Story 02 – A splinter in the eye
by Giuliana DeWitts and transcribed by Mia Hollingworth
A constant feeling of estrangement followed me. I never felt I belonged here. I was much too Italian.
I began working in the family restaurant since the age of ten and was somewhat of a servant to my family and the customers who frequented. I missed out on the childhood I imagined everyone else was having.
Some years later in my early twenties I had some upsetting dating experiences followed by a tumultuous three-month marriage. There didn’t appear to be much love in my life. I was in darkness and unwillingly to return to the only life I had known up until that point. I took my first step towards self-determination. I left that marriage and little by little I began to lay down my own path.
…An empty unit, little love notes, 2001: A Space Odyssey and a mothers’ intuition…
Unbeknownst to me, I was readying myself for my next evolutionary leap when in 1968 my future husband appeared in my life. Is life not but a short amount of time between birth and death whereby we are in the process of enlightenment, unknowingly readying ourselves for the next evolutionary leap.
In the meantime, what better way to escape the grip of your past than to travel. The year was 1970 and I had finally arrived in Italy. I was so happy to be here but strangely I felt much too Aussie. When I returned to Australia seven months later I knew I had landed on home soil.
Fate has a funny way of showing up when you’re busy making other plans because five years later since our first encounter, my future husband magically re-appeared as my mother predicted. He was gorgeous. It was love at second sight. It was 1973 and we married that September.
With three Piscean children and a husband who was on the look-out for new adventures and opportunities ‘somewhere else’, we sold the news-agency business in Melbourne, packed up the family and moved to Wagga Wagga, NSW. The Bristol Paint shop became the centre of our busy lives for many years.
A holiday in Noosa in 1992 was the catalyst for another ‘somewhere else’ my husband wanted to be. Once again, we sold the business, packed up the family and moved to Sunshine Coast, QLD. Each time we moved, I made curtains to match the different houses we lived in. One batch of curtains I re-purposed and is now a bead-spread I still use.
A clairvoyant once told me I would end up living in Queensland. It was different this time as not long after our arrival to the Sunshine Coast, my husband found yet another ‘somewhere else’ and business venture. I stayed put and felt like a free woman for the first time.
Another evolutionary leap occurred in 1996 when I found inspiration at a little place called Wallace House. This pivotal moment led me to pursue painting. I was hungry to learn all I could and slowly my life started to bleed into colour. While moving paint across the canvas and obscuring the outer rim of reality with the invisible unknown I found a joyful abandon. I was free to play and just be me. So, this is what a childhood must have felt like. Painting gave me a third language (Italian and English were my first and second respectively) to speak the things that had not yet been spoken. I had finally met the little girl who was never given the childhood she desperately wanted.
…A tutor, a hidden poem, a painting, a splinter in the eye…
As it turns out, home isn’t a place on a map with borders made of anthropology but a place that exists moment to moment and when the infinite self, touches, shapes and creates across the canvas of perceived reality. I am still painting and creating and have made my home on the seaside in amongst my paint brushes.
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