her money. Sorry, mum. Uh yeah.
SPEAKER_00You previously mentioned you're living in far north Queensland, living on a thousand acres. How did the land shape you? What sorts of memories do you have from that time?
SPEAKER_02Well, my dear boyfriend and I went to live in Far North Queensland up behind Tully in an old farmhouse for twenty bucks a week. Remember that? Those cheap rent days? And uh we had no electricity, no hot water, surrounded by a thousand acres of rainforest with all these old tropical fruit trees, just with an old hippie. The amazing thing about the farmhouse was that there was a big library in the centre of the rooms, and my mum's a librarian. I have a deep, long love affair and respect for books. So I just read. I just sat around in the hammock reading. So I educated myself in a way, you know, I I I just read all the vegetarian cookbooks, I read all the yoga books, I read all the self-help hippie find yourself books, I read the chakra books, I read the massage book. It was like any book you'd ever I'd ever wanted to read. It was there. It was quite magical. So I read a lot and I wrote a lot of letters to my mum and to other people in in England, and it was wild. There was no one around. There was it there was nothing. There was no backpackers, there was no nothing. Mission Beach was one shop, no houses, nothing. So, you know, we just swam naked on the beach and the castaweri would walk past the kitchen, and I really got the Australian country. I really got the wildness of the bush and the colour, you know, the bright greens, the bright blues. It's just so different to England. When I think of England, it's always a low grey sky really close to my head, right? Australia, Queensland. I remember a cyclone was coming and we were like, oh, let's just strap ourselves into a chair on the veranda and you know, like it's it's a little crazy up there. You have crazy ideas in the tropics. It just opened me up, it loosened me up. And I I got a couple of waitressing jobs on Dunk Island and was dancing in the nightclub and having fun and making friends, and I just sort of found myself a bit up there, I think.
SPEAKER_00And then where did that propel you to after the far North Queensland tropo adventures?
SPEAKER_02I went overseas for a year or so. I lived with my dad for six months in Canada, and who was in Canada by then. I lived with my mum in England for six months, which is when I spent some more time getting to meet my older brother. And then I came back and I lived in Coff's Harbour for a couple of years, and I went to TAFE, and I was doing a welfare work course, and my teacher just said, Gigi, you're too smart, you're a good writer, you should really should go to Sydney and go to uni. Anyway, I went to I moved back to Sydney and I went to uni. I was living in a share house in Newtown with my old boyfriend's brother, reconnecting with people and going to uni, studying social work degree. Gonna save the world. You know, I thought I can bring all my empathy and people skills, you know, I can talk to anybody. I'm like my dad, I can talk to anybody. I've definitely worked on that skill as a waitress. And and then, yes, what happened in Sydney? I was living in a house in Erskineville. My housemate asked me if I wanted to drive with her to Tasmania to a music festival, and I I said yes, and then I said no, and I decided to stay home. And so she left with her friend and two boys, and in the car on the way down, their tie blew out and they lost control, went over the viaduct, crashed, and the three people only had a scratch, and my dear housemate broke her neck and she's now a quadriplegic. And so that was a huge slam in the guts of just bouncing along, having a nice life, experimenting with life. And my friend very seriously said, I can't feel my toes, you know, I sort of want to die. If you could do anything with your life, what would you do? And I was doing my social work degree and going out to lots of raves and doofs and protests, and I said, Well, I would just dance. Really, that's the one thing that's really brought me the most joy ever that I feel like I'm supposed to do. And she just looked at me and said, Can you just dance? And I thought, I'm 28, I was having my Saturn Return crisis, and I thought, you know what? I'm just gonna drop out of uni and I'm just gonna go to every dance class I can go to because that's what I think I'm supposed to do. So I did. I just went to every dance class, I was cycling around from here and there and here and there. And then one of my teachers said, Gigi, you should go and study at the con in Lismore because they take mature aid students, you've definitely got something, you're clearly very devoted to this dance business, you know, you can do a whole different range of dances. And I'd started performing in Sydney. I had an old housemate who was doing a dance degree and doing an impro sort of improvisation practice, and she put me in one of her shows. We were it was at the Mount Annan Botanical Gardens, and she said, Look, I just want you to put on this wedding dress and just walk around carrying this big bag of stuff looking mysterious. And I thought, Oh yeah, I can do that. I remember clearly I was walking around the gardens and we were performing, and I felt like I was just like everybody else, but I had a wedding dress on. And then I went back to the dressing room and I thought, there's something I'm not doing because I didn't feel like a performer. And then I went back out again for the second set, and I I don't know, I just flicked a switch. I don't even know where the switch came from, and I just kind of thought, oh, oh, oh, I I I know how to do this. I know how to do this, and I somehow turned myself up. It's the only way I can explain it. I just went from, you know, five to like ten. Okay, this is it. I'm ten, I've got a wedding dress on, I'm walking around this gardens. And everybody changed, people looked at me in a different way, people got out of my way, I was like, oh, that I got it, I'm a performer. And when I went back to the dressing room, I was really high and happy and bouncy, and I said, Oh, I just turned on a switch. And my housemate said, I knew, I knew you had the switch. I just had to give you the moment to find it. And she did, so that was it. So then I started performing with other people and doing other things, but I knew I needed more skill. I knew I had the switch, but I wanted more technique. One of my dance teachers said, Why don't you go to the con in Lismore, do the dance training, and then come back? And I thought, yep, I'll move to Lismore for nine months, and then I'll go back to Sydney and join in with all the performers and all the groovy people, and uh, I'm still here.
SPEAKER_00Throughout that time when you were discovering the switch and and your dancing and being in this environment, did those questions in your early twenties of what am I doing, where am I going, did they have an answer?
