Stephen Smith chats to Hamish McLachlan about his troubled upbringing

Stephen Smith’s parents separated only a week after they were married and his troubled childhood took him from the streets of Melbourne to performing at the Sydney Opera House. He chats to Hamish McLachlan.

Stephen Smith with his two older boys Tynan and Jay in about 2006.

Stephen Smith’s parents separated only a week after they were married, and soon after, Stephen was placed with another family.

He left school in year 9, and from there, life’s road got a little rocky. Squat houses, nights on the streets, no regular meals, beatings and uncertainty, but he always held a sense of excitement about life’s possibilities.

When out in the streets of Melbourne, he would develop a love of music — and that would change his life.

HM: Steve Smith … you’re not the cricketer, are you?

SS: (laughs) No, there’s a few of us — he’d be the most famous!

HM: Your story. Your father was 57, and your mother was 22 when they met. How did they meet, and where were they from?

SS: Dad was in the Western District of Victoria. He was looking for companionship, and love. I don’t know exactly how they met, but it was through letter writing — they were essentially pen pals. She was 22 in Western Samoa, as it was known then. He wanted love and connection and she had the promise of a better life, and was encouraged to marry Dad when he proposed. Mum tells the story of when she was waiting at the airport in Samoa for Dad to get off the plane — they’d never met. She had a photo of him, that was it. When he got off the plane, her sister laughed hysterically when she realised he was the old man walking towards her! As Mum tells it, he was in his late 50s, said he was in his 40s, and sent a photo of himself in his 30s.

HM: (laughs) … an interesting approach …

SS: Well, I imagine he sent off his best photo. Back then there were no iPhones, so it might have been the most recent photo he had. It was pretty devastating for her, and she was essentially forced into a marriage by her parents, in what they believed were her best interests. The wedding happened, then a one-week honeymoon where she fell pregnant with me. And that was it for their marriage! He flew back to Australia and she went to New Zealand, where you went to get your papers sorted, and they never got back together.

HM: The marriage literally lasted weeks?

SS: They had a week together — that was it.

HM: Your mum went to New Zealand and found a new partner, but it turned out to be a very violent relationship?

SS: That’s right. That second relationship was such that she felt that once I was born, the best person for me to grow up with would be my father. She contacted him again and flew across to Australia. I think he was under the impression that there might have been a reconciliation there, but it wasn’t to be. As she tells it, she essentially handed me over, turned around and got back on the plane. Dad, while he always wanted to care for me, just wasn’t in a position to do so.

Stephen Smith with his mum Tiosa. Picture: Supplied

HM: How old were you at this point?

SS: Just a few months.

HM: You said your old man wasn’t in a position to deal with you.

SS: Dad just didn’t have the family support, so I was to be adopted, but I basically ended up moving between families. It was a constant changing of location and ‘home’. I spent the bulk of my time with one very lovely family up until the age of ten, with intermittent contact with my father and no genuine contact with my mum. I think I saw her once during those 10 years.

HM: Then at 10?

SS: When I was 10 my dad retired, so the question was posed “Would you like to live with your father now?’’ For a ten year old it was the ultimate dream come true. We moved from Melbourne to a caravan park in Port Fairy, but we realised very quickly that the relationship didn’t work at all. It was more like a grandparent kind of relationship, where I was an intelligent young kid, who was headstrong and heading into my teens, and Dad was old and submissive and didn’t know how to deal with that. He wasn’t in a position to provide boundaries.

HM: Everyone needs boundaries — particularly kids.

SS: I just absolutely ran riot. I was in trouble with the police, trouble at school, in trouble everywhere until it got to the point that I got bored. By the time I was fifteen I dropped out of school, left home and headed to Melbourne.

HM: Just jumped on a bus with a bag on your shoulder?

SS: Pretty much! I never had an issue with travelling. Dad never had a car, so I’d jump on the bus from the age of 10, or hitch hike. I think on that particular occasion it was a backpack and the Warrnambool to Melbourne train. I stayed with my a guy I considered my brother.

HM: He’d been in and out of jail, hadn’t he?

SS: He’d been in and out of jail for years, but he was my idol at that age. When I came to Melbourne, I was staying with him, and he was in a halfway house, so I was sleeping on the floor beside him. He was arrested for something and so I ran out of places to stay. From there it was a string of youth refuges, squats, and all the places you go to when you don’t want to go home. It’s not that I was in danger at home or anything like that, I was just bored, and didn’t have boundaries to tie me there. Living in Melbourne in these refuges, in squats, sleeping rough — I was cool with it all — it was sort of exciting. The world was full of opportunities and I was free to do what I wanted and felt no sense of danger.

Stephen Smith with his friend Harry on a shop doorstep in Thornbury during his homeless period. Stephen was 15 at the time.

HM: What did you learn?

SS: I learnt a lot on the streets, but most importantly I found my love of music, and of dance, of R&B and hip hop. I absolutely got swept up in it all — as a singer and a dancer. It wasn’t drugs, it wasn’t violence, it was music I found on the streets.

HM: How did you feed yourself?

