Before the runways, before fashion school, and before I ever called myself a designer, I was just a young Tiwi woman with big dreams.
After finishing high school in Darwin, I moved to the Wurrumiyanga on the Tiwi Islands and began working at the local school. My days were spent tutoring students and reading books with them, becoming part of the school community and reconnecting with life on the Islands.
In the afternoons, I volunteered at the school's café alongside Sr Anne Gardner. I helped prepare food, serve coffee, clean tables, and lend a hand wherever I was needed.
To many people, it may have seemed like an ordinary routine, but for me it became a place where my imagination was free to wander.
The café sat near the beach, overlooking the ocean.
Every day I was surrounded by the colours of the sea, the changing skies, and the rhythm of the water moving across Country. During quiet moments, I would find myself daydreaming about fashion. I imagined garments flowing like waves, colours inspired by the ocean, and designs that reflected the beauty of the landscape around me.
I didn't realise it then, but those moments would become some of my earliest design lessons.
The ocean became my first mood board.
The horizon became my first runway.
And my imagination became my first design studio.
When the day was over, I would often head back to my sister's house. Around that time, she had just gotten cable television, and for me it felt like opening a window into another world.
I was completely obsessed with the Fashion Channel.
The moment I walked through the door, I would switch it on and sit there mesmerised by runway shows, designer interviews, backstage footage, and collections from around the world. I couldn't get enough.
I would watch for as long as I could.
Sometimes for hours.
In fact, I watched it so much that eventually my family would get sick of seeing fashion shows on television and tell me it was someone else's turn to choose what was on TV.
Looking back now, it makes me laugh.
At the time, fashion felt so far away from my life on the Tiwi Islands. I didn't know any designers personally. I had never attended a runway show. I had no connections to the fashion industry.
But something about it spoke to me.
I was fascinated by the creativity, the storytelling, and the way designers could take an idea from their imagination and bring it to life.
The more I watched, the more I dreamed.
I would spend my days looking out across the ocean imagining designs inspired by the water, and my evenings immersed in a world of fashion that felt both distant and somehow familiar.
Without realising it, I was laying the foundations of the designer I would one day become.
Years later, those dreams would lead me to study fashion design, become the first Indigenous graduate of Whitehouse Institute of Design, receive the Student of the Year Award, intern in New York, showcase collections on national runways, and build my own label.
Whenever people ask where my inspiration comes from, I often think back to those days.
To the café by the beach.
To the endless view of the ocean.
To family, culture, and community.
To the Fashion Channel playing in the background while my family rolled their eyes and waited for me to hand over the remote.
Because long before fashion became my career, it was already living in my imagination.
Sometimes I think the designer I was becoming already existed back then. She was sitting by the sea, dreaming up garments inspired by Country, unaware that one day those dreams would become reality.
And sometimes, the biggest dreams are born from quiet moments spent imagining what could be.