Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Laura Bell Spirovsky grew up in Manila in a communal apartment block with a big square courtyard in the middle. That's where all the women in her building would congregate. Her mum, her aunts, cousins and her grandma. While little Laura Bell, an introverted and creative kid, would retreat into her imagination whenever she could.
One notable absence from this bustling matriarchal home was Laura Bell's dad.
Chapter 2: What was Loribelle Spirovski's childhood like in the Philippines?
He was in Australia, working as a taxi driver, sending money back to his wife and his young daughter, whom he'd never met in person. So when Laura Bell imagined her father, she saw him as Santa Claus, a man who sent presents and lived in a mysterious place far away. Eventually, the family reunited and Laura Bell and her mum moved to Australia.
Here, Laura Bell became a celebrated artist, a three-time finalist in the Archibald. She fell in love and her career was soaring until an injury forced her to stop painting and ask some big questions about who she was and what her life was all about. Laura Bell has now written a book drawing on her experiences. It's called White Hibiscus. Hi, Laura Bell.
Hi, Sarah.
You come from such an interesting family background or an unusual one. As I say, your mum is Filipino. What kind of world did she grow up in? What stories has she told you about her childhood?
Well, it's funny because my mum isn't the most sentimental person, I suppose. So she doesn't really hold on to very much. I think that's one of her secrets to ageing gracefully, to be honest. But she, I mean, it's all little scraps of visual imagery, I think. A lot of it is climbing coconut trees. She was a great climber when she was a child.
She lived in a tiny island called Katanduanes and her parents had a large house there. And she grew up with her eight siblings and they ran a small general store when she was a child. And so she would have a lot of stories about that little store and kind of, you know, wrapping the peanut brittle and the little, you know, candies and things.
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Chapter 3: How did Loribelle's family dynamics shape her identity?
And it's so funny. One of the things that I remember most, weirdly, is they would have a few different brands of toothpaste. So they were a general store, like everyone will buy everything there. And the neighbours will be like, oh, can I get the Colgate? And my mum will be like, which one? And they'll pick like a different brand because Colgate became like a catch-all term for toothpaste.
Like they almost didn't know that it was toothpaste. They just called it a Colgate, if that makes sense.
What place did music have in her childhood?
A huge one. Filipinos, I think, are pretty well known around the world for being a very musical culture. And my mum's family was no different. She was a singer. She sang ever since she was out of the womb, I'm pretty sure. And all of her siblings were very musical. So the house was constantly full of singing and guitar playing and drumming on random bits of furniture.
Would that have been Filipino music or American pop songs? What would she have been listening to?
A little bit of everything. She actually ended up working at a radio station in her late teens and it was a little bit of everything. She loved, you know, Nat King Cole and Freddie Aguilar was a huge Filipino star at the time. A lot of kind of 70s folk music was big at the time and disco, of course. This is a great banquet of musical influences. Absolutely.
How did her love of music take her beyond the Philippines, take her overseas?
It's actually extraordinary because if she was my child and she told me what she told her parents back then, I'd be like, no, don't go.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Loribelle face when reuniting with her father?
Because she essentially just saw an ad in the newspaper saying, can you sing... Do you dream of travel? And she's like, yeah, yeah, to both. Absolutely. And she just responds and apparently auditions for some people. And they're like, we know exactly where to put you. We have two other Filipino women. We'll put you in a band. We'll fly you off to Japan.
I think the whole thing happened within a month or two.
And yeah, to hear that sounds like there are so many potential risks, ways that could have gone wrong. But what happened for your mum? Was it a legitimate ad?
It was legitimate and it was her dream job. Like she essentially went from student working at a radio station and then jet setting across Asia to sort of Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, and just singing in five-star hotels.
Wow.
She ended up singing in a hotel bar in Malaysia. And who joined her there? Who were her bandmates?
So by that time, it was her younger sisters, Grace and Amor. And obviously, they're also amazing singers. They also played different instruments. I think one had a keyboard. Two of them had guitars, I think. And it was a bit like a Supremes kind of thing with a bit of a Fleetwood Mac, really cool 80s makeover.
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Chapter 5: What was the significance of Loribelle's book, White Hibiscus?
Well, what did they look like? Have you seen pictures from this period?
Oh, yes. Amazing. I mean, my mum's style was on point. You know, she actually studied, let me get it right, cosmetology. So, like, makeup. Studied makeup in college at some point. I don't know where she managed to fit that in with her jet-setting lifestyle. But, yeah, she just looked incredible. Like, the colour combinations, I mean, oh, my gosh.
And this is where your mum met your dad for the first time. What was he doing in Malaysia?
So my dad was working for Energo Project, which is a former Yugoslav engineering firm. And he was essentially travelling all around the world, really, as an engineer. He loved working particularly abroad. in the Middle East and in South America. And at the time they were building a bridge in Malaysia and he just happened to be staying at the hotel where my mum was performing with her sisters.
And what kind of impression did he make on your mum? What did she think of this European stranger in the bar?
Well, of course, they're used to plenty of attention. I think at the time she actually had this Japanese boyfriend even, or a Chinese boyfriend. And my mum had many, many suitors and admirers. But I think the thing that really caught her attention, all three sisters really, was that my dad was going to the bar, but he was always ordering a soda water bottle.
He was never, he's always been a teetotaler. So I think they were really impressed by that, almost like his self-control. He was dressed really well. My dad looked like one of the members of the Bee Gees. So you can sort of imagine like a denim on denim with like a curly hair situation. It was amazing. He was owning it.
He was rocking his own style is what I'm hearing very strongly.
And so do things develop between them quickly or what was the story? Okay. Well, this is the funny thing, and I feel like this is a very Filipino thing, especially of that generation, where they kind of... It's almost like their personalities become displaced and they kind of share this communal identity in a way.
