The story behind Sacred — and the girl who made it
Trigger warning: This article contains references to child sexual abuse, grooming, animal cruelty, and bestiality. If you need support, please contact 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
This article describes events that occurred 26 years ago, many of the people have passed. This is her personal, lived experience.
Throughout this article, the author refers to her abuser and predators as men, but acknowledges that abuse is perpetrated by people of all genders.
I want to talk to you woman to woman. Not like a founder with a carefully worded caption. I want to talk with you like someone who has been where you might be right now, and who made it to the other side of something that had no right to be survivable.
This is the story of Sacred, Elshka, and of my way back home.
The girl I was
I was barefoot almost every day of my childhood.
Roaming in the forest behind our house, building bike tracks with my siblings, a dog always trailing behind us. I swam in the ocean and would turn up to school with sandy hair.
I did dance routines in the lounge room with my school friends and we caught rips in the ocean for fun. I was a school prefect in primary school, confident, but with a quiet manner about me, and I loved socialising with my peers.
My family had businesses in Ulladulla….we were in the public eye, part of the town's fabric. I learned young how to carry myself around adults, how to speak respectfully, how to hold a conversation, and most of all, how to respect my elders.
I didn't know then that this would be used against me.
School holidays were spent out west with my grandparents, where my grandmother and great-aunt taught me the foundational basics of making our own medicines….what grows, what heals, and how things interact.
I watched death on the farm and I watched birth. I tamed aggressive farm dogs by instinct, and spent hours roaming paddocks with them at my heels. I rode quad bikes and felt so free.
I saw my whole future… a woman on the land, surrounded by her animals, her sighthounds, and I believed in it completely.
All I wanted, more than anything, was a horse. My parents had promised me one for my thirteenth birthday, and I clung to that deadline with everything I had.
The man in the akubra
Once a week, an old man with sky blue eyes would ride past our house on horseback. Our road led into the bush, and he'd come through slow and easy, akubra low. I would run out every single time. The smell of horse was intoxicating to me.
He was patient with me, patient in the way that feels generous when you're 13 and horse mad and asking a million questions. He'd stop and chat, let me study the horse's hooves, listen to me go on about farrier work and training methods. He was 72 years old and seemed like the kindest person I had ever met.
He approached my parents and offered to teach me horsemanship, which was so generous in my eyes, but my parents were cautious.
We were relatively new to that part of the south coast, and before they said yes, they asked around town.
Everyone they spoke to gave this man glowing reviews, his character, his morals, and my safety with him.
Completely reassured, they agreed to the offer, and it began slowly. Once a week, a Tuesday afternoon, picked up and taken less than a kilometre to where he kept his horses for less than an hour to feed them.
I threw myself in, I wanted to prove my dedication and commitment to learning and being helpful. I so badly wanted to be a good girl, and make my parents proud of my behaviour. He taught me how to open a feed bag without a knife, how to rotate grazing spots to avoid mud, how to tack up a girth-sensitive horse, how to ride a cross-country track safely. It was everything I'd ever wanted.
I started going almost every afternoon after school, for up to 2 hours at a time.
I did not see what was being built around me.
The grooming
It started with a conversation in his car.
He told me I needed to be careful, because people might take things between us the wrong way. I had no idea what people could say about a girl learning horsemanship from an old man.
Then he said I shouldn't hug him hello or goodbye in front of people, though we were never around other people anyway, and I never initiated contact with hugging him so it seemed strange. I didn't see the flag.
Then one day in town when our paths crossed, he pulled me into a giant hug in full view of everyone. He'd told me not to, and here he was, doing it publicly. The people around us smiled at what looked like a loving grandfather and his granddaughter.
I was so confused.
That confusion was the point. Keep the child off balance, keep her second guessing herself. It is a script as old as predators, and he knew exactly how to play it.
The hugs became lingering touches and the touching escalated. A 72-year-old man does not have this kind of patience, this kind of method, unless he has never faced consequences.
He had been protected his whole life. He had done this before, and now he had me.
