Lisa Lamarre owns La Trouvaille, a French-inspired gift shop in the Star Court Arcade on Molesworth Street and has a timber farm. Lisa has lived all over the world and has an amazing life story which she tells to Lilly Harmon.

I was born in Casino in 1967, to a registered nurse and a young detective who both worked in the area, and had themselves been born in Mudgee/Gulgong. We lived in a little house in Clay Avenue near the railway - I went back recently to see it from the street and it is exactly the same 50 years later - neat, untouched and suffused with black and white memories of another life.

We moved to Sydney in 1971, by which stage I had a brother and sister, and settled in Castle Hill, which at the time was still the edge of a sprawling rural community.

Dad went back to work as a Detective Sergeant around inner Sydney and mum worked her way up to managing a nursing home. Life was filled with schoolmates, push bikes and swimming carnivals, and later our after-school jobs at the local McDonalds. I still have lifelong friends from my time there.

The big bad 80s hit, and with it the “recession we had to have”. Dad had quit the force early, probably with PTSD, after too many years of infamous names and cases which regularly made the nightly news (and later, TV productions). Our dinner table conversations were regularly peppered with what were to become the worst names in criminal history. 

He chose to switch to work as a developer. Unfortunately, timing and a series of events during this chapter would result in the end of our life as we knew it, and saw us lose our home and just about everything else.

As teenagers, my sister and I were suddenly the architects of our own futures. I was lucky enough to get myself qualified as a draftswoman, switching from full-time to night study through the help of a very kind lecturer, and worked for surveyors in Liverpool in the meantime.

Sydney in the 80s - what a riot of big hair and shoulder pads, rock bands in pubs, MTV, and getting everywhere on red rattlers until we could afford our first jalopies. Mine was a Datsun 180B, bright orange… and probably still being driven.

Eventually, in ‘87 I made my way to Canberra as a 20-year-old and settled into contract work with the Dept of Housing & Construction, which would see a number of name changes over the four years I lived there. I loved it. Design work was still done on the drawing board with pen and ink and I’m grateful for those skills; we worked fast and hard and everyone had their own style. Friday nights at the Contented Soul in Woden were always packed with architects, engineers and drafties.

Most design work is now done via sophisticated CAD packages. I’ve been lucky enough to experience this whole sea change in my lifetime and have worked right across the spectrum - as a user, administrator and customiser. Now CAD figures largely in my own business.

1991 saw me back in Sydney working for a project north of Newcastle - Tomago Aluminum. The joint venture on the potline expansion involved a Montreal based EPCM (Engineering, Procurement, Construction & Management) firm, SNC-Lavalin.

Our office in St Leonards housed almost 200 people, including a bunch of young French-speaking expats. I think this is one of the best projects I’ve ever been involved with; they really were the glory days and I’ll miss the camaraderie and friendships we took from that one. I also met a young Canadian engineer from Quebec, Michel, whom I later married - once we got across each other’s languages. He had way more success with English than I did with French!

Fast forward to 1993 and we were transferred to South Africa for another aluminium project in Richards Bay. South Africa would figure largely in our futures as expats. We saw the first democratic elections held in 1994 and the rugby World Cup - later the subject of the movie Invictus.

We married near Howick, in the southern highlands in 1995, in a tiny settler church close to where Nelson Mandela had been arrested before his long incarceration. There is a beautiful sculpture there now but back then it was just a small stone marker. 

During our second assignment there from late 1999, both our kids were born in Johannesburg. A further project in Mozambique, which was emerging from civil war and then the horrendous floods of early 2000, really was sobering.

We lived in a compound, drinking water was supplied by trucks and crime was rampant as the country dealt with the complete collapse of infrastructure. Furthering the misery of the population, who already dealt with TB and staggeringly high AIDS rates, came an onslaught of Cholera, Typhoid, Dysentery and Malarial Meningitis thanks to the floods.

I could write a whole book about that experience, like watching the Sydney 2000 Olympics with friends and colleagues thanks to an old generator that kept cutting out. Grocery trips took all day through bombed and potholed streets and you always carried mosquito repellent. De-mining was commonplace.

In the middle of this, a figure familiar to anyone on the planet happened to wander onto the project site (a feat in itself considering it was protected by razor wire and AK47s…) The guards simply melted away, whispering “Madiba…” none other than Nelson Mandela himself had casually wandered in to check out this project which employed 9,000 people and was the greatest economic boost to the country since the war, doubling its GDP.

His third wife, Graca, was Mozambican herself and the widow of its president, and Nelson was all about getting across what was happening there. Of course, heads nearly fell off their shoulders and Michel was lucky enough to spend a good hour with both of them in the project office. Great memories.

Another four years in Brisbane and then seven years in Canada followed. We had lived in Quebec (Montreal) right across to Toronto and finally Kitimat, northern British Columbia. All that time we maintained a home we had built by the St-Maurice river in Quebec… somewhere to come home to between projects, hang with Michel’s family, spend the summers fishing and boating, and messing around on the wharf into the long Canadian summer evenings. Christmas was always deep white snow and a roaring open fire. It was perfect. We only recently sold it.

