Clunes artist Katka Adams' first solo exhibition at the Lismore Regional Gallery opened earlier this month. It's called Coming Home and features portraits of migrants and refugees who have come to live in the Northern Rivers. Katka spoke to the Lismore App about her own story of coming to Australia as a refugee, how she became an artist and what she hopes to achieve with Coming Home.

I was born in Prague in 1962. When I was six, there was the Prague Spring when the Communist Party was trying to bring in some reforms to make life better and easier for people, but then Russia sent in the tanks to suppress that and a lot of people left.

Czechoslovaks carry their national flag past a burning tank in Prague. PHOTO: Supplied/Wikimedia Commons.

We left in January '69 with fake passports and ended up in Vienna with a lot of other people waiting to find a place to go to. Australia sent over these films showing us how great Australia was, really advertising Australia. Things have changed so much now.

I remember watching this amazing movie. It had palm trees swaying on these beaches and just beautiful sunshine. It looked really very lovely. They said: "Come, we want you, you're valuable. We want you to come to Australia." Mum didn't know much about Australia, but she loved the sun. She always loved the sunshine.

My mother had divorced my father when I was two and she left Prague with this guy who she ended up having to marry to get to Australia because they didn't want single mothers at that time. They would only take families.

I remember this wedding, which was in a Catholic church. There was a line of women and a line of men and a priest at the front marrying them. As they would get married, they would then pass the bouquet to the next person in line. It was like a queue of weddings because they all needed to get married to be able to come out to Australia. They just married whoever was there, basically. it wasn't really good for us because my stepfather was a criminal.

We were processed through Bonegilla, which was the processing center for migrants in Wodonga in Victoria and mum was a bit disappointed. She just thought: “Where are the palm trees? This does not look like what was in the movie.”

The Bonegilla Migrant Camp. PHOTO: Supplied.

We were in these little army hearts, Nissen huts. It was very kind of spartan but clean and everything and very welcoming. They had crash English courses for people. There were dining rooms, bathroom blocks. It was quite fine. It wasn't fancy. I just remember having to go to bed with scarves around my ears to protect me from the earwigs, which we were told as soon as we got there would climb at night into your ears and eat your eardrums away.

After Bonegilla we were sent to Melbourne where there were a few hostels. I can remember we were close enough to the bay you could walk to the water. There were factories that the migrants could walk to and get work. My mother went and worked at Johnson and Johnson packing tampons and my stepfather went to the other side, which was Dunlop tires to make tires.

You could leave when you were ready, when you had work and stuff. The gates were always open and there was a bus that would take me to the local primary school. After that we kind of moved around Melbourne and then ended up in Sydney.

My mother and stepfather's relationship was very volatile and not very healthy. He was 22 and she was 27 and she had a child and he basically became a drug dealer, so we were with people who it wasn't healthy for a child to be around. We were in these share houses and mum was always running from him to get away and he was always following us. I went to 14 schools and we just kept moving. It wasn't very stable.

Eventually, what saved us... well, he went to jail, so that was kind of good for us. My mum had a really tough time. She also had mental health issues. She was traumatized also from her childhood during the Second World War. So she had her own trauma from childhood and a very controlling father and then she had a very controlling violent husband, and then she had a very controlling second husband. So she really did have a tough time but once Whitlam got in in 1972, that made our life so much better.

I don't think people realize what an effect a government can have on on people's lives. Our lives changed because Whitlam brought in the single mother's pension, so women were no longer judged for being single mothers. They were supported. And at the same time we got our hands on a housing commission flat in Surry hills in Devonshire Street, right next to Central Station. So we had affordable, stable housing. I got into Sydney Girls High and so we kind of landed on our feet there.

After high school, I went to Sydney College of the Arts where I got a visual art degree and I got married to my husband Russell and then and then he got a job up here. My first baby was six weeks old when he started his job at the Lismore Base Hospital and so we've been here for 35 years now.

I had three children and when my youngest started kindie, I decided to go to Lismore Tafe to learn more skills with my drawing and painting. At Sydney College it was really very conceptual, the learning there and they didn't teach us practical skills. And so the Tafe course was a really good move because the Tafe had excellent teachers.

Within two years I felt really confident with my mark making and skills, and I won my first art prize at the end of that year at Coraki for drawing. I just thought: “I'm an artist now.” That was the beginning of my art career and I made the decision to build a studio at our house and be a practicing artist. That's 20 years ago now.

Katka Adams drawing Trinity from her exhibition Animalia. IMAGE: Supplied/Katka Adams.