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Chapter 6: How did Loribelle's love for music influence her life?
And after school, we would just play together on this courtyard. And you had extended family living there as well? I think in the Philippines, the situation is family will just dip in and out of each other's lives. Like everyone's place is everyone else's place. You know, you're always welcome to come and stay for a night or two. And we often went to stay at other family members' houses.
So home was a very nebulous construct for me because it wasn't really tethered to a specific place. And I feel like that's something I carried into Australia as well.
So your dad was helping support the family financially. What about your mum? Was she still singing or was she taking care of you full time?
So one of the greatest gifts I think that my dad gave us is that he worked solely to support not just us, but also his aging parents in Serbia. And so my mom could afford to just stay home with me and really offer me a safety that was compromised by other things, by just the sort of uncertainty of living in the Philippines. It's so crowded, especially in Manila.
I think Manila is very different from the rest of the Philippines. It's not like there's no island time in Manila. It's very loud and very busy. So the fact that my mum was always there really was the thing that held me together, I think, as a child.
When you were still just a little girl, your mum noticed that you weren't eating much and Where did she take you to try and work out what was going on and help?
She took me to something called a manghihilot, which is a, I'm not going to say witch doctor, but it lives in a similar head space. A shaman or a healer. Yeah, a healer, exactly. And he used different herbal kind of, he would put the herbs on the skin and then he'd put like a banana leaf to like press it down, like a compress.
And I remember the smell of the place and weirdly just the image of like a wad of pre-cut banana leaves that looked like cash on his table. For some reason, that's one of the strongest images for me.
How did you feel about going there? What do you remember the experience being like?
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Chapter 7: What sparked Loribelle's journey into the art world?
And so I remember like climbing up the bamboo ladder up to the house. And this really strong image of the Manghihilot's very old mother. And she smiles at us and her teeth are red because she's chewing the beetle leaf, which everyone does over there. My mum too. And... There was barely any light inside this hut.
Everything was shrouded in darkness and you get all of these herbal smells and, of course, the feeling of having to remove your clothes in front of a stranger. I mean, I was like five at this time, so I was still very young, but just the feeling of exposure. And I think because the Philippines is such a hot country, any time I would feel cold, I'd really remember that.
So that was one of my first memories of feeling cold was in that man's hut. Did it help? I have no idea. I have no idea. I think it helped my mum. I think it helped to ease her... Her feeling of not being able to control the situation. I think she thought she was doing something about it. Not that she really understood what was going on. I certainly didn't understand what was going on.
But now that I am looking back on my childhood, I really had terrible anxiety. It was just panic attacks. I think I was suffering from panic attacks as a child.
Was art, creativity, imagination, were they places that you could go as a kind of refuge in the midst of that anxiety, of those big feelings you were having as a little kid?
Interestingly, in the Philippines, I didn't make art as much as when I came to Australia, partly because we didn't have many materials or toys. So the closest I came to creative play was Play-Doh. That was the only art I remember making as a child. And I had a cousin who was pretty good at drawing.
But then the moment he showed me that he was good at drawing, it was like, oh, no, that's his thing. I can't go into that territory because... He already knows how to do that. I won't be as good as him. So I immediately like cut that off as a potential creative activity for me and I stuck to Play-Doh because I knew that I could do that well.
And mind you, the Play-Doh sculptures were like really good.
Play-Doh is nothing to be sniffed at.
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Chapter 8: How did chronic pain impact Loribelle's creative process?
Play-Doh is one of the great materials and underrepresented in our art galleries, I think. I love Play-Doh. Absolutely, absolutely. One thing that you did have an experience with as a child, I guess it's a creative pursuit in a sense, is beauty pageants, which are a big thing in the Philippines.
Oh, my goodness. Like, you have no idea how big beauty pageants are. And for kids as well. Yes, yes. So the pageant that I entered was called Little Miss Philippines. I'm pretty sure it still runs now, but we are talking nationwide televised. I mean, everyone was watching this show. It was really like reality TV before reality TV. And whose idea was it for you to take part?
So I was about four years old when the idea started playing around between my mum and her sisters. And I think they would, because we would watch it, of course, on our little black and white TV. And my mum would look at me and look at her sisters and be like, she could totally do this. You know, she's cute. She can sing. She's smart. Yeah. I think we should give it a try. And kudos to my mum.
She went in with the purest intentions and just, she wasn't a pageant mum in the way that we look at sort of American versions of child beauty pageants. So even when I look at photographs of myself back then, I looked like a child. You know, I looked like a child in a little dress, as opposed to some of the other, especially wealthier contestants.
who kind of were really dolled up in that very extravagant makeup and hair. And like you could tell I had less money than them because my hair wasn't done and my dress, you could see my feet. Like it wasn't long enough to cover my feet.
And did you have to do an act, a performance as part of that?
Yes. And I have such clear memories of her teaching me this song that I was going to perform with like the hand movements and everything. So like I would have a hairbrush for a microphone and she would model for me how I was going to hold my hands and like look up and like look down and all this stuff. Well, of course she had all that experience, I guess. Exactly. So totally built in.
And I remember she introduced it as a sort of game. Like she didn't even tell me what it was for. She's like, let's just try this thing. You know, I'm going to do this. Can you copy that? And so by the time we arrived at the studio to actually record the first episode that I was on, because I think I was on like five episodes in total. I was like, yeah, this is fine. This is easy.
I even like voted to go first. I was not anxious at that point yet. And there's a video of me with this little like turntable, almost like a lazy Susan for children. And I would stand there with my escort. That's what they called him, my escort. He was just my cousin dressed in his traditional barong costume. And me in this little dress where you can see my little feet.
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