Kimberley Garlick was a professional ballerina in Sydney before injuries led her to a new passion, pilates and the prevention of injuries. Kimberley has been running Northern Rivers Pilates and with husband Adam, have just purchased the building they were renting in Keen Street. Lilly Harmon sat down with Kimberley to get her life story.

I was born in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea and then moved to Australia when I was about five or six.

I don't have many memories from those early days in Papua New Guinea. It is more from photographs that I remember the area. There are some amazing photos with us in the jungles with different tribes as my father was a photographer there. We spent quite a lot of time with the native people in the jungle. It was cool.

(Kimberley as a baby in Papua New Guinea)

From there, I grew up in Jimboomba, so kind of country Queensland.

When I was probably about six or seven I started ballet. It was something that I just fell in love with.

The posters on my wall were very unusual in comparison to other people. I was the child that had Rudolf Nureyev posters and Mozart. I just loved that world and I just had that passion. I'd be dancing everywhere I possibly could.

I think these days it's a lot more competitive than it was back in my day as well. So, I probably got given a little bit more opportunity than if you're growing up in the country now. You really have to ensure you've got those dedicated parents to do a lot of driving and I had a dedicated mum that was willing to do a lot of travel for me.

I started in Park Ridge and I ended up going into Brisbane City and then it got to the stage that ended up getting little scholarships along the way and that took me into the ballet world in a big way.

(Kimberley as a young ballerina in Brisbane)

I was the big fish in a very small pond at the time and when I moved to Sydney to do ballet full-time, I was no longer that big fish.

I kind of left home about the age of 15 because my mum sent me to McDonald College on a summer school. From there, I got a partial scholarship into McDonald College.

Mum was a single mum, so the uniforms and everything were a little bit expensive. So, then Marilyn Jones and Garth Welsh offered me a different kind of way. It was literally full-time ballet where at McDonald College it was school with ballet. So, I did my schooling by correspondence this way we didn't have the costs and stuff involved.

Marilyn Jones and Garth Welsh probably doesn't mean much to anyone unless you're in the ballet world. They were kind of the 'to do' people at the time and dancing with the Australian Opera Ballet Company.

I met my husband Adam in Sydney when I was 17. I didn't start dating him though until I was 21 because he was a few years older than me and he was a bit of a rebel. He's still a rebel. He's someone that makes me laugh and works really hard and I admire very much. I'm a bit of a planner. I have my 5 year, 10 year and 15 year plans. He's not into post notes and planning like I am so it's a good combination. He's put up with me for this long.

It got to the stage with my ballet where I really couldn't dance without pain and I was only 20 with feet and shin splints. These days, you have a lot more support through the actual training. So we've worked with a lot of ballet dancers here and they're doing pilates like two or three times a week.

For a good few years I danced with these injuries. I ended up with compact compartment syndrome and a few other injuries along the way. My boday was literally saying, you just can't do it anymore.

At the time, I was still sort of dabbling in ballet. I was thinking I'd go to class at 20 and then also have a job and I'd be able to return to it later. It takes a little while to mourn it, and then you mourn it for a lot longer. I think I'm still mourning. If it's something that you're passionate about, it is very difficult to let go of. It's like a rugby player when he gets to that certain age and he can no longer even do it for fun. It is very difficult walking away from something you're passionate about.

Back then, I had never done pilates until I went to Sydney and then it was like a very rare kind of opportunity to do it. In all the full time ballet schools, there's physios, massage, pilates, yoga, there's a lot of modalities now supporting those kids. And when you are blessed with a ballet body, you tend to have hypermobility with your refined build. That hypermobility is what makes you good at ballet but unless you've got the control of that, it can then lead to injuries. So, these days, I think there's a lot more support in the development of that.

Pilates really wasn't like this in the 1990s. I was doing personal training, doing all those step pilates. I was in the lycra and I guess in a way, that was my new stage for a while. I also was studying nutrition and the human movement. So the spin classes to pump classes and doing all of that. 

In one of the gyms they wanted to bring pilates. It was starting to gain momentum in America and other areas. I got handed a video and it was suggested “Can you watch this video and then teach this class?” 

So, not a lot of credibility would have gone into my first classes, I can guarantee, but what we noticed was there was a massive influx of people wanting to do it. 

