ESTHER: Hi everyone, my name is Esther and this is my story Joy Ride. I was born in the 70’s in Subiaco, and my parents have a cultural background of my father being Indian, and my mother is English, Burmese, German descent. Here’s a photo of my parents. This was taken just after they migrated here to Perth. So you can imagine what it was like growing up with parents that looked like this in a not-so-diverse Perth in the 70s. My father was also very traditional, so blue light discos and parties were the elephant in the room. And also, I didn’t quite fit in anywhere, like to my Indian cousins. They used to have a term for it because I was in-between. So they used to call me a ‘soda lemon’ because I wasn’t one thing or another. But by the nineties, things started to slowly change. I got my first job in Maccas across the road from Perth train station, and back then it was called Forrest Place in the city center. So, there were a lot more migrant families that were coming into Perth.

And my best friend was not a soda lemon. She was a very bold young lady, like wherever her mind went, her mouth went with it. And this kind of excited me, but scared me at the same time. And I remember us sitting on her bedroom floor on a Saturday morning, and she said, Rock, which she used to call me, let’s go clubbing tonight, no one’s gonna know. And we’re gonna slip out this window and our two mates are gonna take us on their bikes to the train station. And in that moment, I think I left my body, but I really wanted a chance for an adventure. I wanted to challenge myself against my father’s strict rules and curfews. And I didn’t wanna do it because everybody else was doing it. I wanted to do it because it was an adventure just for me.

So, within a few hours, we were dressed to the nines, we had our hair sprayed into place, and we were on the handlebars of these two bikes with our two cheeky friends, Paper and Scissors I’ll call them. And then all of a sudden there are these uneven concrete footpaths and tree branches in our faces. And the wind shook the hairspray out of our heads, and my bum was really, really sore on these handlebars. And then this long silver carriage pulls up in front of us at the station and there’s a bikey. His eyes are like laser beams all the way until Perth. Along the way, a guy argues his way off at one of the stops. And in a corner of the train, a couple exchanges one breath of life for another.

And then there we are in this queue in front of this towering concrete devil. And this man with a mustache the length of Roe Street saunters down these steps. And he hand picks us out of this lineup, and this bass just pounded through these glass doors. And we could hear these people chanting hip-hop, Hey-ho, Hey-ho. Our whole world inverted up this path to this giant beast in Perth’s belly. And we faded into this smell of sweat and the slow motion of these strobe lights and shapes past us wearing nothing but boob tubes and hot pants, and people were drinking from these colored test tubes. And then another song came on and it just blew the roof off the club. And people started handing out the fluro drinks. And it was like the stars fell outta the sky and shone onto each and every one of us. And in that moment, I didn’t care who I was or where I came from. Another song came on and it swallowed us up on the dance floor. And I just disappeared into myself.

And then I realized, I can’t see my friends anymore. I don’t know where Beans is, and I dunno where Paper and Scissors are. And I followed these stairs up to the second level, and then the third of this club, and every face that I looked at was a different one staring back at me. I thought, now I really am dead.

Mum’s face, newspaper headlines, dad’s voice, reading the newspaper headlines, “underage girls in club.” And then I asked around, I was giving descriptions of my friends and people were saying that they had seen them leave, and they’re at another club a few streets away. So I go back down to the first level, and before I could even form a plan in my head, I see Beans. She’s at the same bar that we came to on the first level when we first entered. She’s climbing onto it. And she’s hanging off this very, very muscly looking guy who’s outgrown his T-shirt. And I grab his arm in panic, and I think I said something like, if you wanna see this underage girl again, you’re gonna call us a cab, otherwise she’s gonna pass out completely. And to my surprise, he actually does this. And he throws her into a cab, you know, half an hour later alongside me. And I’m sitting there in this cab and I’m picturing my dad’s angry face. And I think back to my last visit to India where a friend and I, we had snuck into this Indian temple and we were running in this temple and everybody was shaking their heads at us and clicking their tongues.

But then that night, being in that taxi, I really saw past what Dad saw. I actually didn’t care. I felt like for the first time something happened to me that night.

I think what happened was that where I know I’ve been in every situation where the world is looking at me, staring at me, judging me, doesn’t know me, doesn’t trust me, doesn’t care for me, and often doesn’t see me. I thought, it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter. Because as I crawled back through that tiny space of that window, and I woke up not too much later with the sun, I woke up to the first day of the rest of my life where I could finally count on me, and I knew I could count on me.