Many of my earliest memories take place in a single-fronted terrace house in Brunswick.

The house was painted yellow. It had a dank, wiry carpet throughout, and a toilet at the bottom of the backyard, which was paved with rupturing concrete.

I lived there with my mum and older half-sister. We moved there after my parent’s divorce in 1990.

Mum and Dad’s relationship was always very musical. They’d first met at a folk event, played in Baz Luhrmann’s early musicals, and even recorded an album together: a magically daggy affair complete with flutes and layered harmonies.

After their divorce, Mum started an arts degree, got involved in activism and became a lesbian. It’s a trajectory that has since become its own archetype; Mum did it before it was cool. (I’ve told this story in more detail in a past Archer piece here.)

She was exploring queerness after being in two heterosexual marriages for the majority of her adult life. Writing and performing music became a way to process these life changes; she used it as a tool for catharsis during a period of massive upheaval and personal growth. My sister and I were always along for the ride.

She began to perform at small venues around Melbourne, particularly in Fitzroy – which was, and still is, despite the endless threat of gentrification, an artistic heartland.

She played at feminist marches and events, and was invited to Sydney to perform at a massive activist event on the Harbour Bridge. Her songs were about gay rights, gay love, empowerment and visibility.

In 1993, when I was six years old, Mum recorded an album called Sung in my Lover’s Bedroom: a collection of tracks that were explicit acts of feminist and lesbian activism.

I remember bits and pieces from this era – Mum leaning over her piano in a tie-dye top with hacked off sleeves and no bra; me begging for renditions of my favorite songs in our lounge room; a ‘women’s spirit camp’ in the bush with giggling, nude women thrashing around in an outdoor pool.

I remember spending time at other women’s houses, where they would let me watch Rage, unmoved by the technology ban imposed in my own home.

Photo of the author’s mum, taken between 1991 and 1994 in Albert Street, Brunswick.

After Mum’s album was finished, we moved to the outer suburbs so my sister and I could go to a Steiner school nearby.

She stopped playing folk and jazz, and instead started playing classical guitar. She took up the lyre and started writing strange, avant-garde choral pieces; the days of lesbian songwriting were over.

We still had her album on tape, stuffed into an antique sideboard in our living room. But at some stage, during unrelenting house moves throughout my teenagehood, we lost it.

Fast forward to 2023. I’m in my mid-thirties and Mum’s in her early sixties. I’m recording my own album, called It Should Have Been Done With Ease.

Driving up the Eastern Freeway, past the Croydon house we lived in with the antique sideboard, Mum and I are listening to the first of my recordings.

“My voice sounds HEAPS like yours sometimes!” I yell over the music. I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s comforting to imagine so.

We get to talking about her own album from way back when, and I tell her I want to listen to it.

We verbally scroll through options of where it might be: my godfather’s shed, under my childhood best friend’s house with all my old Dolly magazines, in Dad’s garage perhaps?

My mum tells me she thinks 1000 copies were sold, and vaguely remembers that the cover had a hand-drawn pink teapot with a lesbian symbol on it. Inside the cover was a photo of her drinking tea.

When I get home, I post to three local Good Karma Networks and a Melbourne music history group on Facebook. I’m desperate to find this tape.

The posts get a lot of engagement – curiosity about the wild goose chase, as well as nostalgia from followers invested in Melbourne’s music history.

A discussion about publishing to tape is sparked in the music history group, and then after about an hour, a commenter points me toward an ancient webpage called Queer Music Heritage. It tells me that my mum’s tape was once played on a queer music radio show, Lesbians on Cassette, in the US back in 2008.

The radio host’s name is JD Doyle, and his email is still listed at the bottom of the page. I send an email, and days JD sends a polite reply with a PDF scan of the front and back of the insert. He tells me he’ll digitise the album for me as soon as he gets a new digital converter.

The cover is as I remember it: a misty, smudgy, pink swirl of colour with the promised teapot, far pinker than I recall. 

On the inside cover, the lyrics are printed in typewriter font (or perhaps, I realise, by an actual typewriter). Each song listed is accompanied by one or two sentences, pithy and poetic, explaining the meaning or intention behind it.

In the photo, my mum looks skinny and melancholic, a teapot sitting in front of her.

The ’90s ‘pay the rent’ slogan (which, like other ’90s things such as claw clips, is thankfully back) is written across one edge, and the credits list “Ro” as the sound engineer. I immediately message my sound engineer, amazingly also called Ro.

Album artwork for Sung in my Lover’s Bedroom by Elizabeth Ellen. Preserved and scanned by JD Doyle for Queer Music Heritage.

Inside cover for Sung in my Lover’s Bedroom by Elizabeth Ellen. Preserved and scanned by JD Doyle for Queer Music Heritage.

