Q: Felicity, could you please introduce yourself?

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My name is Flick. I'm a Ngarrindjeri woman from South Australia. I spent a lot of my younger years in prison. I've been out for five years now, so a lot’s changed. I’m glad to be here having a yarn with you all today.

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Q: Can you share a little bit about how you first got involved with painting, The Torch, and how you feel it has shaped your journey since?

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I started going to prison the day after my 18th birthday – that's when I first got locked up. They were just small sentences, off and on. I was using substances, so by the time I'd withdrawn from that and started actually balancing out I was already back in community and the cycle kept going.

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It wasn't until my last sentence, which was almost three years, I was given the opportunity to figure out what I really wanted in life and how to take steps towards it.

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I started attending Koorie art class at DPFC (Dame Phyllis Frost Centre), and that was where I got introduced to The Torch and the Senior Arts Officer, Paul McCann, he came in. I'd never painted before. He was amazing, he was fabulous, and he helped me and coached me and guided me through how to get the visions I had in my head of these paintings and how to put them on canvas.

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I'm a Ngarrindjeri woman from South Australia. The library didn't have much information about my mob and everything that I wanted to learn, but The Torch put together a resource booklet all about my mob, brought it in, and basically that really got me going.

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I exhibited and sold my first painting in 2019 in The Torch’s big annual exhibition called “Confined”. My artwork was called Pilarki. That's Ngarrindjeri for “callop”, and that was kind of where everything changed for me, making that first sale and knowing that somebody really wanted my painting – that they they went out, worked hard, made money and they purchased my painting to put on their wall in their house.

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It kind of empowered me to realise that maybe I could be more than what I had been labelled by the community and the media when I was going through those challenging times and making those poor decisions. When you call somebody dumb so many times, they start believing they're dumb.

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After that first sale, I thought, maybe I'm more than just an addict and a criminal – maybe I'm an artist as well. That really fueled the fire to keep learning.

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There's a lot of traditional line work that my mob does, that's always been a constant throughout all my artworks. When I paint the lines, you've got to have a steady hand, you've got to control your breathing to be able to get those clear lines. So it became a real self soothing and healing process, and that became my new way of self-medicating.

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I didn't go to the drugs when things got hard to deal with. Instead, I picked up the brush and I’d start zoning out and I’d paint, and that's how I found my mind then and it's how I still do it now.

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Q: Can you talk about the importance of remaining connected to your family and how the high cost of prison phone calls can be detrimental to the overall well-being of people who are incarcerated?

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Absolutely. The phone systems in prison, aside from snail mail, are vital to be able to keep in contact with family. It's so important to be able to keep an ear out on what's going on at home, make sure everyone's okay, keep them up to date with your court matter, what you're doing, if you're okay. For me, prison calls were $12 for 12 minutes to call a mobile. Otherwise, it was usually about 30 cents, depending on where they are in Victoria, if it was a landline. And that went for 12 minutes as well. But who has got landlines these days, really?

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If you're not getting money from family or friends put into your account each month, you get such a small portion, and that's if you're working or if you're on remand. The money that you do get from the prison from working or being on remand was also the money for toiletries to be able to wash yourself, any kind of snacks, stamps to write letters for family, friends – things like that – and then to add those phone calls on top. It's crazy. It's so hard to stay connected.

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Q: We’re a couple of days out from Invasion Day. What does Invasion Day mean to you as a formerly incarcerated mob? And what change would you like to see on First Nations justice?

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Not a day to be celebrated, that's for sure. It’s Invasion Day. As you know, it's very clear, we were okay before we got colonised. It's not something to look back and reminisce on in a good sense and celebrate.

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It should be acknowledged as a Day of Mourning, a day of Sorry Business, where people should really put weight in their acknowledgement of what transpired back then and how it continues to transpire in today's society with mob. Change the date, do what you want with it.

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I don't agree with how it is now, and it should have been changed – well, it shouldn't have even been turned into a day of celebration. It's not something to be proud of, it's not something to be glorified. That's my opinion.