Jan Mulcahy is 87, but her humour, hope and exuberance for life is strong and contagious. Jan has overcome great trauma in her life and achieved incredible success. She sat down with the Lismore App to share her story and encourage others to pursue their dreams.

I was born in the western suburbs of Sydney. My parents were hard working. My mother was a top-class dressmaker. She worked in Sydney for a very stylish dress shop.

She and my father had to elope because my grandmother (my mother's mother) wouldn't give permission for them to get married because there was a deep dark secret in my father’s family that no one talked about. I discovered that my father's great-grandfather had been a convict. He had come out on the First Fleet and his wife came out on the Second Fleet.

Their crime had been stealing clothes and they were trundled off to jail for about two years and then sent to Australia for seven years, which I think is disgusting. His wife stole a petticoat worth a penny. She was on the second fleet, which they called the floating brothel because it was jam-packed with women. There were hardly any women in the colony and the men were just raping and stealing the native women.

Convicts weren't able to marry from the time of their incarceration for seven years and my great-great-grandfather and mother had to wait three or four years after they met. They had three children in that time. They lived out at Richmond on a property there by the river and had 12 Children.

So that was the deep dark secret in our family that caused my poor parents to have to elope to get married because my grandmother on my mother's side knew about it and she didn't want my father as a son-in-law. But it didn't stop her from having him fix her lawn mower or whatever it was she needed doing around the house when we visited her! 

Mum was this wonderful cook and she was incredibly intelligent and well-read. We absolutely adored her. But there were times when she'd be really off her trolley. She had a third child during the war and she had a terrible nervous breakdown caused by medical neglect.

(Jan at approximately 3 years of age)

I remember I would come home from school trembling because she'd been in a rage in the morning. But when I got home she'd be like another person. You'd never know who you were coming home to. We just had to learn how to deal with it. But I had a very close relationship with her through music. She sang, we had a pianola and nearly every Saturday night she’d invite the neighbours in for a party. My father played the violin, very badly really - he was a dance-band violinist.

At one point I was farmed out to my grandmother for almost a year because of my mother's mental illness. She wasn’t coping at all so I went to live with my grandmother in Strathfield. That was very difficult. She molested me sexually and she would punish me every chance she could get, for the slightest thing that I did wrong. So it was also emotional abuse.

I found out later that my grandmother had a very special relationship with an illegitimate cousin who was taken out of the family when she was fifteen and my grandma was five. When my grandma wanted to know where her cousin had gone to they told her she drowned in the river. But I got the death certificate. She died at the age of 19 from influenza, and she wasn't at the farm. I think that girl had interfered with Grandma. I don't think Grandma ever found out about what happened. But she did have sexual problems. It is really a terrible legacy, but it's much better to know about it than to pretend it all didn't happen, which is what families often do. 

This kind of abuse leaves you feeling sick. You have awful feelings of inferiority and anxiety. One teacher from the college I went to years later, helped me to get real about what had happened to me from my grandmother as I had suppressed the memories. I've had a lot of help from my family of course, and from a wonderful yoga teacher, called Shane Smith, that I had a very close relationship with.

She was a lot older than me, and she was right into the psychology of yoga and relationships and I was able to open up to her about the abuse. It's wonderful to have relationships with people you trust enough to tell them the sordid behaviours that you've had pushed upon you and be able to have their sympathy and their understanding.

That's why I ran away from grandma’s. Fancy running away at the age of nine! I came home from school and found myself locked out again. So I broke into the house and stole 10 shillings from a drawer and I walked to Homebush and got on the train. I caught three trains from Strathfield to Macquarie Fields! My parents were shocked to see me knock on the door. They were amazed that I’d done it. My father was really impressed. He said, “Oh, don't worry about the 10 shillings, I’ll phone that old bugger tomorrow.”

In 1948, I came down with rheumatic fever and I was bedridden for almost a year - I missed out on school and everything else. I had a very close brush with death. I was having out-of-body experiences and floating above my body. It was terribly hard on my mum and the whole family to have a child so ill. But I did turn a corner and got over it. That's why I am vegetarian, I was on a very strict diet.

So, I was handicapped with my schooling. I was hopeless at maths. I went to Liverpool Girls Home Science School, and I just didn't fit in there.

The mathematics teacher was also our class teacher and one day I gave an incorrect answer to a question she asked me. She came down the aisle with a book and she went Bang! on top of my head with it and call me an idiot. Blood spurted out of my nose. I ran to the first aid and they stopped the bleeding. What a terrible thing to do to a child.

Anyway, I only had to wait three months after that until I could leave school. I just sat up the back and I didn't contribute to any of her classes. I'd finished as far as I was concerned, all I had to do was attend.

