Before we kick off tonight’s proceedings – I need to provide a trigger warning! Luen and I discuss sexual abuse. Please delete (and accept my apology for) this if it’s not something you want to read.
Good evening, good evening, good e-ven-iiiiiiing!
I am coming to you LIVE from Melbourne, Australia on an unseasonably delicious day. U best believe this McChicken is getting sunned.
I found these sunnies in an abandoned shopping trolley outside Luna Park this morning. They make me feel like Simon Baker.
It’s such a pleasure to be back in the company’s hometown. I have truly missed the savage wind, sideways rain and my Dad’s unsolicited comments on my weight and/or general appearance. Being welcomed by all three on Monday felt like a windfall.
Tonight though, we’re heading north – all the way to the Byron hinterlands – to acquire Luen Free’s TOP HAT TIPS. She’s a Boiler Room-level DJ and self-described “garden thot” with a passion for fashion and/or slashing.
I first came across Luen back in 2016 when she was a presenting a music show on Triple J. I liked her style – she was confident, knowledgable, warm and also cool.
Naturally, I was jealous. Lol.
We met in 2018 and any threat I felt immediately dissipated. She’s one of those people who is so cool that they are unaffected by their coolness and therefore even cooler.
She’s an open book – which you’ll see in this interview. I am so excited for you to hear her TOP HAT TIPS!
WHO
F: Who are you?
LF: I am a garden fairy who likes to DJ and make club music. I eat from my garden everyday and grow flowers for people to enjoy in their homes. I also identify as a gr8 dancer.
CAREER
F: I first heard u on triple j. What did you do there, and how did you get there?
LF: I started out at triple j unearthed, I used to be a massive Australian music nerd. After getting my foot in the door there I soon became a triple j presenter. I used to talk on the radio which was fun because I love talking and getting paid to talk about music was the best.
I also got to take calls from drunk people and sometimes that got wild on air.
It all started when I turned 18, I started partying and that lead to curating events in my home town of Brisbane. Ever since then I’ve been in the music industry. I’ve dipped my toes into music writing, managing and touring bands, djing, radio presenting, being a groupie. You name it!
FARM REALITY
F: You live and work on a farm. Howmst?
LF: My farm is on rented land in Federal which is about 20 minutes from Byron Bay in the Hills. I live with my dog muzzy and my husband Patch. I also live with lots of mice, snakes and koalas.
I didn’t step foot on a farm until Patch and I got married and we decided to go on a wild trip around South America for our honeymoon. Working on farms in Colombia and climbing mountains in Peru. The farm in Colombia had rescue horses and my favourite job was rubbing home made CBD oil into their wounds and brushing their hair. I also enjoyed the homegrown treatments for myself. There I started planting and harvesting vegetables and got the bug to start my own garden in Sydney when I got home.
From there it snowballed into a dream of having something much larger. We now have a massive veggie and flower garden and I’ve started to make some cashola off it which means I can spend even more time on it.
FARM FANTASY
F: The idea of uprooting and living on a farm, growing your own veggies, flowers, etc, feels like a pipe dream to most. But you’re doing it! What’s the least glamorous thing about it?
LF: I get a sore back from planting seeds and have to do star jumps every 15 minutes between bending over like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. I’m sure I’ll get stronger as I continue, but being in my first year of being a real farmer - I’m still a weakling.
GROW
F: What is the easiest vegetable to grow?
LF: Pumpkins.
SPEAKING UP
F: I used to stalk you because I loved your fashion and wanted your jerb. It would trigger me tbh because I thought you were so cool! Anyway, I found you on Facebook, and saw you were selling a Zine, so I bought it. It came, and in it (amongst other things, like poems and drawings by artists) told the story of childhood abuse you experienced, by your father. It was one of the most moving, provoking first-hand accounts of abuse I’d ever read, I still think about it a lot. I think a big part of it was that it read as so brave – you spoke about the intricacies of sexual abuse. If you’ve never experienced sexual abuse, I think it can be really hard to properly imagine – but the picture you painted, so generously, felt very real. Can you tell us about that, how you came to write it and feel comfortable sharing it?
LF: Oh man I just had to write it. I think it started as a letter to my father which I fully intended on burning or tearing up after I wrote it. But then it became an account of sorts of what I remembered. As I wrote about the memories I started to feel pretty ashamed and that’s why it got a bit weird at the end. I don’t feel any shame now, I know nothing that happened was my fault. But that article, writing it, printing it for people to read... it was the beginning of my release from the shame I felt so strongly back then.
I wrote that article about a year after I started seeing a psychologist. If you have been abused you’ll know the feeling of speaking up for the first time. Something that is very background becomes very vivid, like you are living it all over again but this time you’re an adult, with the natural understanding of what those things mean as an adult. So... this undeniable fact that I had been sexually abused for over a decade as a kid, basically losing my virginity to my father... it all came out and became real and it was a release. But that was like 4 years ago and everything is more mild now.