He knew where to find small spaces. There was a feed shed where the mare I rode liked to eat..it was cramped, and very dark and private.
I'd go in with her at feed time and stand with her while she ate... I adored her. He began joining us.
In the corner of that shed, sandwiched between a horse and a wall, he did what he came to do.
I remember watching from the ceiling…present, but not in my body. By the time he dropped me home, I had pushed it so far down inside myself that I forgot. I became very good at forgetting.
He also stopped out in the bush on our long rides, secluded spots, like vacant buildings at the bush surrounded netball courts, or pockets in the forest, ostensibly to rest the horses. I rode home from those stops uncomfortable, hurting, unable to justify to myself why.
He insisted we have a new routine, new structure. This included kissing hello and goodbye, as he deemed it respectful. I did as I was told dutifully, I figured he was from a different generation and I grew up kissing my grandparents cheeks. However, he of course turned it into a foul, smelly, open mouth kiss.
When I resisted him, he locked me in a timber shed in the dark with the doors chained closed. The punishment for saying no to his “car kiss” was the mare taken away, and he would bring in another child to ride, while I had to scrub the water troughs in the rain.
He said it would teach me lessons, one been that I am always replaceable.
My grades started slipping. I changed how I did my hair…I chose to slick it back with gel, flat into a low bun to look like a boy. My friends at school were horrified with my style change, given that my mother owned a local clothing store, it was almost criminal to dress the way I did. Anything to cover my body.
He showed me who he was in other ways too. He squashed newborn mice between his shoes, in front of me, watching my face as he did it.
He would force me to sit stationary on a timber bench, not allowed to talk, while he would share his inner thoughts with me during long monologues about adult affairs of locals I did not understand.
These were not accidents. They were tests, of my silence, of my compliance, and of how much I would absorb without running. I have an enormous capacity for enduring discomfort, he trained me well.
On one trip to the city to see a renowned horse trainer at an event, he stopped on the freeway and picked up a hitchhiker.
I was nervous but knew better than to voice my thoughts.
He parked on a stretch of bush, they got out together and were gone for a long time. He came back alone and would not speak about her. She did not return to the car.
I do not know what happened to her. I have never known.
But I am no longer naive about what a man like that, with a child's silence secured, was capable of.
The rest of that trip is hidden from me. All I know is I woke up in a bed with him leaning over me, offering me Cadbury chocolate.
He was also, in those final months, pushing to have my younger brother and sister come along for the horse time…to come for spa baths at his house, to relax. I made excuses on their behalf every time. I didn't understand the feeling, just that I could not let it happen.
He told me that if anyone found out about our “special friendship,” he would go to jail — and then he would harm my family. He threatened to destroy both of my parents’ businesses. He told me I would be the cause of their ruin.
I was 13. I believed him completely.
The horse that saved my life that I can not name
For 2.5 years, the moment he touched me, I would leave my body. Float to the ceiling and go somewhere safe.
Then one afternoon, he made his move while I was on horseback.
The mare shifted under me, her weight, her heat, her movement all grounded me and I couldn't leave my body. She kept me in the present. My abuser must have sensed the change.
On the ground below me, he was crying, pawing at my leg, saying the sentence I will never forget:
It's time to take our relationship to the next level.
Everything became very bright in that moment... what level could possibly exist???
I knew in that moment I was about to fight for my life and I had to be smart. He was wiry and strong. There was no ceiling to float to, there was no forgetting what this was this time. It hit me like a tonne of bricks. I was in danger and had been for years.
I talked fast....the way my mother taught me to do in danger.
I told him he was like a grandfather to me and I was grateful to him, I played sweet and docile and dumb about his statement, and I said that my family was waiting to celebrate a birthday... I had to hurry so could we talk another time?
The horse shifted away from him, and I untacked her, and got to the gate in record time. He sobbed in the car on the ride home and I pretended I was on a call on my new mobile phone. He tried to kiss me goodbye, but I rebelled and quickly slipped out of the car and walked inside. I am very good at running away.