SPEAKER_02When my housemate said to me, Can you just dance? I thought, okay, I'm just gonna choose dance. If any question comes up, the answer is gonna be, I'm just gonna dance. So I'm gonna try and make choices, motivated by following the dance. And that has really served me well. And it's a crazy thing to do because I ended up really broke with no car, but at the same time, I was happy, my heart was happy, and that is fairly priceless. It is nice to be able to pay the rent and afford food and stuff. But I was lucky, you know. Well, lucky, you know, I made a dance company with a friend, we got funding, we hand wrote grant applications, there was no internet, there was no, you know, we had to fax things to people. I feel as though I was on the dancing path, and I'm still on the dancing path. This morning, before I came to this interview, I did a 20-minute five rhythms dance wave just to get me on the path.
SPEAKER_00Before you relocated to Lismore, and we'll go into this whole journey of what that unlocked for you. You discovered the word queer. What did that word actually open up in you?
SPEAKER_02I'm a romantic and my mum loved romantic movies, so I watched every black and white romantic film you've ever seen, probably three times. I was very indoctrinated in man meets woman, boy meets girl. I remember being at school, I think I was about eleven or twelve, looking at some of my girlfriends, thinking, Oh, you're so beautiful, what would it be like to be in love with you? And then I would think the same thing about the handsome tall boy in class. So I feel as though I was always curious about everybody. I guess I knew I wasn't straight, but I didn't know really what that meant. I mean, I didn't actually have sex till I was nearly 19. I'm quite an observer of people. I like to take my time and I just knew I wasn't straight. And then I was working in a gay restaurant just off Oxford Street and there was a magazine called Lesbians on the Loose, which I took home to read even though I knew I wasn't a lesbian. I felt like I was a bit naughty reading that magazine. But in it I read one day I read the word queer and I did just hear a bell go off, and I just thought, oh my god, that's me, I'm just queer. I might not be able to be more specific than that, but it's just the alternative to straight, which never was right. So that unlocked a sense of expansion, I guess. A feeling of, oh, I don't have to be that. I can be something else, even if I don't know what that is.
SPEAKER_00So you had thoughts of the boy in your class and the girls in your class, but when did the opportunity arise to actually kiss a girl? And what did that moment teach you about yourself?
SPEAKER_02I was with some friends. We went out after work on Oxford Street, just waitressing. I didn't even really notice her to begin with, but she clearly noticed me. So she was sitting behind me and we were watching a show, and she started playing with my hair, and I remember thinking, what is going on? Who's what's oh, okay, this is interesting. And then she came with us to the Imperial in Erskinville, we went dancing, and I remember there was this moment when we were sitting on the couch, and I it was two o'clock in the morning, and I was straight, like I said, I'm not really a drinker anything, and I just thought, oh, she's gonna kiss me, we're gonna kiss. And I remember thinking, oh, everything's gonna change, the world is gonna completely change. I just took a deep breath and we kissed, and I was kind of wanting fireworks to go off and the world to shift on its axis, and but it didn't. It was just normal. It was just what it was. It didn't mean I was anything other than who I already was. I didn't have a huge, oh my god, that's it, I'm a lesbian. Sorry, sorry girls. It just showed even more that I'm I'm kind of just me.
SPEAKER_00So this was in your early twenties. Were there many meetings or groups that were forming, or was there any place for people, for queer people to go who weren't sure about their sexuality? What kinds of things, what kinds of support were around at that time?
SPEAKER_02It was the early nineties, so the AIDS crisis was still happening, still finishing. You know, I marched in the candlelit vigils and I I identified very much with the queer population, the queer community. At the same time I also found that there were a lot of rules, you know, like if you're a lesbian, you kind of had to wear a blue singlet and a flannel shirt, you know, you were either Femi or a Tomboy, you know, butch. Just none of it worked for me. The fact that there were so many rules made me feel I felt restricted. And I sort of thought the whole point of having queer sexuality was that I feel really free and I don't feel really free. I feel as though in the early 90s there was a lot of bisexual phobia or something. It's like you had to jump right in fully or not, you were one of the stradies. I I'm not sure. I did go to a bisexuality meeting in Lismore. Caddies, in the old cafe in Caddies in Lismore, and there were some lesbians there who were so bulshy and so you can't be bisexual if you've got to be one, you've got to choose one or the other. And I I just left because I felt so controlled and so unseen in who I was. Just as the straight people had been telling me how I had to behave, then suddenly so were the queer people telling me how to how to behave. Now we've got all these other words. Now we can be pansexual, we can be demisexual. Like it's just grown and evolved so much. But back then, and maybe that was me being too anxious that I wasn't going to follow the rules well enough to really be a proper lesbian, so I shouldn't even try. I don't I really don't know. So there was definitely some gatekeeping, I felt, for me. I feel as though n I'm pansexual, is how I would identify now. So I'm attracted to people. You know, you might be a male, a female, a non-binary, a a trans person. I d I don't know. It's kind of an energy thing. Asexuals, you don't have any sexual attraction to people, but you can still feel deeply romantic or not. I mean, there's such a spectrum now. It felt like it was a lot more black and white in the 90s, which was partly coming out of the terrible AIDS crisis where we ni people needed to bond together and be really, no, that's it, we're all here, we're all together, and oh, I just want everyone to love everyone, and can we all just get along? That's my I mean, there's so much information on the internet. You can connect with Acon or Tropical Fruits, you know, of course, our local organization, Queer Family. You can do lots of reading if you if you're curious at all about the terms. And, you know, love is love. Thank you that we've got marriage equality. Why did we have to vote on it? Why didn't we have it 30 years ago? But it's great that we've got it, because yeah, why can't a girl marry a girl?
SPEAKER_00Aside from sexual identity, do you think that as a performer you felt that you were more the performer than even any kind of identity that was linked to anything sexual?
