How Canberra’s Gen Sparkle turned trauma into a beautiful life
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Joy isn’t her personality – it’s her rebellion.
“I have this really intense commitment to joy,” Gen Sparkle says. This is no motivational slogan. Believe me. Her words are hard won.
Spend an hour in Gen’s company and you’ll understand why. The riot of flowers, fabrics and colour in her home. The blush-pink couch where her black dog, Xena, sprawls across her lap. The lush plants. And the same unmistakable warmth and aesthetic that greets every person who walks through the door of her newly relocated Dickson health food store.
Nothing about her is accidental.
“Whether it’s five minutes or whether we spend a decade together… I want to leave you better than I found you,” she says, adding, “I want to spend every day in that place of positivity and joy, and I want everyone else to have it too…”
At first, it’s tempting to assume Gen has always been this way. The truth is much darker.
Long before Gen Sparkle existed, she was a little girl growing up in Canberra with a mother consumed by addiction and mental illness, and a father working relentless shifts to keep a roof over the family’s heads. Gen spent much of her childhood caring for her younger brother, sister and, in many ways, her own mother. By 13 she was moving through refuges and numerous foster homes.
“I wasn’t her daughter,” Gen tells me quietly. “I was her mother.”
By 15, she was pregnant herself.
“I was a child myself, having a child. I had to learn how to be a good mum despite never having seen that role modelled really.”
There was more hardship to come.
As a teenager, Gen was almost killed in a motorcycle collision after running away from foster care, shattering her pelvis, fracturing her spine and sustaining injuries that still cause chronic pain today. She later lost her mother after years of alcohol-related illness.
Statistically, lives that begin this way rarely become stories of flourishing.
Ask Gen why hers did, though, and she doesn’t have a neat answer.
“I know that there is some lucky thing that I have that lots of other people don’t have,” she says, going quiet for a moment. Eventually, Gen shakes her wild head of curls: “I don’t know.”
What she does know is that the decision to find a better life came to her early.
“I just always looked at Mum and thought, ‘I don’t want to do that’.”
Instead, Gen became fierce and intentional about creating the kind of life she hadn’t yet experienced. Nothing illustrates this more than the name she chose for herself.
Years before she legally changed it, Gen had been signing deliveries and unofficial paperwork with the surname ‘Sparkle.’ After her in 2018, she finally made it official.
Why?
“I thought it was going to make the postman happy,” she laughs.
It’s funny. It’s whimsical. It’s also completely genuine.
“I’ve just always been so excited about being alive,” she says. “We’re here on Earth for five minutes… and I just don’t want to waste that.”
Gen in her new Dickson store.
In Gen’s life, this philosophy is visible in so many ways – including how she’s chosen to raise her three children.
“Every day I try to be a better version of myself for them and model the kind of mothering I wish I had received,” she says. “It lights me up to give them the care they deserve.”
This same ethos is woven through the home she worked two full-time jobs to buy after years in public housing.
Looking around her renovated, Southside townhouse, Gen explains, “This is the very first house that I have owned on my own, and I worked crazy hard to get it.
“I’ve been in here for nearly three and a half years now, and honestly, I wake up every single morning… and I think, ‘Oh my god, I’m so fu****** lucky’.”
Perhaps all of this is why opening a health food store never really felt like a career move. For Gen, it felt like another way of caring for people.
Growing up with a chronically unwell mother, then navigating her own lifelong health challenges after a devastating accident as a teenager, Gen understands how profoundly health shapes every part of life.
She later qualified in youth work, community services and alcohol and other drugs, driven by a simple desire to help others.
To her mind, opening a Go Vita store seemed like a “natural extension” to this.
“Helping people has always mattered to me, and empowering people to be the healthiest, happiest version of themselves brings me joy,” she says.
After eight years in Tuggeranong, Gen recently moved her business to Dickson. Her teenage daughters, Max and Steph, now work alongside her – another chapter in the family she has worked so hard to build.
“My hope is for us to really be part of the community and for people to feel welcomed and safe in my store.”
Our conversation veers away from childhood trauma – and lands upon kindness.
More than 25 years ago, Gen’s Canberra High science teacher, Rosemary, and husband, Leo opened their doors to a pregnant teen.
“They took me home and they took me shopping and bought me pyjamas… They gave me a bedroom. They fed me [and] taught me about normal family life and also all the life skills that I had missed.
“They cared for me while I had newborn baby, Hayden, and assisted me in applying for government housing on my own when my son was six months old,” she recalls.
Gen still speaks about the couple with enormous gratitude.
Likewise, her stepparents Chris and Clare: “They have…taught me the value of working hard and encouraged me to achieve my goals. They also gave me a short-term loan to do the new store fit out.”
Gen reflects, “My life is a different place because of the kindness of others.”
Visiting Gen’s Dickson store one cold Canberra Sunday to take photos for this story, I can’t help listening to her chatting with customers as they wander in. Smiling. Offering thoughts and advice.
Once again, that warmth radiates. Maybe Gen’s life did turn out differently because of the kindness of others. But she returns it in spades.