I don't remember anything after that.
I'm told I sat by the fireplace, completely still, for a long time. My mother came home from work and knew the moment she saw me that something had broken. I had a scalding hot shower, sitting on the floor, which is where I sit in showers to this day, saying sorry over and over.
I trembled for hours. That night I kept saying I don't understand why he did it, without being able to say what he had done. My mother held me all night. I kept telling her he was coming to pick me up for the afternoon feeds.
She told me she would protect me.
He showed up the next day. My parents met him outside while my siblings and I hid inside. My little sister thought it was a game. My mother asked what he had done to her daughter.
He denied everything, then began blaming me….my grades, my attitude, apparently I had become boy crazy in his eyes. My father was shaking so hard he couldn't speak.
My mother called him disgusting and told him never to ride his horse past our house again.
One day later, the clip clop of hooves came down the street…He rode past, after first pausing at our driveway, waiting to see if I would come to him. I began shaking, and what would be the first of a million panic attacks began.
A few days after that, I was walking to school carrying my skateboard across a grass area when he pulled up, flung the door open, and lunged at me screaming at me to get in. I ran through the scrub. A wiry 74yo man could not follow me there.
I had been hysterical for days by this point, begging my parents to do nothing, say nothing. I truly believed the threat that speaking would destroy us. But the attempted kidnapping changed everything.
My father (a man who was terrified of horses), chased him down in his car as my abuser rode his horse and grabbed his reins.
He threatened him to stay away from me, but the local club my abuser belonged to spotted the confrontation and gathered round to protect their own. My father walked away before the police were called.
My parents were done honouring my requests, they insisted on police involvement.
What the town chose
When we involved the police, part of the interview was conducted with my mother present, and part alone with the detective.
I told them everything I could remember as he questioned me and helped me to open up... the locations, the details, the way he created opportunity.
The detective guided me to share how the lessons started, and he asked me if I noticed anything that seemed strange…so I told them about the horse I cared for.
I was so confused as a horse newbie about what I saw, but my instincts were screaming, so it felt easy to start there, vs the fragmented dark memories in my head I was scared to name.
My abuser had a method he called horsemanship. When a mare was in season with an engorged genital area, he would insert his fingers into her. He did this in front of me, repeatedly, without breaking eye contact.
In the interview room, I described this in the same plain terms a 15yo girl uses when she doesn't have language for what she witnessed.
The silence that followed was deafening.
I understand now what that silence meant….that what I had just described confirmed the picture of a man whose
sexual violence was not limited to me, and who had been performing it openly in front of a child because he was certain she would never speak.
Afterwards, the officer spoke to my mother privately.
She has been through this many times.
My mother has never been the same.
The police went and spoke to him. His word vs mine, a numb teenage girl. He blamed me for everything.
Word spread through Ulladulla fast.
The same people who had given my parents glowing reviews of this man, suddenly claimed they'd always found him strange and inappropriate with children. When their previous endorsements were pointed out to them, they walked away and never spoke to us again. In a small town, this is noticeable.
The men in his club knew. His friends knew. Workers at the property where the abuse mostly occurred knew ... one of them saw me being let out of the locked drying shed and said nothing.
A man whose house backed onto the property knew, he watched him kiss me open mouthed and said nothing as he hung his clothes out and stared.
This is what community complicity looks like. It is quiet.
It is people choosing comfort over a child, every single time.
My best friend, someone I snorkelled with before and after school, was taken away overnight. Her family's verdict when my traumatised parents turned to them:
What do you expect? Look at her and her body.
She ignored me at school from that point on. In a matter of days I lost my horse and my closest friend, and I understood clearly what I was going to be blamed for, and how the town would treat me. I dropped out of school. I couldn't do it anymore.
I refused formal proceedings. I kept the secrets.
To this day I remember only a small fraction of what happened.
My brain protected me the only way it knew how, and in doing so, took most of my childhood memories with it.
What remains are fragments...the rest is gone.
