AWARDED second prize in the FAW Anne Elder Award for Poetry 1993. HIGHLY Commended in the 1994 Human Rights Award for Poetry.
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Sandy Jeffs was born in 1953 and grew up in Ballarat, Victoria with her parents Max and Mavis, and a brother and sister. A good student, talented musician and a very keen sports player, Sandy excelled in softball, womens cricket and tennis, primarily to distract herself and others from happenings at home. With an alcoholic mother and a violent father, Sandy and her siblings survived rather than thrived in their home environment, cloistered by the social attitudes of the 1950s and 1960s.
After studying history at La Trobe University Sandy had her first psychotic incident and was hospitalised, ironically only a few years after her father had taken her to play music for patients at a Ballarat asylum. For the next twenty years Sandy was dogged by recurring episodes of madness resulting in numerous hospitalisations.
During this period Sandy had written poetry which had been occasionally published in magazines and anthologies. In 1993 Spinifex Press published her first collection Poems From The Madhouse, a thought-provoking collection of poems inspired by her psychotic experiences. Her poetry explores the bleak despair and the black comedy of lunacy, the stereotype of the mad woman in the attic, the containment of madness in language and the clash in the mind between sanity and insanity.
After her parents death in the early 1990s Sandy began to revisit the terror of her childhood, and her second poetry collection Blood Relations explored this forbidden topic of domestic violence. Her poems express the dual sympathy and revulsion ignited by her parents relationship and the fallout after their deaths, the final payment on the destructive force they became.
Sandy now works as a community educator (she calls herself a professional lunatic) speaking to numerous AGMs of Doctors, and Psychiatrists as well as community health centres, high schools and other associations about madness. She strives to make people understand the experience of insanity, and combined with humour and down to earth language has an amazing success in this. Sandy also contributes to a poetry collective called Loose Kangaroos which combines the efforts of several individuals and their experience of mental illness.
To comprehend the success of Sandys efforts in bringing taboo issues to the public eye I refer you to her poems, open at any page and I dare you to be unmoved by the power and delicacy of her work.