The album’s credits list a few names: one I recognise as an ex-girlfriend of my mums. Another is a saxophonist, who I then look up on Facebook and message.

“I remember you Molly,” she replies. Although she played on the tape, she no longer has a copy. Damn.

So I wait for JD Doyle.  I am impatient, and follow up my email twice, scared he’s forgotten.

He hasn’t (a stab of guilt at my harassment). I update those on the Facebook posts who are following along: a journalist, a supportive woman who is a fan of the poetry of personal histories – I will get the tape soon.

The summer passes.

Excerpts from the insert of Sung in my Lover’s Bedroom by Elizabeth Ellen. Preserved and scanned by JD Doyle for Queer Music Heritage.

Excerpts from the insert of Sung in my Lover’s Bedroom by Elizabeth Ellen. Preserved and scanned by JD Doyle for Queer Music Heritage.

It’s a few months later. I’m underemployed, so have spent the week in a dreamy state: songwriting, drinking too much and catching up with friends.

I’d spend the night at my childhood best friend Rosie’s family home in Croydon; it was basically my family home too. While drinking negronis and playing pool on Rosie’s decrepit pool table, we’d unraveled our past relationships and childhoods.

Just home from Rosie’s, lying in the sun on my couch and scrolling TikTok, Doyle sends me a link to the digitized tape.

When I see the notification about his email, I bolt upright with excitement. I grab my keys and a tote bag for groceries; I decide to listen to the album on my way to the supermarket.

The two sides of the tape are on two separate files. Side A and Side B. 

I listen to the first one. My mum’s voice is higher, stronger and more bell-like than I remember. Its beautiful vibrato and skilled jazzy inflections come as a surprise.

I find myself grinning. It sounds nothing like my own. I experience a tiny pang of jealousy that she’s a way better singer than me. I remember all her annoying singing exercises, and make a mental note to do more of them.

Strangely, I don’t recognise any of the songs, even though I’m expecting to. Excitedly, I send it to a few friends. One of them listens to it from Adelaide, where she’s having wines with her mum.

“We seriously love it,” she tells me. “Your mum is talented.”

I find the picture of them sitting in an elegant South Australian lounge, listening to the album together, unexpectedly touching.

I listen to it a second time when I get home. It builds a history.

There are references to bike riding through the streets at night, following the tradition of the Australian countercultural classic Monkey Grip.

Brunswick Street is mentioned – specifically The Black Cat, which I’m told was “the place to be”. There are mentions of “groovy dykes” (which turns my grin into a half-cringe/half-laugh), Mother Earth, drinking tea and uranium mining.

The lyrics build a recognisably leftie-Melbourne cultural landscape. I can almost taste the Bonsoy.

Image of event Love and Friendship: An Evening of Women’s Songs and Poetry, part of Melbourne Fringe. Date unknown, likely 1991-1994.

Flyer for event Love and Friendship: An Evening of Women’s Songs and Poetry, part of Melbourne Fringe. Date unknown, likely 1991-1994.

There are a handful of more intimate, quotidian songs, which reflect on the domestic landscape of relationships.

One lyric that struck me is, how I remember her raucous snore. It is funny, although its intimacy makes me slightly uncomfortable.

My very favorite track is about Suzi Quatro, who I have long known was my mum’s very first crush.

Painted vividly in the lyrics, I smirk at the thought of my grandmother, dressed in a stern twin-set with a silk scarf neatly around her neck, losing her daughter to lesbianism and rock and roll: 

My mum took me
To your concert at Festival Hall
And while I jumped and screamed and shouted
She sat still quietly in her stall
In the aisles with my girlfriend and we danced wildly to your beat
But when your big boyfriend moves close to you I wished his guitar would self destruct.

Later that night, I’m at a dinner party. Six of us sit in a courtyard on Victoria Street in Brunswick, after having eaten a perfectly hedonistic amount of homemade Italian.

Wine and effusive vibes are circulating, and we listen to the tape. The jazz and blues sound of Mum’s songs imbue the setting with an old-school dignity. 

Everyone agrees that my mum’s voice is beautiful, and they ask a lot of questions about her. Everyone is excited by the reference to Brunswick Street.

We discuss the difference between ’90s lesbianism and contemporary queerness. We talk about identity and labels, and remark on how much has changed in such a short amount of time.

We make predictions for the future: “soon we will all just be BORN pan!” yells my friend Liz across the table.

Mum’s tape celebrates counterculture, resistance and pride. It’s also a celebration of personal growth and feminine identity.

We listen to the tape twice over the evening. As the courtyard darkens, dogs curl up on their beds and our ankles are beset with mosquitoes.

We decide that the tape is almost unbearably earnest – but also that it encapsulates a sense of hope, community and kindness that we agree we’d all love to uphold.