Catatonic
The Sydney Olympics came and went. My family had tickets and took us out in the hopes I would enjoy the change in scenery....I was there in body only.
I spent six months like that, shut down, unreachable, and going through the motions of being a person. I could not tell you what happened inside me during that time. I was not present for it. I have no memories of it. It is all dark.
Lily
On my sixteenth birthday, 6 months on from the Olympics and everything coming out, I received a 3yo Arabian mare named Lily.
She had been mistreated. She was not dangerous in the way people expect a damaged horse to be, she wasn't aggressive or violent. She was gentle but she was terrified, and terror in a horse that size becomes explosion without warning. She was unpredictable in the way that fear makes a creature unpredictable.
I understood her completely.
It was a rough start.
Thanks to my abuser, I had been essentially marked as trouble, and finding somewhere to keep Lily was challenging.
A kindly man rented us a paddock, until we found lodging where it was all woman horse owners and I felt safe.
We spent her whole life together.
I learned her rhythms and she learned mine. She was the first being since the abuse who I felt completely safe with, not because she was easy, but because she was honest. What she felt, she showed you.
She is buried here, on this farm I now live on, and she is tattooed on my arm, where she will stay close to me.
She is the horse that saved me, after the horse that saved me (for privacy reasons I cannot name her xxx). I credit them both with saving my life.
The night I hid in the herd
By 17, I was at war with my own body…I blamed it for the attention it had attracted and because of my best friend's parents' comments, I wanted to remove the parts of myself that felt like the reason any of this had happened.
I sought a double mastectomy. The surgeons fought me…..they refused to do it. They believed in me when I felt ruined. We managed to compromise with a reduction instead. Well they grew back anyway, so escaping did not work with a knife.
My body stayed. It refused to disappear, even when I wanted it to.
As a young woman I discovered alcohol the way a lot of young people do…fast.
It took very little to get me drunk, and when my guard dropped, the memories came flooding back, which I was NOT prepared to handle. Being surrounded by men when I was drunk taught me to move away fast.
There was a party one night, near where I kept my horses. I could feel the room shifting ... drunk girls, men with ideas, anxiety and panic beginning to build which usually meant a memory would come back to me, and I left before anything happened.
I ran to the horse paddocks I rented, and hid myself in the middle of my small herd of horses I had collected, berating myself for being so distrustful and anxious.
But then my blood froze…the boys had followed and I could hear them searching for me. I stood completely still, shaking, horses all around me, and thankfully they did not think to enter the paddock.
I decided it was time to stop drinking. It cost me my entire social world at the time, being the sober one in your early adult years is its own kind of exile. My peers couldn't understand my trauma, so I never spoke about it.
Going sober meant going quiet and staying home.
Learning that I was safer with a dog than at a party……I learned to stop apologising for that.
How predators find you again
There is something nobody talks about honestly, and I am going to say it plainly.
Once you have been groomed and abused, you carry something in you that certain men can identify.
Not because of anything you wear or say or do consciously.
But because of the way you were trained to respond…the freeze, the appeasement, the learned tolerance for being pushed past your limits. The inability to trust your own instincts when something feels wrong.
The belief, buried deep, that you are not worth protecting…………
Predatory men have spent years learning to read and spot exactly that. A victim, an easy target.
For more than 20 years after what happened to me in Ulladulla, I attracted men who exploited what was broken in me.
Men who would push for intimacy before I was ready, knowing I would eventually give in rather than lose the safety of the connection.
Men who knew I would tolerate terrible treatment once I had bonded with them, because the months it had taken me to feel safe with someone were too costly to walk away from.
And one of the worst kinds... the emotionally abusive man who causes damage and then refuses to name it. Who expects access to you again when he arrives in a softer energy, as though the harm simply evaporated, like your job is to receive him in whatever mood he turns up in.
There is no repair offered. No reconciliation.... just the assumption that you will absorb it, reset, and open the door.
I recognise that now for what it is:
a direct reenactment of 2.5 years of being trained to do exactly that.
