I am so pleased you have come to visit. Please hang around,
explore, and have some fun with me.

Have you ever been through a difficult situation, where you have felt like your insides are crumbling, you feel stressed, sad and like there is a sinking feeling in your body. Have you ever had your heart broken, or seen your family such as your parents or friends to through it? Have you been betrayed by a friend or work colleague, a husband or a wife?

The sad truth is that this will inevitably happen to everyone. This is ultimately how life unfolds. However, I feel that every time it happens if we can pick up and keep going, we grow strong.

"Let yourself feel the Smoulder, let it burn, but don't stay there too long. Pick up yourself and fight."

I believe that every ending opens the door to a new beginning. With my Jewellery I hope to remind women who they are meant to be and focus on there strength and wellbeing.

I created Smoulder as I wanted to give women the opportunity to express themselves, to make them feel strong, beautiful, stylish, special, and confident. I deeply want women to feel strong and find that silver lining no matter what adversity they face in life.

Smoulder has several meanings, but I have chosen this name as it means to burn slowly or to keep a strong emotion hidden.

This is the feeling you have when you lust after someone at the very beginning of a love story, the butterflies you get when you see them across the room. However, it's equally, the feeling you get when you are betrayed, burnt or hurt by someone
close to you and had your heart broken.

I liked the polar opposite meanings of these scenarios.

My mum was born in Phom Pehn, Cambodia. Although her family was originally from Vietnam. Her grandfather (my great-grandfather)
was a senior leader in the Vietnamese government and known as a sort of provincial Mandarin (or so I'm told by my relatives). His family lives a very comfortable, luxurious life in Vietnam.

The constant refugee

There was however a point where there was some sort of power struggle or conflict where his family had to flee Vietnam. My great-grandfather's family was split up and my grandfather ended up in Cambodia alone. He grew up there and met my grandmother who was also ethnically Vietnamese but living in Cambodia.

My mother grew up in Cambodia in a very impoverished setting, she was the oldest of six children and was responsible for assisting with raising the younger children. Her father worked in a sugar factor and her mother was a maid at the French Embassy. Her mother was however a terrible gambler and spent more money than she earnt. My mum doesn't remember having any toys growing up, she and her siblings just played with dirt and little geckos they found.

Unfortunately, due to the impoverished way in which they grew up with hardly any dairy or other nourishing foods two or her siblings died in childhood.

Because of the family finances my mother was only allowed to go to school until Year 9 as her family could not afford the cost. Her father told her not to work that "her husband would work and look after her when she was older", so she didn't need an education. Her two brothers were allowed to finish school' as they would be the future heads of the family.

When my mother was a teenager, conflict started to brew in Cambodia. Stories started to circulate around her neighborhood about Vietnamese people being rounded up and murdered. Her family, decided to pack their belongings and flee back to Vietnam. There they lived in a refugee camp until my grandparents could salvage enough money to build a wooden, stilt home on the river in Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh City as it is known now). There was one shared living space where everyone slept in hammocks and a small kitchen.

In her early twenties, mum had an interest in learning French and had worked up a little bit of money to enrol in language lessons for a few hours a week. At the same time, a young foreigner named Anthony from Australia held a senior position in the Australian Government's Department of Foreign Affairs and was on posting to Vietnam. In Vietnam he went to enrolled in French classes as he had a love of languages. He took an instant liking to my mother, he said he liked her smile and thought she was beautiful. He started to write her love letters in French. She thought he was a littel strange at first, this foreign white man, but he was kind and made her laugh.

he didn't speak Vietnamese and she didn't speak English, so they used their common, but somewhat broken understanding of French to speak to each other and get to know each other. Eventually however, he had to move back to Australia, but they kept in touch and wrote letters back and forth.

All the while war was raging in Vietnam and mum spoke of constant bombing of the city. Her family kid inside their wooden stilt home as the bombing grew more intense. The streets became deserted as people feared what may happen next. My father had seen the bombing on the television and wrote in many letters declaring his love and worry for her safety. Saigon fell in April 1975 to North Vietnamese forces. In 1979 however my dad sponsored my mother to Australia as his fiancé, they were married in 1980 and I was born a year later. We had a little home in Canberra, Australia where I spent my first year and all was glorious.

Smoulder and burn

When I was around 18 months old though, my father and our family was posted again, this time to Manilla in the Phillipines. Manilla was a beautiful busy city - bustling with people, markets, and hot weahter. When I was around 18 months old though, my father and our family
was posted again, this time to Manilla in the Philippines. Manilla was a beautiful,
busy city - bustling with people, markets, and hot weather.

My mother noticed that my father had started to act strangely. he would go out alone all the time and hardly spoke to her, preferring instead to read his books. If they did go out he would walk 20 meters ahead of her, letting her walk alone. She decided she had enough and decided to return to Australia with me. She said he was extremely happy when she decided to leave and later found out he had met another woman.

We had nowhere to live in Australian, and my mother only had very limited English. Firstly, my father arranged for us to stay in a small flat at the back of his mother's house in the beach city of Adelaide. It was clear after a while that my grandmother needed the rent, and she was unhappy we were living there.

Building a fire in the rain

We moved several times, living from place to place including at another Vietnamese family's cucumber farm. She found work wherever she could in low skilled jobs due to her language and education barriers. My uncle, my mum's youngest brother, with the assistance of my father had since moved to Australia and settled in Canberra. We ended up moving in with him in a small one-bedroom government flat.

My mother got to work, firstly as a kitchen hand in restaurants and then then as a supermarket shop assistant to raise me, give me an education and put food on the table.

My father, although absent, always contacted and visited. Years went by and my mother never took a new husband saying that she didn't know if they would treat me right. When I reflect on this it saddens me to think that she sacrificed her happiness to keep me safe.

When I was 15 years old, my father asked if he could return to our family. Although my mother harbored a lot of anger, deep down she always loved him and felt a sense of owing and gratefulness for bringing her out of war-torn and poverty-stricken Vietnam where she grew up.

Finding herself

She took him back and he lived with us as a family for 12 beautiful years. They travelled and enjoyed lifer, she was able to explore and do things that she enjoyed but sadly it was short live. In 2007, my father was diagnosed with lung cancer. My mum was devastated and nursed him through the disease. He very sadly succumbed to the disease six months after his diagnosis.

Dreams

Today I am in my forties, despite all the challenges we faced, i had a very good childhood. I always felt loved and taken care of and I put it down wholly to my mother's strength and determination. She showed an ability to 'smoulder and burn' through so many difficulties and hardships and always be able to pick herself up and keep going.

She is a huge inspiration in my life and is the inspiration for Smoulder and its collections. A dream of a great future for her where she can do things she likes, travelling, enjoying time with friends.