From Fear to Power, and a Little Bit of Magic

"Collywobbles" — from fear to strength and beauty.

I was the kid who ended up in the sickbay with butterflies in my stomach from nerves, and it turns out that feeling had a name all along. Collywobbles is just a common nickname for a Colleen, nothing more, until the day I looked up what the word actually means — a nervous feeling in the stomach, fear and worry sitting right where the butterflies live. My own name had been carrying my purpose the whole time, and I just hadn't looked closely enough to see it.

Every first in my life has come wrapped in fear, and there have been more firsts than I can count — my first day of university, my first job as a landcare coordinator, giving birth, and yes, apparently fending off shark attacks while my kids swam at the beach, or so my mind liked to tell me. Divorce. Walking away from the real job and the normal, expected life to chase art and happiness instead, and to let go of everyone's judgement, including my own.

A moment of reckoning.

I came to realise the fear was never really about the thing itself, it was about the firsts, and about the judgement underneath them — the fear of failing, or of simply not being enough. So I let the judgement go, on myself first, and the freedom appeared. And where the freedom appeared, so did the magic, and so did the butterflies, only this time they meant something entirely different.

That is my power. And it is available to every woman who has ever felt the collywobbles and kept going anyway.

Needs Colleen's real detail

This section needs the real, specific version of how the business started — the moment Colleen decided a hard hat could be more than PPE, what she was doing beforehand, and what made her choose hydrographic art specifically as the way to do it. Placeholder structure below, ready for her actual account:

Founded by artist and creator Colleen Martin, Collywobbles takes hydrographic art — the same process used across her painting practice — and applies it to the one piece of PPE every tradeswoman and miner already owns, turning a safety requirement into a piece of identity. This isn't a safety brand borrowing fashion language. It's a fashion brand that happens to meet AS/NZS 1801 certification — built for women who've spent their whole career being told to blend in.

Needs Colleen's real detail

This section needs Colleen's own reasoning for why mining — her personal connection to the industry, what she's observed about the specific experience of women working in it, and why she believes this industry in particular needed a brand like this one. Once drafted, this becomes one of the most persuasive parts of the page, because it grounds the brand in lived observation rather than a generic "women in trades" pitch.