SPEAKER_02I've always felt as though my sexuality is less important than my creativity or my politics or my feminism. So for me, it's kind of fourth on the list if there's a list, uh there's a hierarchy. I mean, I don't really like hierarchies. And that's why I wanted to do more training because I didn't feel as though I had the skill to say what I wanted to say with the technical skill that I had, and what I was gonna say was not necessarily gonna be about sex and sexuality, but I love the women and the non-binaries who were doing that because that was their calling, it just wasn't my calling.
SPEAKER_00At some point in your life, you were in a library and you saw a photograph of a woman in a wig dancing, and you were quite struck by it. And then a few years later, you met her and you ended up forming a company together. How did that full circle moment unfold?
SPEAKER_02I mean, that's another crazy synchronicity moment. I was in the library at uni, I was in the magazine section, I just randomly pulled out a magazine, and there was this picture of a woman dancing with someone in a wheelchair, and they both looked so happy. She was standing up, she had her arm in the air, he was in his chair, they both had wigs on, and I just thought, my god, that's like the perfect combination of my social work motivation, my creative motivation, my social justice, my theatrical. So I just took a photocopy and I kept it for, you know, two, three, four years. And then I walked into the con in Lismore to start my first day of dance training, and there was the picture on the wall, on a poster saying, Do you want to come and do a dance project? You know, take this phone number. And I just took the phone number and thought, my God, this is amazing. And then I walked into the class, and it was choreography with Catworth, and I looked at her and went, Oh, that's the woman from the picture from the magazine. She and I, she's one of my soul mates, she's one of my life partners. Shout out Rivka. And uh, we've made films together, shows, we made our dance company, Company Chaos. People might remember that in Lismore. We toured around. She had a studio at the Epicenter in Byron Bay. I used to hitchhike over. And one day she said to me, I think you should teach the class next week. And I just went, What? Oh my god, I have to teach a disability dance class. But I did. Again, following the dance, following the path. There it is. Now I find myself in a funded dance company touring to Adelaide, and it's pretty crazy. Some things are pretty crazy.
SPEAKER_00And then we move into a very different part of your life. You at 33 had a son, and then some postnatal depression which hit you hard that you probably weren't aware of at the time. What did that period feel like for you from the inside?
SPEAKER_02It was wonderful to be pregnant. It was an accident. I loved being pregnant so much. I had the biggest belly. My baby daddy planted a veggie garden for me, and I was eating organic watermelon, and you know, I just was a goddess walking on the earth. And I looked like that and I felt like that, and it was just fantastic. And then I had my baby, and I had him at home on the back veranda at Tullera just near Dunun. I didn't want to be in hospital being told what to do by a man. I had two midwives, and my dear friend Rivka, who I was in the dance company with, she came and helped my baby be born in the end. Had long hard labour and I underestimated how isolated I would feel. And I couldn't teach my dance classes anymore. I was teaching disability dance classes, I couldn't teach them. Three really good friends moved to Melbourne and Adelaide. My partner and I, you know, my son started only we only had one car, we had sort of no money, I wasn't dancing. It was a long, hard birth, and it took me months to recover. And I just ended up stuck at home with a baby. He breastfed a lot, and I just felt the life energy being sucked out of me. And I I did eventually get to a counsellor, and she said, I feel as though you're just having a really hard time integrating the pre-birth Gabrielle with the post-birth Gabrielle, and some of that is to do with your mother, and some of it is to do with parenting kind of brings up our parents. My son's dad was fantastic and he had quite a hard job. And I do remember lying on the couch one day thinking, ah, if this is the rest of my life, I don't think I want to do it. I just want to go to sleep. And now I know that I was postnatally depressed, but I didn't know it then. I just was like, Who am I? I was so lost. My baby, he even slept. Like, I can't even say that I was that sleep deprived because I wasn't. It was hormonal. I was not moving, I was I'd put on a bit of weight, and I wasn't walking. I you know, it was just so hard, and I think I underestimated how hard it was going to be. Even when I went to the playgroup with the other mums, I just I just didn't want to sit around talking about my baby all day. I mean, I'm just gonna say it. Some of mothering is very repetitive, even monotonous, and I struggled a little bit with that, and I it was the isolation that got to me. So, what helped me get out of that? Was going back to dance classes, walking every day. I went to Adelaide and I reconnected with some arty friends. I took my son to Adelaide. We went on the train, we went on the plane. You know, like I guess I underestimated that I was an artist. And I've never lost it again, but I definitely let it go, and now I've got it back, and I would never let it go again.
SPEAKER_00So you started to reclaim yourself, as you say, moving around, starting these dance classes again. Then you also had a very short and necessary stint as a hitchhiker when a strange fruit performer picked you up and said, Well, actually, I'm gonna let you tell the story.
SPEAKER_02Well, I had to get from Lismore to Byron because my car was getting serviced and I had to go and hitchhike to pick it up. I used to hitchhike quite a bit in the old days, and a woman picked me up, she had long hair, she was very beautiful. We were just chatting, you know, like I said before, I can chat to anyone, and she said, Oh, I've just moved up from Melbourne, I'm a performer with Strange Fruit, you know, they sway on polls, they're an amazing person. I I'd heard of them, and she said, Oh, you know, I've done a whole bunch of impro and I want to start a group up here, and I've I'm trying to connect with performers that I've had recommended. And she said, and I've heard about there's this woman I want to meet, her name's Gabrielle, she's an improviser, I've heard she's pretty good. And I just looked at her and said, Oh, I think that's me, actually. And a really dear friend of a mutual friend, Barry Hill, had said, Oh, you should meet Gabrielle because she's, you know, she can improvise. And and so it a whole new chapter opened up, and so we made this cloud costumes, which took me back to when I wanted to be a little cloud ballet dancer when I was six and seven and ten. And we made these cloud creatures and then fish creatures, and you know, Valie was a really generous and highly skilled, highly motivated creative buddy, and so she kind of collected, you know, there was Claudie Frock and there was Simon and Peter and me and Simone, and she kind of collected us all slowly over the years. And uh, we would do improvise street theatre, which is absolutely something I love, and I'm gonna own it, I'm good at it.