SS: I remember we would sit in one of those little laneways off Flinders Lane, and I remember as a fifteen-year-old being there at four or five in the morning, when the bakeries would do their deliveries to the restaurants. I’d knock off bread rolls, or whatever else there was on the doorstep. We ate three or four times a week or so. I got beaten up quite badly once.

HM: By who?

SS: They were some guys that we kicked out of a squat we were living in, and I was lying on the floor one day when they barged their way in and just absolutely kicked the living s--t out of me. That experience shattered my sense of reality, and it brought me crashing back down. I ran back home with my tail between my legs for a period, and that was when I met my mother.

HM: Home was back to Port Fairy with your dad?

SS: Yes — for about two weeks. I found a photo of my mum, and managed to track her down in Sydney. I’d only met mum twice in my life, and I’d had no meaningful contact.

I reached out to Mum. I remember speaking to her on the phone. She said, “Come up”. Within an hour I would have been on the Princes Highway with my thumb out, ready to catch a ride.

HM: How does the meeting with your mum play out?

SS: I called her from Spencer Street Station to tell her that I was boarding the overnight train, and that I’d be there by 9am. She met me at the station, and the best way I can describe it is that it was that feeling of falling in love. It was amazing. Mum, my sisters, my aunts, my uncles, grandparents, cousins — all there ….

HM: Was it the first time you’d felt loved?

SS: There was just something amazing about a sense of belonging, of being wrapped up in family that was all mine — and really mine.

HM: Did your mum feel the same way?

SS: I got to Sydney, and there was this love affair in my family, and vice versa, but it was also quite destructive for Mum and her marriage. She’d remarried, had two daughters and here was this son coming in and just completely disrupting the dynamic! I saw it as an opportunity to go and connect, but when I reflect on it, she would have been thinking “you need to get out of here!”

HM: Were they in Samoa still?

SS: Yes. That was quite an eye opener. Experiencing that culture was quite a shock to me, and I think I lasted about four months. I was desperate to come back, and it wasn’t back home to mum, it wasn’t back home to Dad.

HM: You fell in love with music on the streets — and ended up making a career from opera after hearing music in a food hall?

SS: I went back to Port Fairy and I met a girl. You meet a girl, and then you try and transform yourself to make yourself a better person. Her old man laid down the law to me, “You get a job, and you get yourself sorted”. That’s what I did. I was working in David Jones in the food hall, as a fruiterer, and every morning before the shop would open, we’d be down there with Dean Martin or Frank Sinatra playing, and I would sing along, full voiced. One of the girls I worked with, Leanne, said to me one day, “You’ve got a really good voice, you should go and get lessons”.

Stephen Smith (right) in Opera Australia’s production of Die Fledermaus in 2009.

HM: And you did?

SS; She sent me off to her teacher, Natalia, and she introduced me to Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma. For me, it was this massive revelation. Here were these voices like athletes, highly tuned, like formula one engines if you like, telling these stories of heart break, and sorrow, and despair, and love and anguish. I’d never known anything like it — it captured me, and took me on a 20-year journey. I applied for the Bachelor’s Course at the Victorian College of the Arts — it was all audition based! I went, I auditioned, got accepted into the VCA, and my musical journey started from there.

HM: Had you had any education training voice wise?

SS: The year or so leading up to that I was taking as many private lessons as I could afford. I was a long, long, long way behind. But for me, it was all about emotive expression. It was life and drama through voice. That’s what it had always been to me.

HM: From the streets to the Opera House?

SS: I was invited to come and join the Young Artists Program with Opera Australia. A few years later we performed at the big park next door to the Opera House. There were about 120,000 people there. I remember walking home across the Sydney Harbour Bridge that night, in my tails, with my wife and friends, reflecting back on this 15-year-old homeless kid who would sing and dance until midnight down at St Kilda foreshore with his mates, dreaming of a career in music. And it had happened. It was a nice moment.

HM: Why did the singing end?

SS: It was clear that the income was not going to be there at a local level for very long. My wife, Eleanor, worked in real estate and we’d always half joked that when I left the stage, I would join her in real estate. That’s what we did! It seems like a pretty bizarre career shift from opera to real estate, but there’s a lot of crossover between the two. You’re telling stories and looking to inspire people.

HM: It’s been an interesting journey — what have you learnt?

SS: My family is everything to me. Everything else pales into insignificance. Life is complicated, there are always moving pieces, and you do your best to give everyone what they need. Sometimes you get it right and sometimes you get it wrong. You’ve just got to keep learning and rolling with it. Now, as a 42-year-old rather than a teenager, I look back on my dad and realise he was always there. He didn’t know what to do, he didn’t know what to say, but any time I would reach out and ask for something, if he had it, he’d give it. He was always kind, and compassionate, and I try and model myself on that. Try to get as much of the ride as you can right — and don’t worry about your mistakes — focus on your future.

HM: Seems a smart outlook. Thing you’re most proud of?

SS: I’m not sure about what I’m proudest of — but I’m very grateful for a lot of things. I’m grateful for my wife, grateful for my kids, and grateful for the people that I work with. I have a habit of answering the question I want rather than the question that is asked!

HM: Politics perhaps when you are ready!

SS: I’m happy in property! Thanks Hamish.