"the estate developed a stigma and that stigma was then extended to the people who live there and it persists"

Kate takes us through a deeply impactful childhood … painted in three distinct panels. The first is architectural—a childhood spent inside a literal panopticon, a hexagonal state-housing block in 1980s Perth, surrounded by the inward-pressing, incomplete loops of a Radburn-designed suburb. The second is socially influenced—navigating the heavy stigma of a shifting welfare state as the child of a fiercely protective single mother, finding solace not in school, but in brutalist university libraries and piles of classic books. And the third is a rare beacon of agency—the Karawara 'Fun Factory,' a Danish-inspired adventure play-space where kids were handed raw, recycled materials and told to shape their own worlds.