The Day Strangers Stopped a Crowd for My Mother

I did not expect any of this.

I went to MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, on a Saturday afternoon wearing a coat I had made for my mother Elizabeth. Pure wool tartan. Hand sewn. Every grid line matched by hand. Three weeks from cutting to complete.

I made it because my mother loved fashion and said in her next life she would be a model and fashion designer. So I made her a coat. And I wore it through the streets of Hobart in her honour, to the restaurants, to the Dark Mofo festival, to the museum, warmly and proudly.

I was not prepared for what happened.

The coat stopped people in their tracks.

From the moment I arrived at MONA, strangers kept stopping me. Thirty, forty people over the course of the afternoon. Asking about the coat. Asking about the hat. Telling me I was the most beautifully dressed person they had seen at the museum that day.

A man who clearly knew his fabric stopped me specifically to ask about the tartan. He said it was the most beautiful tartan he had seen. That meant everything to me because I had wondered, when I chose it, whether it was truly tartan. He confirmed it was and it was beautiful.

A woman asked me if I was a fashion designer.

My mother would have loved that.

The unanimous vote.

As the afternoon drew to a close and the crowd began to gather at the ferry queue to board back to Hobart, something shifted.

The people around me began talking amongst themselves. And then, spontaneously and unanimously, the crowd voted that I was the best-dressed person at MONA that day.

I was stunned.

And then it got more extraordinary.

They stopped the crowd.

When it was time to board the ferry, the crowd refused to move.

They blocked the gangway and insisted I walk it alone. Just me. In Elizabeth's coat. While they stood back, waited, and honoured what they saw.

The organiser said no. The crowd overrode her.

They held back. They filmed it. And then, slowly, far behind me, they followed.

I walked that gangway alone. In the coat I had made for my mother. On the day before her birthday.

I had no words. I still don't.

What it meant.

My mother was given three months to live the year I turned seventeen. She fought for twenty-five more years. Through surgery after surgery, chemotherapy, radiation and pain that never seemed to end. She never complained. Not once.

At the very end, when my brother came to take her to hospital for the last time, she asked him to wait. She walked to her bathroom. She put on her lipstick. And her mascara. Then she let him carry her to the car.

She was a woman who believed that how you present yourself to the world matters. That style is not vanity. That it is the way a woman says I am still here. I am still worth seeing.

I went to Hobart to swim in eleven-degree water on her birthday. I went to honour her in the most visible, unguarded way I could think of.

But the most extraordinary tribute did not happen in the water.

It happened on a ferry gangway at MONA, when hundreds of strangers stopped everything for a coat, for a woman, for Elizabeth.

She got her moment.

Thank you to the beautiful people at MONA who gave it to her.

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