Born from Scottish and Welsh descendents she grew up in Zimbabwe  Africa and later returned to England for schooling. Arriving in 1970 to WA’s largest Noongar settlement in Gnowangerup, her father as an Anglican priest woke her to the history of aboriginal people in Australia. Nurse training in Fremantle fell by the way side as she joined in a back to the land movement that arose out of Nimbin NSW & Findhorn in Scotland.

We are the generation brought up on poets like William Blake & Ted Hughes; music of Joan Baez/Dylan; anthropologist Margaret Mead; existentialism in Simone de Beauvoir, the feminist movement & psychoanalysis with Carl Jung: poets seers and musicians who found themselves in the atomic age.

Married to Stuart for 35 years and with 2 young adults settled with partners, we have continued to visit Ada Andy Napaltjarri and her family since 1984. We began to paint while sitting with Ada at Papunya and then continued to design trips to the family every year or two: taking paint and canvas and encouraging everyone of the family and their friends to paint with us in the back yard.

We began to visit Thanakupi in Weipa in 1989 and began the renaissance of the grass basket traditional to her family. Having made loya cane baskets for 10 years; we discovered that the master weavers in Cape York could be involved with helping communities who had lost this skill. I have continued to be a support for any indigenous weaver who has requested it.

Kate is an artist in fibres and textile using the genre of Art Cloth to portray story. She senses the fast disappearance of knowledge that the hunting and gathering life on the land has carried. Her current paintings are a naive attempt to capture this walking on an ancestral landscape.  

Kate currently practices as a Natural Therapist using Emmett's muscle management techniques & Tom Bowen's 101 and Upledger's Cranio Sacral  techniques taught by Malcolm Hiort at his Melbourne School of Cranial Sacral Therapy. Kate offers to work with parents who have children with learning difficulties & people needing relief from pain.