ABOUT ME
My Journey (So Far).
What if you were told your future pathway was either jail or life on welfare. If you weren't dead before you turned 21. Not because you did anything wrong. Not because you were dangerous. But because you didn't belong to anywhere, and a system that was supposed to protect you had already decided what you were worth.
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This is often what is expected of kids who grow up like me. After being placed in out-of-home care at 13, I spent almost a year in a state-run girls' group home, then was relocated to a refuge that housed drug-addicted adult men at 14. I ran away. I was homeless at 15. And for years, everything I owned, everything I needed, everything that mattered: it all fit inside a bag. A bag was home. A bag was safety. A bag was all I had.
But I was built differently. Somewhere between survival and stubbornness, I became the kind of tough that doesn't have an off switch. Not the inspirational poster kind. The kind forged in places most people will never see, never want to see, and genuinely cannot imagine. Competitive to the bone. Capable of absorbing things that would level most people and getting back up before anyone noticed I'd gone down. I didn't choose to be that person. That person was made for me.
And she never left.
In my early 20s, I became a young single mum with no social capital and made a vow to my baby boy: I would be the mother I wished I'd had. I took everything I'd learned from surviving (the resilience, the resourcefulness, the ability to make complex things simple) and I built something from it.
Always make a total effort, even when the odds are against you
For over 25 years I worked in business and people development, mentored by distinguished entrepreneurs, thought leaders and master trainers, including learning the art of professional branding in LA with Guns 'n Roses' original marketing manager Craig Duswalt, and personal effectiveness with the legendary Brian Tracy. I ran my own consultancy and training business for 15 years, helped 2500+ job seekers, graduates and frontline leaders find their footing, and became known as the person who could take complicated systems and make them feel simple.
From the outside, I had made it. But I was still carrying the bag.
Because here is what nobody tells you about surviving a system like that: the doors don't stop slamming just because you grow up. The exclusion doesn't end when you leave care. It follows you into every room you try to walk into, in healthcare, in the workforce, in the very sector that claims to speak for people like you. The discrimination changes shape. The exploitation gets more sophisticated. But it is the same thing, dressed up in funding submissions and sector conferences and roundtables where people who look nothing like you decide what your story means.
I am neurodivergent. I am a care-experienced woman. I am both things at once in a system that was never designed for either, and certainly not for someone who is both.
Belonging doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.
No matter what I achieved, I never quite felt like I belonged. I was always a little different. Always working twice as hard to prove what others were just handed. Then in 2017, I discovered I was one of the 500,000 Australians known as the Forgotten Australians.
Something shifted in my core.
I started reading. Reports, inquiries, academic papers, government reviews. Over a century of documentation about a system that had been failing people like me, over and over, in the same ways, with the same outcomes. The research was everywhere. The conclusions were the same. And nothing had changed.What I also found was this: the people most affected, the women in their 30s, 40s, 50s, still carrying everything they were never helped to put down, were largely invisible. Too old for youth services. Too young for the historical redress conversations. Excluded from the very tables where their futures were being discussed. Written about constantly. Consulted almost never.
Just get a bag and drop a dream in it, and you'll be surprised what happens
And then it hit me. Every woman I was reading about had lived out of a bag at some point. Not just physically, but emotionally. All that unprocessed history, all that grief and grit and survival, packed up and carried forward because there was never a safe place to unpack it. Because the system that harmed them had also stolen the most fundamental thing of all: their sense of who they were and who they were allowed to become.
For years, the irony escaped me. I had built an entire career helping other people find their footing, develop their potential, believe in their own value and I did it literally via a bag. And I believed, genuinely, that I was doing the same for myself. I was doing everything I had been taught to do. Everything that was supposed to work. What nobody had ever helped me understand was that when a body has been running on survival mode since childhood, there comes a point where it stops waiting for permission to rest. Not a breakdown. A reckoning.
My body eventually made the decision I couldn't.
In 2020, everything finally stopped. Not gradually. All at once. What I could not have explained then, and can only partially explain now, is that asking for help was about far more than exhaustion. For thirty years, I had been in hiding. Not metaphorically. Literally. I had changed my name. I had made myself unfindable. I had disappeared, more than once, because disappearing was what kept me safe. It worked. The data on what happens to women like me when they do not disappear is not kind.
When I finally reached out for help in 2021, it was the first time in my adult life I had actively chosen to be found.
Something became very clear in that moment. I mattered. I had always mattered. Not because of what I had achieved or survived or proved, but simply because I existed and I was still here.
That realisation, quiet and overdue and radical, became the foundation of everything that followed.
You always matter. Not conditionally. Not once you have earned it or proved it or survived enough to deserve it. Always. If you have spent years carrying everything alone because nobody ever told you that: this is me, telling you.
You matter.
You always did!
In 2022, I decided to become a bag lady, again. But this time, on my terms. I developed ACE Gear Bags as a social enterprise, purpose-built gear bags that carry a message: “You Always Matter”. Connected to the ACE Hub, a free digital resource platform built specifically for care-experienced women and girls, grounded in nine years of evidence, seven research databases, and a very clear-eyed view of a sector that has been collecting funding and producing reports while the women it claims to serve remain invisible.
No forms. No disclosure. No proving your pain before receiving support. Just access, finally, to the information and resources that should have always existed.
I have rebuilt my identity more than once.
The state tried to define me.
The sector tried to contain me.
Neither succeeded.
I am not waiting for permission, a grant, or an invitation to a table that was never set for me. I am building the thing that didn't exist, because I needed it, and because the data proves I am not the only one.
If any part of this story sounds familiar: come and have a closer look. There is plenty more to show you.