I was absolutely wrapped up in music. I just wanted to be a musician and that was piano at that time. I was playing duets with a girlfriend and performing family concerts for my piano teacher. I was playing a Beethoven sonata for my teacher and she said to me, “Janet, are you left-handed?” And I said, “No, I'm right-handed. Why have you asked me that?” And she said, “Well, I can’t hear the treble even though I'm sitting next to it.” And I said, “Oh, I don't care much for the treble!” I sort of heard the music from the bottom up. So that was the first sign that I was meant to be a bass player. So the teacher stuck me on the left-hand side of the piano for the duets, and I was absolutely happy!

I left school the day I turned 15. I told the librarian I was leaving, and she was not very happy about that. But she could see what I was really going to do. Because the school piano was in the library and I used to play it for her - Rachmaninoff, C sharp minor and other things that would knock your socks off.

I got my first job through a national cash register company. These were the for-runners of computers. My first job was with the Bank of Adelaide, in Sydney, which suited me fine because I wanted to work in the city. I could just walk from there up to the Conservatorium to study music.

They loved me at work, they thought I was the ants pants! I would mix with the other girls and the men too. They all admired me - we had a Christmas party at one of the posh hotels in Sydney, and there was a man tinkling around on the grand piano. I went over and said, “Would you like to hear some Rachmaninoff? Can I have a go?” And I sat down and played Rachmaninoff prelude in C sharp minor.

(Jan on double bass (far right) performing with Charles Gray String Orchestra 1959)

I didn't really get my music game going until I wanted to learn the cello. I was at the Conservatorium learning piano and I was listening to the student orchestra. Thinking “Ah, I’d just love to be there playing the cello”. I had made friends with two of the cellists from the orchestra and I told them that I wanted to learn the cello and they said, “forget it. We've been playing the cello since we were eight, now we’re eighteen, so there's no way. Why don't you learn the bass?” The next thing there was a sign on the notice board at the Conservatorium - “free lessons, scholarships: french horn, viola and double bass.” And I got the double bass scholarship for two years. All I had to do was play a piano piece for the examiner.

I had a very special relationship with a double bass teacher. I absolutely adored him and he adored me too, up to a point. He was like a father I'd never had because I had a real blockage between myself and my father. Our family was very split. It was me and mum and dad and the two boys. And it was a shame but my father had a lot of jealousy because mum was always talking about me and how clever and beautiful I was. It was a real shame but we healed that relationship before he died.

After I got my first top-class, professional job with the ballet I had to fly down to Melbourne. In the second week I was playing, my father phoned me and told me he was proud. That was very difficult for him to do in those days, it had to go through an exchange and all the rest. Mum wasn’t involved, he did it himself. He died days later.

I met my first husband, Eamon, at the Conservatory. He came from an Irish family and he had nine brothers and sisters. All the children played instruments. Eamon played violin and viola. He was killed in a car crash on our honeymoon, at twenty-one years old. 

(Wedding to Eamon with her mum 22 April 1960)

We had been touring around Tasmania in my mother and father's car that we borrowed. We travelled all around on the west side and down through the centre, over the mountains. We had a girlfriend from our string orchestra, who was then employed by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. So we met up with her. We had a wonderful honeymoon, it was just tremendous. And then we got on the ferry coming back over and the weather picked up. It was raining and it was a very rough voyage across.

Eamon had made friends with a young chap, he was only 16, and he hitched a ride back with us. We got to near Canberra and the road in those days was absolutely terrible. It was teeming with rain. The windscreen was fogging up all the time. I was mopping it up with a handkerchief. We were approaching a small town and there was a semi-trailer overtaking a broken down semi-trailer and we ran straight into him. Eamon and the hitchhiker were killed instantly. I was injured and my consciousness drifted. I came to for a moment and I could hear a siren going, and then I came to again in the hospital the next morning and the doctor then told me that Eamon had been killed. It was horrific.

At this point, Jan reads an incredibly moving poem that she wrote about the loss of Eamon.

This was published in Wingbeats in 2003, it’s called Honeymoon. I read that poem at the Byron Bay Writers Festival and it came second (because I went over time). It was the first time I'd attended the festival and I read the poem out in public - I had so many people just weeping away in the audience when I got to the end of it. I love it. I think it's one of the best poems I ever wrote. Writing poetry is healing.

I couldn't go back to the conservatory after the car smash. I didn't fit in because people wanted to talk about it and were dumping their own grief onto me in their efforts to sympathise. I didn't understand that until I studied my psychology degree when I was in my 50s.

That's why I went to England to study. To get away from people who knew me and what had happened. It was tough. I didn't take well to London. I arrived there in January in 1961 and didn’t see the sun until April.

I had connections through a girlfriend who had French connections and she was at that time studying violin at the Conservatorium in Paris. She was also engaged to an Australian who was studying in London, and there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing across the channel.