What it looks like now is this: the moment I identify a predator, I disappear.
I will reroute my entire life before I risk crossing their path.
I have become very, very good at avoidance, and I have stopped pretending that is a flaw.
If someone causes harm to me, they will not hear my voice again. They will not see my face. There is no confrontation, no final conversation, no door left open for when they arrive in a softer mood.
I have been running and hiding since I was 13, and somewhere along the way I stopped calling it a weakness. It kept me alive then. It protects me now.
And then there is the other side of it, the thing I rarely say out loud.
I have met a VERY small handful of genuinely good men, and I pushed them away. Not because I didn't want them.
But because I knew the state of myself…..I didn't want to hand a good person my damage and watch them feel obligated to carry it. I felt healed, but forever broken, and I couldn't reconcile those two things.
I am almost 40 and I have been single for ten years. It has taken me this long to understand this pattern clearly enough to begin to change it.
The moat
I have 7 dogs at my feet as I write this out, with a herd of horses in the paddock outside the window. Heavy set steers are alongside them, so that there is a barrier of muscle between me and the world.
Almost all of my animals are a rescue. They have suffered at the hands of people while the world looked the other way. We understand each other completely!
They are my moat. The barrier a person has to cross to reach me. What they give me that humans cannot, is unconditional presence and love, without agenda.
I have noticed upon reflecting over the years, that there was never a dog present when the abuse occurred. Not once. I think about that every time one of them puts his head on my knee.
To stand in a horse paddock, surrounded by a herd, is to feel safe in a way I cannot fully put into words. I have been hiding in herds since I was a teenager.
I am still doing a version of that, and I am no longer ashamed of it.
The man's end, and the work I did
My abuser went mad at the end. Strapped to a hospital bed, he had a frightening and karmic death. While he was alive, I had an obsession with knowing where he was at all times, too frightened to drive anywhere near his house, but needing to know. When he died, I felt something I hadn't felt in years: the beginning of safety.
I went into therapy. My therapist specialised in CPTSD and had worked extensively with war veterans. She brought my dogs into the sessions. We did role play. She taught me techniques for when suppressed memories surfaced... not flooding back, but arriving slowly, in fragments, over years.
There was a psychic once, early in my recovery, who told me that unless I learned the lessons my abuser was sent to teach me, he would find me again in every lifetime and continue to violate me. That wrecked me for a long time.
I want to say clearly, to any woman who has been told something similar: that is not healing. That is harm dressed up as wisdom.
You do not owe your abuser a lesson. You owe him nothing at all.
I also have a strong sense of justice. The horse world is not safe .. it attracts men who understand exactly what a horse means to a girl, the access it provides, the trust it builds, the specific vulnerability of a child who will do almost anything to stay close to an animal she loves.
Over the years I became involved in protecting other girls from the same type of predator....I moved undercover, and passed evidence to police.
One of those cases involved a child , violated by their own father. Being part of the intervention that stopped that, in the town that once looked away from me, was a healing moment I hadn't expected. It is important we become who we needed as a child ourselves, and protect the next generation.
Prior to all of this, anytime my family would spot a new victim with my abuser, we would figure out where they lived and warn them off.
To my knowledge, once we began this work,
my abuser was not able to teach or access children with his horses again.. It ended with me.
That matters to me more than I can say.
What I made to survive
Here is the part almost nobody knows.
The consequences of prolonged intimate violence are not only physical. My wounds have healed, but I still carry them. What follows is about the body.
Torn skin. Swelling. Pain. Bleeding. Urine on open wounds is excruciating. I was a teenager trying to get through a school day, a school bathroom, surrounded by other girls who had no idea.
One afternoon while my parents were at work, I walked into the kitchen and reached for what I knew, what my grandmother and great-aunt had taught me, what I had read in my mother's books on the shelf.
I wasn't trying to create anything.
I was trying to get through the next school day.