SPEAKER_00I mean, that just opened up a whole new pathway for you, dancing along your little path of life. You also auditioned at an opera for a puppetry show. Tell us about that audition.
SPEAKER_02I was dressed as a cloud and I was at the Lismore Tip opening, and there was another performance group there who did this act with newspaper. And I am a professional, but I was so delighted and filled with wonder at them making this butterfly out of newspaper that I couldn't keep my professional front, and I I just was filled with wonder. And I went to them backstage in the direction and I said, Oh my god, you guys were amazing. I've never seen anything like it, and I just had a rave. And they kind of looked at me and went, Oh, we're auditioning for a new person for our new show at Norpo in a couple of weeks. You should come. And I said, Yeah, yeah, I'll come. And I just thought, because I had knew nothing about puppetry, I thought, oh, I'm just gonna go and have a good time because there's no way I'm gonna get the job. You know, there was, I don't know, 10, 15, I can't remember how many people then they had all these props and they just wanted us to play with things. And because I thought I had nothing to lose, I just kind of went for it. I was pretty funny, I can be funny, and I was pretty funny, and I remember them both, Patty and Lara, pissing with laughter at one point, and I thought, oh yeah, this is fun. And then they said, Okay, we're gonna let everybody know tomorrow, so um, you know, we'll we'll ring you all tomorrow. And I thought, great, well, I haven't got the job, but that was really fun, and maybe I should explore that. And I walked out of the studio and around the corner and my phone rang, and they it was them, and they were like, It's you, we want you. You've got loads of body somatic dancing experience, but no puppetry training, so we can mould you exactly as we want. And they said, Come, and you'd be perfect. And so I ended up with Krinkle Theatre. You know, we went all around Australia, we went overseas, we did tours to Singapore, Scotland, France, Slovenia. You know, I had a really great time with with Crinkle Theatre, and I discovered that I have a little talent for puppetry. I think it's the dance, and also channeling into an object and making the object come alive. So that opened up a whole new avenue of creativity.
SPEAKER_00And how does puppetry, which most people may be thinking of for children and all these little happy stories, compare to adult puppetry, which you're probably more involved in? I don't like performing for children. I don't really like kids that much.
SPEAKER_02Apart from your son. Apart from my gorgeous son and various godchildren. The thing about adults is, you know, we're so in our intellectual brain, and I've had so many times someone, often men, standing at the back of one of my shows, you know, with their arms folded, going, Oh, puppets, whatever. And then by the end of the show, they're leaning forwards, they're fully engaged, they're like, Oh my god, no, don't do that. You know, they're talking to the puppet. And I think adults need the experience of wonder and magic, and we're so ground down by the hustle of daily living. To be able to give someone a non-verbal experience of wonder is such an honour. I'm honoured to be able to do that, and I definitely can do that. I have done it and I aspire to do it. You know, we're surrounded by words and sound and music and vocabulary, and to be able to show someone a life using imagery and evocative sound and props, but no words, is like the ultimate challenge and satisfaction to me. So I got right into puppetry. Yeah. And you're still in puppetry. I am still in puppetry. I am because it's a love that won't go away. And every now and again, I people still will recognize me and go, Oh, you're that woman that's got that big blue puppet. I mean, someone at the markets, even just a couple of months ago, said, Oh, I still think about that dancing puppet that you had. I mean, that's amazing. Like that was, I don't know, five years ago he saw that. We don't get that imaginative experience of like an object in space in front of us breathing. And that's the key, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and everyone in between. The breathing. It's just uh a somatic magic.
SPEAKER_00Do you design and build and create your own puppets? Where do they come from, these these little creatures? Uh I can't even sew on a button.
SPEAKER_02So I have a vision. I'm great with vision, great with dreaming, and then I will find the person who can do it for me, and I'll be quite clear about what I'm looking for, and I also trust that they will bring their own vision and skill to whatever it is. So I got this beautiful big blue puppet made in Melbourne by a guy called Graham, who is a bit like Merlin the Wizard, he lives in this house full of books, and he made this. I said, you know, I want her to be naughty and this high and yeah, that blue and kind of scruffy, so it doesn't matter if I kind of mess her up a bit. And um when I went to collect her, you know, she was fifteen hundred dollars. When I went to collect her out of the bag, I just was blown away like that is it, that is exactly what I was looking for. And so yeah, I can make this puppet dance. She's made exquisitely. She dances, she all her joints are movable, and I've had other puppet makers make puppets out of wood and metal, and yeah, it comes from the vision and then that collaboration.
SPEAKER_00And then you write a play or a a skit or performance for this puppet specifically?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, sometimes I have an idea. I made one show called Pegging Up the Sky. That was my first sort of proper solo show, funded, and and I wanted it to be something that I could tour. I wanted it to be from the perspective of an old lady looking back on her life, reading her book of life, but she was reading it backwards because at the end I knew I wanted her to die. I mean, that's the thing about adult puppetry. You can do sex, you can do death, you can do suicide, you know, motherhood, you can do all the big meaty issues, which of course you can do for kids as well, but I I'm I'm not drawn to that. So sometimes I see the play as a storyboard of pictures. I'm quite a visual creature, so I'll just get images in my mind and then draw them out really badly because I can't draw, and then I'll listen to a lot of music. I'm very inspired by music, and it all comes back to what I'm trying to tell, the story that I want to tell, and it's sort of a feeling, and I'm sure I'm quite frustrating to work with sometimes because it I can't articulate it until I'm there in the moment, going, no, wait a minute, she needs to do this, and then she can do that. I'm definitely a diviser. Um, I think I'm a good collaborator. I do like to dream on things, and I do remember I had this scene with my with um Ciel, the big blue puppet, and I couldn't work out the transition between that section and that section, and then I woke up at four in the morning and kind of went, Oh, she needs to have a shirt and a tie and a waistcoat. And I just knew that that was the right thing, and sure enough, that's one of my favourite scenes in the show.
