About Us
Smash and I met in Sydney in 1990. I was a single mum, running a graphic design business in Surry Hills with a friend and co-worker, Jodi from my previous job at Mambo Graphics. One day, Smash came into our office needing some CD artwork for a band he managed called The Falling Joys. Throughout the meeting, he was abrupt, dogmatic and unsmiling, and said, ‘Less is more’ too many times. We’ve been together ever since.
In 1993 we got married at Bondi Beach S.L.S.C. then moved back to Brisbane in 1994 with Jackson, my son who was getting used to the idea of Smash being his new Dad. That same year, we had another son, Henry, and started an event management company called Media Rare. Smash did site production and I did the backstage artwork and dressing for music festivals including Livid, Big Day Out and Soundwave. In 2002 the event work started to pick up, so we bought a house on a flood plain in Indooroopilly to celebrate the occasion.
On the 11th January 2011, our house fulfilled its destiny, so after washing off all the mud, we sold it and moved to the top of a hill in Taringa, into a run-down federation Queenslander house that we are still restoring. We currently split our time between Brisbane and Nundubbermere where we are attempting to build our dream shed in the bush.
Our wedding day.
These Days.
And this is Smash.
Don’t be put off by his name and don’t feel sorry for him – he deserves it. Five motorcycle accidents before the age of twenty-one – his poor mother. I like to think he’s gotten the smashing out of his system now in light of the fact that he recently bought a new motor bike.
Smash started work at a very young age and has tried his hand at just about everything apart from rocket science and brain surgery (if his stories are to be believed). His greatest love, apart from his family and friends, food, tractors, beer, red wine, motorcycles, starting fires with petrol, crime fiction, hoarding, chain sawing, sleeping in and trashy action movies – his greatest love apart from all that, is music. He started out as a roadie which led to owning a PA Hire business, then he moved into the bossier role of tour manager. He toured with Brizzy’s own and beloved The Go-Betweens, no less. (Years later, when I confessed my crippling youthful crush on Robert Forster, Smash arranged a surprise meeting between me and Robert in the site office backstage at Livid. I could not think of one single thing to say and we sat next to each other on a sticky, pock marked sofa, looking straight ahead for about three minutes while Smash filled the dead air with questions that Robert pondered and gave eloquent, mysterious answers to. After Robert left, I changed out of my sweaty T-shirt and berated Smash for springing the meeting on me, but really I was angry at myself for wasting the opportunity to ask Robert if he’d noticed me in the front row of a show they played in 1980 at Baroona Hall.)
Anyway, (cough) enough about Robert. So then, Smash managed bands like The Falling Joys, Clouds, Sidewinder, Mixed Relations, Swordfish, and later on, The Melniks and The Resin Dogs, all whilst building his event management skills and weaving his way into the festival scene, combining his love of music and telling people what to do. He’s an ideas man, as the boys and I like to say when we hear something crash and splinter downstairs in his workshop. His ideas are big and frequent, sometimes dangerous or hard to take seriously, often not coming to fruition, but every now and then, dazzling. Like his idea for an internet ticketing business! It did really, really well… until Covid came along and changed everything. But that’s another story.