I started working through what was available, by instinct. There was no order to it, just trial and error in a kitchen while my siblings hung out nearby. Some oils did nothing but make a mess! I even tried Sesame oil at one point, I wasn't documenting anything or refining a formula. I was simply trying to reduce the pain.
Over time, I found a blend that changed how my body felt. A blend that soothed the skin and reduced the sting in a way nothing else had. I started using it before school, and again whenever I needed to.
For the first time in what felt like forever, I could urinate without that searing pain. My underwear no longer stuck to my skin. The swelling began to settle instead of escalate.
It didn't erase what had happened. But it gave me something...soothing relief.
That was the moment I understood what I had made. Not a product.
A way to survive my own life.
That formula was Sacred.
For years afterwards, Sacred was invisible. I only made it when I needed it. It wasn't something I spoke about,I returned to it when my body required it, which once the abuse stopped, was very very rare.
Over time, I began to share it in the only way it felt natural... when I was older, between women in my family, passed hand to hand in the bathrooms or under tables quietly.
The feedback was simple, and consistent….it helped.
But it wasn't quite complete for everyday use. It was effective, but heavy. Intimate, but limited in how often it could be used comfortably.
So I adjusted it.
Not as an entrepreneur…..just as someone trying to make something useful more usable. I lightened the texture, simplified the recipe, reduced the weight on the skin. That version became Divine.
I didn't name any of it at the time. It wasn't a brand.
That was the beginning of Elshka.
What I made to survive is still what I reach for when I need to remember that my body is mine.
And that is where this story ends, not with the beginning of a business and brand, but with a life that kept going.
The decision to bring Sacred into the world after decades of privacy was not small…it took me 3 years of therapy and inner work to be confident enough to go "live" with my dirty secret and history I had fiercely protected.
Even my ex husband had no idea any of it existed. I was so accustomed to presenting the version of myself men seemed to want….uncomplicated, easy, not carrying all of this….that a formula I'd made to survive childhood sexual abuse simply never came up.
But I thought about every woman who quietly needed something and had no idea it existed. I thought about the young version of myself in the kitchen, who had no one to hand her anything and had to make it herself.
I didn't want other women to have to make it themselves.
Sacred, now
Sacred went on the website with a product description that doesn't tell you any of this.
Now you know.
When an express order for Sacred comes in, I feel it in my stomach. I know what it means. Someone is hurting right now, somewhere, trying to get through a day.
I cannot sit with every one of those women.
But I made something that can.
Full circle
As I reflect as 40 approaches, I have my dog pack at my feet, a cat purring on my desk, and the land quiet around me.
I look at who I was at 13... barefoot, curious, horse mad, absolutely certain of her future, and I recognise her again. After everything that happened in Ulladulla, after years of shutdown and survival and slowly, slowly rebuilding, I am back where she was standing.
I am on the land now at Jervis Bay. It feels safer here in a way I can't fully explain. The earth here has not been sullied, there are no dark webs of memory around each path in the trail, no buildings that hold something in their walls.
I am surrounded by animals who love me without conditions,
and a purpose that grew directly out of the worst thing that ever happened to me.
I am lucky.
To the woman reading this
If you are where I was, whether it happened last week or 50 years ago, I want to say a few things clearly.
It is not your fault. You are not broken. Your body is not evidence of something you deserved.
What was done to you was a crime, and the people who looked away were complicit.
Tell someone. Keep telling people until someone listens. It is 2026, and there are people trained to hear you. If the first person doesn't listen, find the next one.
And if you have nowhere to start — email us. We are here and we will listen.
To parents: too kind, too obliging, too generous from the very start…..watch for it. A man who offers everything and asks for nothing has usually already decided what the price will be. Don't leave your children alone with men, even men who come with glowing references from people you trust. That will ruffle feathers, people won't like this. Ruffle them anyway.
To communities: when you close ranks around one of your own at the expense of a child, you are not neutral. You are complicit. The silence of people who could have spoken is the ecosystem that predators require. Do better.
After years of silence, this is what happened. And I am still here.
xxx
If you need support, please reach out to 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.