I was doing cooking and cleaning. I also worked in the Kenya coffee house from six o’clock until midnight, right in the heart of London. I would run like mad to get the last train home over to my place in South Clapham where I was living. 

I was sort of adopted by the lead bass player of one of the best amateur orchestras in London. He and his wife, who played the viola, were absolutely gobsmacked when they heard I was over there because I was running away from my connections in Sydney after I lost my first husband. They could see that I was handicapped by my nervousness in meeting other people or even talking about it. They had also lost a son about the same age as my husband and they they told me the best cure for it was to talk about it. I didn't believe them at the time but it did help.

I really wanted to find out what it was that I loved doing and focus on that. That's why I said yes to every opportunity I had.

I was playing Gilbert and Sullivan operas and I was engaged by one of one of the orchestras. They travelled from one suburb to another. Sometimes I'd be booked up to do jobs for months at a time. The Chelsea Opera Group in London was one of my biggest breaks because that was conducted by Colin Davis, who became Sir Colin Davis. It was like heaven. Sometimes I was so exhausted from playing and lugging the bass around. Often taxis wouldn't take me with my instrument and other times I'd be waiting for a bus and then the bus would just ring the bell and go off without me and I would just be left standing there with the double bass in pouring rain.

(Jan and her double bass 1962 – Clapham South London UK)

I was in England for two years. And I came back and thank goodness I did too. Because I avoided one of the worst fogs and wet winters they ever had. I had to come back to initiate the money that would come to me from the accident. I had to go through all of that. Which was not easy. But I was ready to come back. And my mother was so pleased that I came back. Everything started to fall into place for me once I came back to good old Aus.

The funny thing was that my second husband Peter was English and he was being flown out to Australia by the electrical company that he worked for to be the boss of that company out here, at the exact same time that I was on the ship heading to England.

Two years later we were introduced by an Australian girlfriend of mine, who I met up with in England. She was a friend of the sister of Eamon my first husband, and so it was all very serendipitous. Yes, it all sort of clicked. Peter was very well educated and spoke beautiful English (also quite a good smattering of German and French).

I started work with the Sydney Conservatorium Orchestra, then the Australian Youth Orchestra. It was quite amazing because our first performances were in Sydney, and we had a rehearsal room in Kings Cross, which was owned by the ABC, who employed the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Then I played in the Canberra Symphony Orchestra - every second month I'd shove the bass in the car and drive down to Canberra.

I went to Melbourne for work for three months at one point. My girlfriend was horrified. “What are you doing leaving your children and going down to Melbourne to live?” Well, we got a nurse and she came in and stayed and looked after the kids.

Joe was four and Emily was two. Peter at first wasn't too keen and I had to wait for an answer from him. But the average secretary was paid about $30 a week and I was going to be paid $80 plus expenses for travel. We got the Christmas holidays, three weeks, which were paid. I was a permanent employee. I was paid whether I turned up or not. But by golly, I turned up! 

I said, “I know it's been difficult for you Peter, but I really do want to keep it going”. We were able to live a lot better with me bringing that extra money. Peter said “Oh, yes, I could see how it's giving you a lot more self-confidence. I'm all for it.” And it was true. I had to shape up or ship out. The last thing I wanted was to be a housewife. I just couldn't bear the thought.

You can have a relationship and a career and you can do what you really want to do with your talents. You can bring out the very best in yourself and also be a parent.

I remember one evening about four o'clock the phone rang, and it was the manager of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. He said, “Janet are you free tonight? I said, “Yes” (Of course, I did). He said, “Can you come in, we are performing at the town hall?" And I said, “What are you performing?” He said, “Oh, it's Brahm's First Symphony. Do you know it?” I said, “Well, I know it, but I've never played it.” And he said, “Can you come in about half an hour? Can you do it?” And I said “yes, of course I can”. And I did! It was wonderful. When I was driving home I was so thrilled about it. I was driving over the Harbour Bridge thumping the steering wheel in delight saying “I did it! I did it!” to myself.

(Jan aged 40 years old when she was playing with Sydney Symphony Orchestra 1975)

I really struggled with my nervousness though. I went to a psychiatrist for about four years. And I was on Stelazine, Laroxyl and Valium - it was my cocktail, I took those pills every day for seven years before I gave them the toss. It was through yoga that I gave up all alcohol and tobacco too.

I had several breakdowns. I was working too hard. I had a relapse and I was in a psychiatric unit at one point suffering from nervous exhaustion. This is when I was working as a musician, and having difficulties with Peter. I was just plain exhausted. The psychiatrist said “I'm not going to allow you to go home because I know you're going to do far too much for everyone else and neglect yourself. You're going into hospital.” So I said, “okay,” and I went downstairs and out into the garden to have a smoke. I went to the door of the smoking room and I looked in and there's all this blue haze and all these people are in there, smoking away. Some of them were crying and they all looked miserable. And I thought "Oh my god, I don't belong in there.”