There was a small course that was running in Sydney that my mum did at the same time with me, because “no one is teaching this and no one your age because no one older is doing it, so you should do it with me.” That's how it kind of ended up. 

The University of Sydney was running their first pilates course. So, I did that and a lot of pilates certifications. At that time I was running a lot of education for pilates within gyms. So I was kind of getting taken to all the different gyms around Australia and helping their instructors understand pilates.

The company that I am very much involved with is called Polestar Pilates International. Back then, they had their main presenter who was in Australia and who knew one of the gyms that I was working with. I was very fortunate that I had a one-on-one with her for three days and that's when my whole world started to change with pilates because it was like, wow, this is actually the nuts and bolts of it. This is something so much more in depth than I ever realised. 

I went and did their diploma and that's when they asked me to become one of their educators. The way I can remember all of the years I started my pilates training and so forth, coincided with the birth of my children, Madison (27), Bridget (23) and Caitlin (20). 

I grew up loving the Byron area so my mum used to come and take us into little holidays around this area. My girls all grew up loving horses and we were in Sydney and it was like, oh my gosh, there was property up here. We found a place in Corndale and then rented it out for five years. We moved up when Maddison started high school in 2008.

I still had my studio in Sydney because I wasn't sure whether we should keep that and just tracked back and forth. I knew pretty quickly that I didn't really want to go back to Sydney very often (Sorry people that live in Sydney). What I started to do was I hired a hall in The Channon, Lismore and Clunes and then started to get a feel. I initially thought that I'd probably open one in either Byron or Bangalow. 

I have to be honest, I didn't really know much about Lismore, so I wasn't sure whether there'll be a need for it. But then living here, what I discovered very quickly, is that the community was very dense and very honest and, I guess there was an authenticity about Lismore rather than a transient kind of feel. In other areas you kind of feel there was an ebb and flow of people coming and going, where I felt you had these roots and nuts and bolts here in Lismore.

There was certainly, I thought, a need for pilates in the area, like there was in the hospital system. You have all these amazing teams and sports people but there wasn't a modality that was meeting the needs of them to improve their rehab components.

So, I took the plunge and started in the Karen Ireland Dance Centre, just across from Ireland Honda. I was teaching ballet with them for a while. We got some equipment in there and I started Northern Rivers Pilates. Then I moved up on the corner of Keen and Magellan Street. 

When Covid came, we really couldn't afford the rent, so I moved all of the equipment home. One of my clients was here in our current space, and got in touch with me and said I heard that you no longer have a space. So, we moved in downstairs.

The February 2022 flood definitely wasn’t in our thinking. This building has never flooded upstairs, but we knew downstairs flooded in 2017.

(Kimberley doing the mud cleanup after the February 28, 2022 big flood)

I had a flood plan, so we came in when all the warnings were coming in on the Friday and we moved all the equipment out in my husband's truck, because he’s a builder. We sandbagged everything and put everything upstairs which was a surveying company at the time who felt safe because nothing had ever gone up there. 

So, we moved our computers and our administration items upstairs, I guess all the soft stuff. And then we moved our larger items to a warehouse just past the golf course, that had never seen a flood. We packed my husband's truck with all the gear in it, and that entire warehouse went under. We thought we were right as rain, no pun intended. We moved everything there and watched everything unfold on the news. I was like, oh my god, his truck and all my equipment with the studio were underwater.

Everybody in town had the best plans and because we were in the other studio in the CBD in 2017, it just came up to the third step or something. So we were like that's fine.

We reopened in June 2022. It was just the downstairs area and was kind of a modified version of what we had. At that time, what I did was put the word out that I needed work and I went and worked in Singapore, Melbourne and Sydney. I needed to get money to rebuild.

(The Garlick family with Mayor Steve Krieg during the cleanup)

The entire time we gave free classes online to anybody that needed it, not just our clients. I was overseas trying to earn an income while Adam, who is a builder, and Madison's partner, who is a builder were in here working their butts off. I was away working my butt off and we eventually got it all together.

After the flood we bought the building. It's the first time I've actually said that out loud to anyone. I feel a bit weird saying that. At the time it was a no-brainer because, you know, I was paying rent here all the time anyway, and I wasn't going anywhere.

I didn't want to open up a studio anywhere else. The amazing women that owned it, they had had enough and wanted someone younger and more energetic to own the building.

We were very fortunate.