I don’t have the nightmares I was having when I wrote that article. I am so much better these days. You have to go through that, get it out, make it real, then you can grow. It’s how it worked for me anyway. I’m sure I have more trauma to heal but I’m feeling happy with my growth and proud of myself.
I went on to send it to a few blogs, all the standard Aussie music blogs. Because I knew so many women, and men, who had had similar to things happen to them - so I wanted my community, my industry to print the article and help normalise being a ‘survivor of sexual abuse’.
But no one wanted to print it. They said it should be printed on a mental health blog, but I just didn’t think it would get any traction there. People who are reading a mental health blog are already searching for ways to heal themselves and I was eager to reach those who had no intentions of coming out about their trauma but who might find the article by accident and then be helped that way. I wanted to reach those who didn’t know how to deal with their abuse.
As no one wanted to print it I made the zine and put it there and on my Instagram account. I subsequently had many people reach out to me with their own experiences, many of whom had never told anyone before.
POPPIES
F: On your flower instagram, you have poppies! You sell them! How do we care for them? I always chop the steps on an angle… I heard that you should put sugar in the water. Please inform me, I feel like I’m barking up the wrong tree here…
LF: Sugar in the water is like feeding them. You can also add a little bit of vinegar and a single drop of bleach. The vinegar changes the Ph of the water and the bleach stops fungus growth which can block the stem of the flower, which stops it from drinking the water. You want to give the flower every opportunity to stay hydrated! Just like humans!
I typically just put the flowers in a clean vase with clean water. The vase just needs to be clean enough to drink from, you don’t need to heat treat it or anything.
If I’m arranging for a restaurant I’ll add floral preservative which I buy online and is basically just the same as the sugar/vinegar/bleach mix.
Your tip of cutting on an angle is good too! It creates a larger surface for the flower stem to take up water.
FOOD
F: What’s your fave fresh produce meal to cook? Pics if you have them :-)
LF: As I write the replies to this interview I’m eating from the garden so for convenience sake let’s use a picture of this salad.
It has grated zucchini and squash from garden, basil, chard, lettuce, silverbeet, kale and cabbage. The carrot is from woolies cos they’re annoying to grow and there’s some quinoa and pork... Patch works at a farm as a carpenter around the corner and they have pigs and he butchered one himself and brought it home. It’s delicious. The cut is pork belly and I cooked it in the oven then sliced it into the salad cold.
TEACHING
F: A year or so ago you ran a workshop to help women/non-binary folk learn to DJ. One of my besties did it and loved it. How did this come about? What was it like?
LF: It was the most fun, most intense, most rewarding 8 weeks of my life. I am actually thankful COVID happened when it did because the tour ended and the next month lockdown started and I feel like I slept for a month.
That tour was a project funded by The Australian Arts council. The concept was... I’d teach as many female/non-binary identifying pplz to DJ as I could as quickly as possible. Lots of guys who already DJ teach their friends and that’s how most people learn, the equipment is expensive and you usually don’t think of starting DJing till you know how to do it. So I was thinking if I can teach an extra 1000 womxn to DJ then they will teach their friends and overall we'll have a lil more equality in the DJ scene.
I started teaching DJing to my girlfriends in nightclubs before the doors would open. We would have a pre party inside the club and 10 of us would play back to back to back on the decks and they would ask questions and I was their cheerleader, ensuring they felt comfortable. This was so fun so I started doing it everywhere I went. I’ve taught people to DJ all over Australia and I still keep in contact with a lot of them.
TOILET
F: Best toilet you’ve been in and why? I imagine you’ve got some kind of outhouse situation at your place…
LF: In the Colombian Caribbean I stayed in a beach shack in a town called Palomino.
We had an outdoor bathroom with a composting toilet. It was beautiful. It didn’t smell. After you pooped you’d add a large scoop of earthy smelling sawdust on top which would mask any scent. You would then walk across mosaic tiles which were laid by hand in a little winding path to a basin fixed to a tree. It was all very sweet.
I want a composting toilet, my home toilet is boring and normal.
FINALLY
F: Do you have any questions for the CEO? I haven’t spoken about myself in a while.
LF: What is the best time of day to post on Instagram?
F: Christ I’m not sure. I was looking through the gram today though and realise I’m the only person who doesn’t do carousels ?? WTF ? ‘Photo dump’, what is that? Say it with your chest and post everything as single tiles, clog the feed, fuck it up. If you can’t handle me at my Eddy Shipek, you don’t deserve me at my Bella Hadid.
How cool is Luen?! If you’re in the Byron area, you can buy flowers from her – check it out @luensflowers. If she does a gig in Sydney soon I’ll make sure to keep my employees posted.
Adious my disco amigos,
Froom x