Most people are so enclosed that they don't seem to be able to see a better future for themselves. They're absolutely locked into the old patterns they've inherited. I was very lucky that I was able to get that shock treatment of seeing all those people in the smoking room and realise clearly that I didn’t belong in there. Anyway, I went back upstairs in the lift and knocked on the doctor's door. And I said “I'm going home. I’ve just given up smoking. I've got a job starting tomorrow in Adelaide.”

I had a girlfriend, June, who was working in the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. I hired a car and drove down to her place in the Adelaide hills and when I got out of the car she said “My god, you look terrible!” She said “you've got to do yoga. Find yourself a yoga teacher as soon as you go back to Sydney” because she was absolutely devoted to her yoga practice.

Anyway, I listened to what she said and I did it and and I loved it. I took to it like a duck to water and it really did make a hell of a difference. I found that I had a much better grip on things if I practiced yoga. I did the training, and I morphed into a yoga teacher. I opened up my own studio and I was also teaching double bass. I had about five or six girls that were learning and some of my students went on to play professionally. Then I really got very involved with studying psychology.

My marriage to Peter deteriorated because of my passion to do things. I was just so busy - I said yes to everything. I also think he was jealous of of my ability to work as hard as I did and to make a success (and sometimes I didn’t! Sometimes I goofed up and made an awful mess of things). Peter also didn't get on with my mother. Many people didn't because she really was very peculiar. The marriage eventually broke up. Peter married his girlfriend that he had on the side (that I knew about).

Emily, my daughter, bought a property up here out at Barkers Vale. I used to often fly up and then catch the train back to Sydney. I was living in Chatswood with my third husband, Larry, by that stage. Larry was originally at the Conservatorium at the same time as me and we met up again romantically quite a long time down the track. He played trombone, and he adored classical music. We met through a dating agency.

I remembered him quite well, but he didn't remember me at all, even though I was the only girl for quite a long time playing almost next to him in the orchestra! He’d been widowed for two years and he wasn't coping at all well. He was older than me by 11 years old. We got on pretty well. We did have our spats but we always made up,

So I was coming up here visiting and then I dragged him up here. We drove up and we stayed at a very nice place that was out of town. It wasn't very long before he agreed to sell up in Sydney. We sold that house for over half a million dollars as it was in Chatsworth. He was a wonderful gardener and I think it was the garden that sold the place. We lived in Alstonville when we first moved here. Larry died in 2009.

I started writing poetry and joined Dangerously Poetic in 2001 and started really getting serious about my poetry. And I learned a tremendous lot from that. I used to write up the minutes for the poetry group. I also joined U3A and in 2011 I was offered the job of teaching the writing group and I did that until 2016. Then I went to France and bought a house and lived there for four years before coming back.

(Jan in France outside a Chateau and Art Gallery 2018/2019)

I did something much smarter than buying a house when I got back. I rented and I loaned the money that I had from the sale of the French house to my two children, all legally, and they pay the loans back now.

I've just reconnected with my son Joe. I visited him a few weeks ago. He's up in Darwin. He works for Greyhound, the bus company, and he takes people out to see the Aboriginal art. I was there for almost a week. I also stayed three days in Brisbane with cousin Kate who also sold up in France and came back about a year ago and she's bought into a beautiful garden retirement village on the outskirts of Brisbane.

I've morphed into a writer now. My first book ‘Other than English’, was the family history, was published in 2006.

I’m now 87. The message I would like to generate is that I’ve had a lot of disadvantages in my childhood and life, but I have achieved a lot.

I think number one, nurture yourself and if you are feeling unhappy, or nursing a grief - be honest about it. But don't dump it on others. Avoid, like the plague, that feeling of hopelessness, no matter how bad things are. Avoid it. If you do have a religious or a spiritual asset, I think you've got to rely on that. It's the better part of yourself, no matter what you call it.

Mulling over things is okay - read about psychology, find out what's really going on inside yourself. Don't be afraid of investigating, of finding out the most awful things about the past. It's very important to open up to someone you can trust or a close friend and to be able to grow out of the experience. Don't stay there. Don't stay crushed or feeling hopeless and downtrodden. No matter how bad things get. They will only get better if you desire it and if you go looking for it, and then you'll find things will start falling into place.

Be patient with yourself. Sometimes people will put you down or they'll treat you like you don't matter. You do matter. You matter to yourself, and you matter to other people too. Give anyone who doesn't believe that you really matter, that you are an absolutely wonderful person, the flick!