SPEAKER_00You ended up at 42 actually going to Adelaide. Did puppetry take you there?
SPEAKER_02Yes. I knew that I had more in me than Mullam Bimby. No offense, I love Mullum, but creatively and artistically, and I guess ambitiously, I was interested in what else I could do, and I wanted funding. I wanted money. I wanted money to make work, and we are regionally starved. And Adelaide has a great arts community, great disability arts funding. There were some interesting dance companies down there, puppet companies, a couple of puppet companies, but not many adult puppeteers. And I could just see this little gap. There was a lot in Melbourne, and I didn't want to move to Melbourne because I knew I couldn't compete with some of the younger ones, because by now I was 40, 42. I could just see this gap in Adelaide, and I had my dear friend Rivka was there, Wrestless Dance Company were there, the disability dance company. I just knew I could just see, and there was a stilt company, and I walk on stilts, and I just thought, oh there, I could just go there, and so I did.
SPEAKER_00You asked the universe though before you did move for some guidance, and then you also got a message on your answering machine. What did it say? Remember in the old days and we all had answering machines?
SPEAKER_02I was umming and a ring about whether to go to Adelaide or not because it was a big decision and it would mean a big change for my son, who was by now going week on, week off between me and his dad, and his dad's new family and his little baby brother, and you know. And one day I just said to the universe, okay, I'm just gonna spend a day imagining that I'm going to move to Adelaide. I'm just gonna sort of commit for this day. Can you just show me what would happen if I did that? Because I was driving myself mad, ruminating and awfulizing and you know, going round and round, thanks, mum. And uh and I was out all day, busy, busy, busy. Came home and there was an answer on on my machine saying, Oh, Gigi, you don't know me, you've never met me, I'm a friend of a friend of yours. And she mentioned that you were maybe thinking about moving to Adelaide, and I really want to move to Mullambimbi, and I really want to rent your house. If you're gonna leave, I need a three-bedroom house. I'm happy to sign a one-year lease. I don't it don't even want to see the house. You know, like it was just crazily good. And I just laughed. I just went, okay, I have to go to Adelaide. I feel as though I've been given a yes. So then I had to, you know, sit down and have the conversation with my son and his dad. And when I told my son that I was going to move to Adelaide and that he should stay with his dad, you know, his dad really could offer him security and safety and a solid family life and time with his brother and his dogs, and I really wanted my son to have that. And I knew that my life was a bit more erratic, it was a bit more, you know, one day I'm on tour in Singapore, and then a week later I'm, you know, it was it was all a bit more erratic, but at the same time I could take my son to exciting places and we could go and see Soc de Soleil and you know, go to S New Zealand and And so I said to my son, Oh, you know, I'm gonna move to Adelaide and you're gonna go live with Dad. And he just said, Cool, does that mean I get to watch TV and eat pizza? And I just kind of half laughed, half cried, and said, Yep, yep, sweetie, that's what that means. So of course, neither of us knew how hard it was gonna be, and it's the hardest thing I've done in my life, and if I lived my life over again, I don't know if I could do it again. There was so much heartache and heartbreak, and it was really challenging, and it's not something that women often do. And I did cop some flack from women and men, and it was very difficult on my son's dad's family, and I acknowledge that, and we've all come a long way to heal from some of the damage that was made in those years. It was a very hard thing, and I cried a lot. But I didn't expect to be away for so long. I'd gone to Adelaide as well to study Pilates training. I knew I wanted a proper job, so I'd done that as well when I was down there, and my father died when I was there, which threw me into my second ever depressive period. I had another sort of very depressed time. Again, it was hormonal, there was a lot of grief. My dad died suddenly, it was a big shock. I loved my dad. So that again was something that I had to deal with down there.
SPEAKER_00Eventually you did come back to Mollum, though, and to your son and to the life that you had left behind. What brought you home?
SPEAKER_02I came back because it ran its course, Adelaide ran its course. I I made solo shows, I got over 200 grand in funding eventually to make solo shows. I made three great works of adult puppetry, you know, full-length one-hour show. I was really supported by great women's theatre down there, Vital Statistics, shout out to them, they're so supportive of new art. And my son started at high school, and his dad just rang me one day and said, He's not adjusting, he needs you. I would visit every six weeks. I just want to be clear. I was visiting every six weeks. My son would spend every school holiday with me. We spoke on the phone every day. But I came back when he had just started high school and I took one look at him and I could see that he was stressed. My heart cracked open and I just went, nah, I'm coming back. He hasn't never looked like that before. I'm coming home. And I did it in two months. I was back in two months, and it was amazing. We just moved back into our old house in Mullum. It was right, it was the right thing to do, and I fully committed to being a school mum, and I was volunteering at the canteen every second week. You know, we were still doing week on, week off. And I had connected with all the other performers and met Simone and, you know, everything just kind of picked up where it left off.
SPEAKER_00You've talked a lot about your professional life and and your career and where that's taken you, and you've ended up back in Mullum, but what about your personal life and and your love life? Because you have loved women and and men, and then maybe women again. How do you understand your own sexuality now?