My art teacher at the time said I had to enter the JADA (Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award) art prize, which is quite a hard drawing price to get into. That was my goal to get hung there one day and I just kept trying every year and then when I eventually did get hung, that encouraged me to keep going.

The exhibition I did before this one was about my own migration story, and while I was doing that I became more interested in other people's migration stories as well. So I put in a proposal with the Lismore Regional Gallery that I would have this show during Refugee Week about refugees and migrants who live in Lismore now, called Coming Home. That was the concept behind the show. Then I had to meet people and interview them and really come out of my own studio to actually hear about other stories, which has been really interesting.

Busara was born in Thailand before migrating to Australia and now owns Ghetto Babe Street Eats in Lismore. IMAGE: Supplied/Katka Adams.

Some of them I knew already. Renee Bolton in the show is an artist who comes from Holland. He was one of my teachers and is a friend. I looked at Denise Alison's Humans of Lismore page on Facebook and through that I found Busara, who runs Ghetto Babes Street Eats and also Helen who came out as an Indian child bride when she was 14. I also rang Vistara Primary School because part of their philosophy is to be multicultural and I got a little girl whose parents are from the USA. I wanted to have a mixture of age groups in the show from very young to very old and also a variety of countries and different reasons that people came to Lismore, to kind of balance the show.

Katka Adams' pastel and pencil on paper, Love 2019, is part of the Coming Home exhibition. IMAGE: Supplied/Katka Adams.

I also contacted Sanctuary, who got me in touch with Philip because I wanted to find someone who was a refugee through that system. His mother got a humanitarian visa, and got settled here through Sanctuary.

I also met people through word of mouth. It just kind of grew naturally because over the six months that I've been working on the project, there's always been someone I'm actually working on and the next person I kind of already knew who they would be, but I didn't know in January the 10 people that I would have, I just knew one or two at a time. And as I finished those drawings, I'd look around for the next person.

Philip is a refugee, and I'm in there and I'm a refugee. The others really came out as migrants. Renee, who's the artist, he applied four times. On his fourth attempt at permanent residency, he got accepted because he's a cultural asset to Australia - and he really is. Busara is from Thailand. Her mother married an Irishman living in Melbourne, but he was really good to her. Jenny, who's from Ecuador, she married an Australian as well. Charlie also came out as a migrant. His father sent him to Brisbane to study because in Malaysia they had the race riots when Charlie was about 11 and the Chinese lost a lot of rights and it was difficult to get into university. Life was pretty unpredictable. So he sent his children overseas to study.

All of their stories resonated with me and they all felt familiar. All migrants have that feeling of not belonging for a while. Every migrant who's left their family, country and place of childhood feels displaced and then there comes a point where you suddenly do feel at home and that's what intrigues me. When does that happen? Some people take a really long time, some people never really get there and other people find it quite quickly.

I think children fit in much more quickly than someone who's gone through their whole education and young adult life somewhere else. The ones that are having difficulty are the ones who were around 30 or older. But I think everybody resonates with coming somewhere new.

It's not just the language or the food. It's the trees and the air and the way the sun shines. It's kind of everything. Like the milk is different and the grass is different and the flowers are different and the trees are different. Every single thing is a little bit different.

Of course, the language barrier is really quite a big thing and I think that's why as I child I drew because I couldn't speak English and I couldn't read English and I couldn't understand English, but I could still draw and people could respond to the drawings. It kind of breaks some of those barriers.

Sachiko, who's the Japanese lady in the show, she found that if she could do origami, it helped her connect with people and to share her culture. And so she did it at the library here, teaching monthly origami paper classes and the group is still going on.

With this exhibition I wanted to draw attention to the fact that refugees are people who live in our community and are a part of our fabric of the town and that they’re the same as everybody else. I wanted to kind of honor them and show them that we value, appreciate and love them. I love them.

I don't know what happened. I don't know what's happened in Australia. I don’t think it was the people, because everybody that I ever talks to is positive about refugees and migrants. We call ourselves a multicultural society - a successful multicultural society - and I've never experienced any prejudice and the friends that I have feel warm and accepted, but in the media and on the news and coming from our leaders there’s a different feeling and a different message.

I can't quite work out when that happened. When did our government stop welcoming refugees and start treating them like prisoners or something? Manus Island doesn't make sense to me. I can't understand why they're there. I actually can't work out why they can't just bring them here. The government is spending millions of dollars to keep them, and I don't know why. And where is that money going? Because the refugees are not getting that money. I can't get my head around it.

I guess what I'm thinking is that this exhibition can help show people that migrants and refugees belong with us. They belong here and we welcome them.

Coming Home is on display at the Lismore Regional Gallery until 28 July. The official opening is at 6pm on July 5.