Kitimat, far north of Vancouver and home of the grizzly bear and salmon runs, proved to be our last project as expats and ended in 2014. Our time there was unforgettable; I joined the dragon boating team for a while and we would train in the frigid Douglas channel with the osprey and seals.

Since there’s not a lot for young people up there and winters are long and deep, they’re either ice hockey players or swimmers - or both. Our kids elected to swim, and our lives became about training, swim meets away and the inevitable partying with parents while we all hollered from the pool deck. We had the time of our lives and the kids benefitted from brilliant coaching. 

We returned to Brisbane where our kids finished school and I started a jewellery business (OXUS) with my sister. It has pride of place in my shop and was the reason I went into retail in Lismore in the first place. The original idea was to rent a small space from where I could design, work, assemble and sell once we relocated permanently from Brisbane to our timber farm, which we had bought years prior.

Our trajectory was severely truncated with Michel, who by then had his own startup in machine intelligence (MOVUS) suffering a massive stroke in 2017.

As he was always super fit and handling six things at once, this brought all of us screeching to a stop as our daughter finished year 12 and son year 10. None of us (including neurologists who witnessed his struggle firsthand) are really sure how he survived, given the assault on his brain and body, however, seven years on he has proven quite the medical marvel. From almost sedentary in a wheelchair he now walks, drives, cycles, speaks two languages fluently again, takes on consulting work, manages a timber plantation and is back to the bossy Frenchman we know.

Our kids have moved on to their own lives now - daughter Vanessa with a hybrid of Architectural Engineering in Adelaide and son Gabriel an Industrial Designer… no surprise really given our backgrounds. I managed to study off campus with Deakin Uni over the years and this has underpinned my work with my jewellery business, which we started over a couple of margaritas on the Sunshine Coast on our return from projects.

By 2019 we settled permanently at the farm while Michel continued his recovery and I started thinking about what direction to go in next. The two shops that were to become La Trouvaille popped up for sale and for some reason, I swung from renting to buying. By mid-2021 we had completed the refit and I’d started sourcing other brands to fill a space that was suddenly a whole lot larger than I’d planned on. Epic timing, of course. We all had our flood plans, didn’t we….

…And the skull in my branding? A watercolour memory of Dad taking us to an abandoned circus site when I was about 10. I found an old, dried-up steer skull amongst the stones and dry grass patches and had to have it. Dragged it home, painted it in rainbow colours and took it to school for show and tell. It languished in a cupboard until the end of the school year when a frustrated teacher asked me to please take it home.

I thought it was just the best thing I’d ever owned, a chance encounter with something wonderful… which is the meaning of La Trouvaille. All I need to do now is paint my sign in rainbow colours for next year’s Fruits.

Dad passed in Feb 2022. My parents lived in Dunedoo and it was becoming clear that mum could not be on her own, so we moved her here with us as the rain pounded down. She arrived here on the 25th and three days later we made history for terrible reasons. What we could salvage, clean, restore and offer in my flood sale essentially helped me get back into business. I also learned which brands are indestructible.

The shop has been rebuilt floodproof (well, except for the plaster ceilings, which I couldn’t live without). Even the beautiful dome chandeliers survived their mud bath; I painstakingly restored them and had them rehung.

Meanwhile, Michel got to work organising for the arcade to be refit; since it’s common area it came down to the shop owners themselves to finance the arcade reconstruction. He did the work pro bono and assembled an amazing team of local professionals who just got it done. I’m so proud of all of them, and my good friend Ian, who was instrumental in pulling my precious shop back together.

People ask me about the little stuffed bear in a cloche, high above my head on the top shelf of my shop. His name is McMuddy. He belonged to a collection of Canadian Christmas pieces I owned and which we stored in a second shop in the arcade. Not high enough, sadly.

When the floods hit and the cleanup was underway, I wandered into the street, still shell-shocked I guess, and looked down into the gutter which had been swept several times by Bobcats. I’ve often said it’s funny what brings you undone. Laying there on his back, stuffing poking out of his head, one eye clouded in dry debris and looking utterly miserable, was my tiny little bear.

I cracked, I don’t mind telling you.

I brought him in and sat him on a ruined shelf, took a picture and for some reason posted it. In short order a friend advised that he had already made the news; his photograph had been taken in the gutter before I found him. I’m not particularly sentimental but he became our mascot - McMuddy had a good soapy bath and found his way with us to trivia nights and parties, then sat around on scaffolding and window ledges as the new fitout progressed.

One day soon I’ll design a little tattoo of him flopped over a stitched-up scar on my shoulder, to remind us we survived it.

What’s next? To tell you the truth, my retail career was never intended to be a long one. Of course, the devastation wrought on our town has had personal implications too. I’m close to retirement and I have a farm and a jewellery business to run, so not planning on stopping work but will, before too long, shrink my operation in town and take some time out.

Art, drawing, design, and manufacturing are my first loves. Sourcing beautiful items from Australia and around the world has been an unmitigated joy, fuelled by the enthusiasm and interest people have shown for their stories and their uses. But I look forward to eventually wandering down to my workshop at the farm, dreaming up a timber and resin piece, designing a silver cuff, or messing around on the lathe with my son.

We’ll see.