SPEAKER_02Okay, this is the section where my son is going to fast forward if he's listening to this. So just start listening for the next five minutes, sweetie. I feel as though I've had a really great time experimenting and exploring, and I very determinedly did that in my 40s. I probably should have done it in my twenties when everyone else did it, but I was too anxious. I was observing everything, and I I just wasn't ready or whatever. I was too anxious, I think. And so I had a great time in my 40s. I feel as though I tried lots of things, and I was a very early adopter of online dating. I have absolutely no shame about that. I think it's a great way for women to lie on the couch in their pajamas and just play with the world safely and curiously and explore. I was interested in polyamory, I was interested in monogamy. Now I feel as though I've really tried everything because nothing felt quite right. Everything felt as though it was someone else's rules, and I want to know what my rules are because I think I'm just that kind of person. So I did a lot of playing around and I was dating two men and one woman at the same time. You know, we didn't all see each other at the same time, but I went from one meeting to another meeting, and then when I went to meet her, I just kind of went, oh, oh, this is sacred. The other two are really fun and lovely and kind and beautiful. But this is sacred. This with her was sacred. And I'd never really felt that before. And maybe that's more indicative of me being ready to feel that, that she could bring that, or that I was ready to receive that. Who knows? I mean, all of our lives are a journey. But that was just what happened to me. If anyone out there is questioning or curious or thinking about wanting to explore something, please, please do. Send me a DM. I'm a great online dating coach. I'll talk you through it. I will help you set up a great pro profile. I'm serious. I mean, I've coached quite a few people on online dating. I mean, everybody's doing it now, but there's only three sites in the early days.
SPEAKER_00Did you ever come across any not so good situations, or was anything ever feel unsafe? Or do you really know your way around those aspects of it?
SPEAKER_02The only time I actually ever had an unsafe experience, ironically, I've used dating apps wherever I've gone, including, you know, Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne. The only time I actually had a bad experience was here in Byron. And that was on me. I knew when I parked my car in the dark lane near Belongel Treehouse that I hadn't even picked a good parking spot. And I, as soon as I met the person, I felt uncomfortable and I should have left. But I was kind of bored and I was kind of horny. I wanted to see how I I don't know, I pushed, I pushed, and I pushed myself a little bit dangerously, and nothing happened. You know, I am sadly a rare person who can say that she's never had an experience of sexual assault or real danger. But I did get away from this person and go straight to my dear male friend's house and burst into tears, and you know, I needed a big hug and it definitely rattled me. But I hadn't done the things that you should do. So I'd parked in a bad place, I hadn't told anyone, I didn't listen to my instincts, I f at least five times I should have walked away and I didn't. So that is 100% on me. Luckily, I didn't have to learn a really bad lesson in a bad way. I I was scared and I felt as though I was lucky to get out of there. I feel as though I really had to use all my wits and all my skill, and I was just lucky. I think I was lucky.
SPEAKER_00Tell me about another lucky moment in your life when a golden shaft of light came upon you and led to something that you are definitely in love with now. Yes.
SPEAKER_02I was in a in pro class, I'm a big improviser, and we had a peer improvisation group, so we were all performers, actors, and we were all doing different things. And one of the performers said to me, Gigi, is there anything you've always wanted to do that you haven't done? And I swear to God, I felt a golden shaft of light come down out of the sky, and out of my mouth, without me even thinking about it, came the words Play the drums. It was such a clear moment that I went home the next day and started looking at drums on marketplace, and I found a shitty electric set for 400 bucks. And you know, I'm lucky that I had 400 bucks and I could drive and go and get it and pick up the drum kit. And I put it in my bedroom like a teenage boy, and I just thought, right, I'm just gonna give this a red hot go for two weeks and see what happens. And about two days later, Simone rang me. My friend rang me and said, Do you know how to do a like a da da da da da bang drum roll? And I said, in my completely innocent, naive way, I said, Yeah, sure, I can do that. And she said, Great, we need someone to play the drums in the circus cabaret at the circus festival tomorrow night. Can you do it? And I went, Yeah, I can do that. So my dad's energy. So, you know, within four days I found myself supporting the over 50s women's cabaret. And so then after two weeks of playing every day, I thought, this kit is a bit shit, I need a better one. So I bought another electric drum kit and set that up again in my bedroom and played every day for a couple of months, you know, loads of things you can learn on YouTube. And then I was like, oh no, I need a proper rock kit, you know, like with like all separate pieces, and I want to be like a drummer. And so then I bought a again off from Marketplace, a drum kit from the Gold Coast. And I realized I didn't even know how to set it up. I mean, I didn't know which bit went where. And so I got this amazing drum teacher called Beck, who's in Z-Star Trinity, you know, she got dreads, she's like an animal behind the drums. I just thought, oh, I don't want to learn from a man, I want to learn from a woman. I'm just gonna message her. So I found her, I found her phone number on you know the internet, and I just sent her a message, and then before I know it, she's like, Yeah, I'll come over. So she came over and set it up for me and started teaching me. And uh, she was so positive and encouraging, and she just said, Don't ever let anyone. Like Newsflash, I was fifty-six. I was fifty-six and I decided to become a drummer. You have to practice every day, and I'm lucky that I don't have three kids and a husband and aging parents. Neighbours. Yeah, neighbours, aging parents. You know, like I I'm lucky that I can put some time into I mean you can muffle things and so I just started playing every day. And then I thought, oh, I need a better kit. I need a bigger, better, sparkly, shiny one. So then I got another kit, so now I've got four. And I've well no, I don't, I've given two away, but apparently you never have enough drum kits. And I read an article in The Guardian about this woman in England who's now deceased, Ruth Miller, and she had started punk bands for women over 45. And I read the article and I just thought, that's a great idea. Like, I why wasn't I in a punk band when I was 18? Because