ProfileAustralian artist Matt Ottley on battling bipolar disorder, fighting bulls in the Outback and finally finding happiness
- Multi-modal artist Matt Ottley had his first bipolar episode at 13 but wasn’t diagnosed until his mid-40s, with a number of life-changing crashes in between
- He grew up in Papua New Guinea in dangerous times, became an in-demand horse artist and fought bulls as a stockman in the Australian Outback.
My mother went to Papua New Guinea as a teenager to be with a patrol officer she was in love with. That relationship didn’t work out, but she stayed and met my father some years later, and I was born in 1962, in Goroka, in the Eastern Highlands.
We lived in Mount Hagen, in the Western Highlands province. It was a small Australian frontier town, patrol officers still making first contact with some of the indigenous people there, and I was lucky to be brought up with a lot of Melanesian kids.
I had two brothers, one older and one younger. Our first school was in a Melanesian-style hut – it was a composite class with kids of all ages. The blackboard would come down in the evening to serve as a bar and one of the women would volunteer to clear up all the glass and spilled beer in the morning. As the expat population grew, they built a slightly larger school.
A traumatic experience
In the early 1970s, the place was getting quite dangerous for Australians – the Melanesians wanted us out. We left in 1974. Eighteen months before we left, I was sexually attacked by a Melanesian man, which traumatised me deeply. I actually don’t remember a lot of the last year and a half there.
My father had begun an affair and left, so my mother was on her own. She was a landscape painter and became known as one of New Guinea’s leading expat painters.
When I was 11, I was with her and my brothers and mum was painting a riverbank when some young men started throwing stones at us. My mother gathered us to her and slowly we made our way to the car, leaving our things there. Those sort of things started to happen more frequently.