Karise Eden has had no shortage of success. She won the inaugural Australian season of The Voice at just 19 and had four songs in the top five of the Aria singles chart, the first artist to achieve the record since the Beatles.
But there’s one thing she hasn’t yet achieved: finishing high school.
“I felt my self worth and confidence was wrapped around my education level,” says the 31-year-old, who dropped out in year 7.
“I thought, ‘I don’t know how [to return to education]’ and would switch off. It seemed too much, that I wasn’t good enough, and it took me a few years to battle those thoughts.”
Born on the New South Wales Central Coast to a single mother, Eden was 13 when she dropped out of school and left home. She spent her teenage years living in crisis refuges and met her foster aunt and uncle, Marilyn and Frank, at a Lions Club program.
While they never lived together, the pair were both musicians, and taught her to play guitar and encouraged her love of music. She developed a sound that has been compared to Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse.
“Everything else about life was hard, rough, painful, other than music,” Eden says. “When I sung, it was a refuge away. Singing has never hurt me, so I always keep singing.”
In 2012, Eden won Australia’s first season of The Voice and was dubbed the “foster kid with the amazing voice” by local papers. She shot to stardom, with her debut album sitting at the top spot of the Australian charts for six weeks.
But she struggled with the pressures and expectations of the industry.
“I was insecure in a lot of things, and was treated badly in the business world as I didn’t have that skillset [of an education],” she says.
“They had me saying to myself I wasn’t good enough … because I was ‘dumb’.”
When Covid-19 hit, Eden suddenly had no income.
“It was now or never,” Eden says. “I needed to figure out who I was without music – as that was looking like a reality for a lot of people.”
She spent time “in the pits”, working brief stints in an abattoir gutting quail. Then came the turning point.
“I thought: ‘look’,” she says. “‘You never thought you could work a full-time job. It’s time to study. It’s the one thing you always wanted to do, that you were hungry to achieve in some way, shape or form’.
“‘You’re nearly 30, you’ve managed to smash so many other things in life, let’s do it’.”
In the end, it was as simple as making one phone call. Eden got in touch with Queensland’s Tafe, which offers a year 11 and year 12 fast-tracked pathway to university.
Her deepest fear was that she wasn’t advanced enough to make it through year 11. But when she took the maths and English quizzes needed to enrol in the fast-tracked pathway, she passed with flying colours.
“It was enough to send me into tears,” she says.
She has decided to complete the Tertiary Preparation Pathway (TPP) course at Tafe part-time over 1.5 years, with a graduation date of Easter 2024. She will sit her high school exams online across the 1.5 years – and not with other high school students.
“Every time I do an assessment and start getting overwhelmed, I tell my husband I have to quit, I’m so dramatic, then I pass and I’m in tears because I passed,” she laughs.
While studying, she’s still performing, public speaking, maintaining a business and raising children – in her words, she’s “barely human”. She sometimes finds herself studying for exams in green rooms.
Adult Learning Australia’s chief executive, Jenny Macaffer, says Eden’s story is a common one – that something outside a person’s control leads them to fall away from education. For others, traditional schooling simply doesn’t work.
“Big institutions might remind people of school days which might not have been so good,” she says. “That’s why online courses and community learning opportunities are so important.”
She has a motto for older learners. “It’s never too late”.
“We want people to be looking at lifelong learning,” she says. “Using that language more – you can go in and out of different learning environments throughout life.”
Eden says she’s an “all or nothing chick”, and doesn’t regret a thing.
“I want my kids to grow up knowing this is what their mum achieved,” she says.
“How is my daughter going to get far in life if mum isn’t confident? I want to show my kids you can overcome obstacles and do this … to break the cycles of abuse.
“Returning to school – you don’t have parents guiding you, it’s up to you. I’d love to go to uni, become a vet, but I’ve got the whole rest of my life.”
This story was amended on 6 October 2023 to remove a reference to Eden spending time in women’s refuges and to her having foster parents. Eden lived in more than 20 crisis refuges and had a foster aunt and uncle.