I wanted to be, but I was too shy to tell mum, and I knew mum my mum would have had a conniption, and we were really poor, we lived in a tiny little flat, and so I never pursued it when I was 18. So when I read this, I thought, oh my god, I want to be in a punk band. And then I thought, well, someone should do that in Australia. And then I thought, well, maybe that should be me. So Lismore had had the flood, and I thought that would be a great flood recovery project to just get a bunch of women together, play music. So I thought I'm just gonna put an ad in the Lismore Women's Festival brochure and get some women together. And I thought if I just have four women, I'll be able to make a band. Twenty women turned up to the pub, and I couldn't believe it because I was really going by the seat of my pants. I mean, I'd only been playing the drums for a few weeks, really, and so I just kind of flagged my way through getting everyone to introduce themselves and what did they want to play, and I wrote I just wrote it all down. I thought I'm never gonna remember all these names. One woman said, I've got an Egyptian rattle, and I just want to come to get over my divorce. I just wrote our name down, I was like, Yep, everyone is welcome. We had a second meeting, and I think 12 women turned up, and then we had our first like official meeting, bring your instruments kind of thing at Bex Hill Hall. And I think there was about eight of us, and I thought, oh yeah, this is what'll happen. And then eight of us kept meeting quite regularly once a week in Lismore at Nedlands, which is a fantastic resource. So it's two studios, they've got drum kits set up, they've got air conditioning for women who are hot because they're menopausal, they've got all the amps. So you just have to bring your own instrument. Everyone basically just needs their own instrument. And then my, as the leader, in quotation marks, of the idea, I just was like, we just need to practice daily. Even if you can just do 10 minutes, and it's like anything the more you practice, the better you get, the more you want to practice, the better it feels. And that's really the the key, I think, especially trying to learn an instrument. And you know, most of the women, there was a couple of non-binaries, you know, we were all kind of 50-ish, 50, 55. And a dear friend of mine, Kathy, she turned up and said, Oh, I just want to play the tambourine. I just want to do this. And then the next week she's like, Oh, I maybe I'll just do the drums. And I felt a little bit territory. I was like, Okay, well, yep, we we could take it in turns with doing songs, and so she played the drums for a little bit, and then she was like, I think I'm gonna try the bass. And I was like, Yes, we need a bass guitar. We're all beginners, but still, she's turned into a great diligent bass player, and she and I we get together once in a while and we call ourselves Slobby. We're like Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, kind of for the drum and bass legendary duo. So we call ourselves Slobby, and we just play in her living room and we just think we're really great.
SPEAKER_00How was Mutton born? Where did that magic start?
SPEAKER_02Simone and I have worked together as performers for, I don't know, 10 years, we've written grants together, you know, we'd known each other a long time and socially, and Simone's fabulous. And we were watching a band at the Circus Festival who are a tribute band to the White Stripes. I just suddenly said to Simone, Oh, we should make a tribute band to this band who are being the tribute band to the White Stripes. And she said, Yeah. You know, she can play, and she was with Circus Soles, she can play the keyboards, and I said, Oh, let's have a jam at your house or my house, or and we did one day, and she suddenly said, Oh, we should call ourselves mutton.
SPEAKER_01And I said to Gigi, I've got the name. She says, What? And I was like, Mutton. It's like very mutton of us to think that we at 60 can start a punk band, but why the F not?
SPEAKER_02And it was just an instant yes from me. I mean, I know a lot of bands go back and forth about names, but that was just the name. And then we got the tagline Mutton dressed as mutton. You know, we both have similar politics, we're both kind of punky and funky and queer and rebellious, and you know, we have a really good time on stage together. So I said, let's look up the easiest song for a bass and a drum to play. And we looked it up and it was the White Stripe Seven Nation Army. I said, okay, let's commit, because I am a bit about commitment. If I think you do have to be disciplined and you do have to follow through. You blue sky dreaming is fabulous, but you do actually have to put in the work. And I said, I'm gonna get us a gig at the vagina conversations with Zenith. And if we have a deadline, we will both work to that deadline because I know us both. And a deadline is fantastic. And so Zenith was like, yep, okay, you can each do a story and then you can have five minutes to do a song, and that was it. We were like, okay, we're gonna rewrite Seven Nation Army to be about something else that we love, and we're gonna use as many different words for the female anatomy that we can, and we're gonna put them into a song. And thank God Simone had a certificate three in music from TAFE. She's currently working on her second one, so she kind of could work out the structure of the song and how the rhyming should work. And so we did this song, and everybody was just like, We love mutton, and we just kind of looked at each other and went, Oh, there's something here. You know, we pierce ourselves with laughter when we're rehearsing sometimes, and I always have thought that's a good sign. You gotta follow that. Neither of us can remember things. So we've got I've got a list of notes of song ideas and funny things that she said, like we're, you know, never quite has been. Mutton is a great new vehicle for us. You know, we're we're both nearly Simone is 60, I'm approaching 60. Technically, as a performance artist, you know, you become a little less obvious, you you know, you don't get so many gigs, you become invisible. I think that's a general cultural, you know, as you age, you kind of get smaller and slower and less attractive and exciting. That's the cultural myth. But that is not what is happening now. This whole new generation, Generation X, we are changing everything and good on us. I'm really good at the socials, and so we just I just started an Instagram page. I was like, I'm just gonna do it. And I think it's that saying yes. It's when you say yes to something, then it helps you say the next yes, and then you can say the next yes, and it just kind of snowballs. Before I knew it, we've got 1,500 followers, and now we started making reels which sometimes get 10,000 views, and you know, we're waiting for our viral hit, but you know, I'm sure it's coming.
SPEAKER_00You say that Gen X is the generation to change things. Are there any changes that you think are taking too much time or that you feel like you would really like to see take a turn?
SPEAKER_02Of course. I mean the patriarchy being in charge is ridiculously long overdue for a change. I've never been so ready for the matriarchy as I am now, and I think a lot of people feel like that, a lot of women, hopefully, especially. And it's really sad to hear about what mental health struggles the younger population have because of social media, and social media is a beast, and Simone hates it, and I do it, and I I try to keep it really positive, and I try to keep it very on message of being feisty and feminist and out and proud, supporting community and supporting creativity and supporting marginalized populations. You know, a lot of people in power, there's that top 1%, they've got too much money, no care, no kindness. We need the opposite of that. And so if we can do that in our little way, Mutton will always do a community fundraiser, we will always donate to the women's refuge, we will always support you know, a local course, we've been very involved in in save wallam actions, and we need to look after the world. We need to support the environment, we need to save the trees, we need to save the seas, we need to save the air that we breathe. I mean, really, there's a song in that already. If we haven't got nature, we've got nothing. So I'm ready for that. I'm ready for nature-centered power that can deal with climate change and deal with climate refugees and all the insecurities that are gonna come from fossil fuel and ridiculous consumption of natural resources. Well, luckily I've kind of let go of having a career path because I feel as though I've wandered in and out. I don't feel as though I'm gonna hit some great high. But I sort of don't care because I feel as though as long as I'm happy and doing well and trying to raise my sisters and my marginalised people with me, then I'm doing a good job. I teach Pilates regularly. I want to try and stay fit and strong. I want women around me to be fit and strong. I don't care what you look like, I don't care if you're fatter or thinner. I mean, that's such a social media trap. I just want to feel strong and flexible, and I want my clients to feel like that. I do keep a blog, so I haven't written on it for about a year actually. Maybe this is gonna make me go back to it. So I I kept a very regular blog called Bone and Silver, which was about having silver hair and talking about the truths that you feel in your bones. And I guess I want more than anything for women to feel as though life actually begins. You know, we're as you turn into an empty nestor, you can actually take time for yourself and pick up that instrument you always wanted to, pick up that paintbrush you always wanted to, start that recipe club that you always wanted to. Like it's just never too late. The whole culture of ageism is just to try and keep us down and to make us depressed because we've got saggy chins and and love handles. And you know, I've got a big saggy chin, man, and when I play the drums, it doesn't look good, but I look really happy when I play the drums because I'm doing what I want to do more than anything. And that joy, like joy is the antidote to despair, to ageism, to invisibility, to whatever makes you feel down. And I have felt suicidally down, so I recognize the power of joy. We're very privileged, you know. My house is safe, my fridge is full, my car is, you know, it's I'm so lucky. So it's the least I can do is to try and support others less fortunate than myself. And I think volunteering gives a great sense of community, creates a sense of community. We all need more community. Think globally, act locally. Oh, and I've I just had a jam with a friend the other day. We got out the microphones and we got out the amps and we put on some really bad beats and we just started rapping, and you know, my son laughs at me and says, you know, Mum, I don't want to come to your show and see you doing some bad white woman rapping. And yeah, fair enough, honey, but we've got shit to say. We want to rap about being asexual or being menopausal. Like I wrote a song called The Shits. I wrote it in 10 minutes in my head driving home from a band practice because I just had the shits. It's a great song. Women resonate with it. We've all got the shits. And I think the thing about being in the menopause, you burn off your capacity to put up with crap. That's my favourite thing. It's like, no, my bullshit tolerance is now zero. It's always been quite low, but now it's zero. So yeah, if you want to be in a post-menopausal, post-punk, just message me, start one, I'll help you. If you want to write angry poetry and take it to open mics, do it. If you want to paint a giant mural on the side of your house, do it. If you want to take up climbing or mountain bike riding, or you know, I mean be careful and be safe, but bloody, just do it. And if you want to volunteer at the Wildlife Sanctuary, do that. Just find your thing. Joy. Joy. Joy is the antidote to all the crap in the world.
SPEAKER_00What stays with me after this conversation with Gigi is just the sheer breadth of life lived in motion. Not just across countries and cultures, but through identities and relationships and art forms and some of the hardest parts of being human. It demonstrates that reinvention isn't a luxury. Sometimes it's survival. Sometimes it's the only way forward when the ground shifts beneath you. Whether that shift comes from a family secret, a move across the world, a crisis of identity, or the quiet, isolating weight of motherhood. Creativity isn't just something that you do to get by, to scratch an itch or to rebel against a system. For Gabrielle, it's something to return to when everything falls away. It's the thread that pulls you back to yourself. And maybe the most powerful part of her story is this: that you don't have to have it all figured out. You don't have to choose one identity and stick to it forever. You're allowed to change. You're allowed to grow. You're allowed to become someone new at any age. Gabrielle has done just that over and over with honesty and courage and the kind of grounded curiosity that feels deeply human. If you'd like to find out more about Gigi and her work, you can find contact details in the episode description. Join us next week for episode 5 of Wow, Wise Older Women, Series 2 with my guest Cara Gray, who's lived a life shaped by forces no child should ever have to face. But she's also lived a life shaped by ancestors, ceremony, by intuition and compassion, and by a fierce commitment to breaking cycles that have travelled through generations. She joins us not to relive the past, but to share the wisdom she's gathered, the healing, the reclamation, the return to her inner child, and the deep knowing that we are more than what happened to us. You can find more episodes of Wow, right where you found this one or on any major podcast platforms. Series one and two were made possible with the assistance from the Community Broadcasting Foundation, cbf.org.au. If you'd like to support future episodes, you can do so via the links in the episode description. I'm your host and executive producer, Rasella Torres. It's my absolute honour to bring you this and all episodes of the WOW Project. Hello for our two, much love until we meet again for our next audio adventure together. Thanks for listening.