Overcoming the odds

As a baby, Jarvis was moved into the care of his grandparents after his young mother couldn’t take care of him, after facing the trauma of losing Jarvis’ twin brother at birth.

“I’m forever grateful and thankful for (my grandparents) stepping up and taking me on,” he said.

“I remember at a really young age telling my grandfather please don’t ever die on me.

“I already had this abandonment issue going on, because my mother wasn’t able to be there and I don’t know my biological father, so I clung onto my grandparents.”

He remembers growing up in a warm, loving home, surrounded by uncles in the north end of Shepparton, playing football and hanging with cousins.

At age 11, the family received some life changing news that hit Jarvis especially hard. His grandfather had been diagnosed with cancer.

“He was my father,” he said.

“It hit me really hard; I was watching my father die right in front of me.”

Jarvis started acting out to cope.

When the time came, Jarvis remembers getting an intense feeling he needed to be at home.

“I was staying at my cousin’s house (that night), and I woke up at three o’clock in the morning and I knew something was wrong,” he said.

He remembers riding his bike back home, and knocking on his front door, his grandfather greeting him on the other side.

“He started giving me this big lecture, you know, what am I doing? I was always out late, hanging around the wrong people,” Jarvis said.

He remembers apologising to his grandfather before grabbing a glass of water to go to bed.

“My grandfather walked back to his bedroom, and I hear this choking noise and my grandmother yells out ‘call an ambulance, I think we just lost your father’,” he said.

Immediately, he said he was overcome with guilt, blaming himself.

Losing someone so important to him so young was extremely hard on him, but unfortunately that wasn’t the only loss he would experience that year.

“About two, three weeks later, after his funeral, me and my cousin were at the BMX track, and we’re riding our bikes, you know it was a lovely, sunny day,” Jarvis said.

“We decided to go to Gowrie St Primary School to play basketball.

“This was when they first started building shade cloths over the assembly areas and Gowrie St had this massive one, like 15 or 20 feet high.

“We started jumping on that shade cloth, until it started to get dark. I said to my cousin, ‘let’s go, your mum would be looking for us’ and he said ‘one more jump’.

“He fell straight through the shade cloth.”

His cousin was unrecognisable to him.

Jarvis recalls the ambulance coming, and his cousin being airlifted to the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne.

“He was down in the Royal Children’s Hospital for about a week, and when I went down to see him, just as I got there, they turned the machines off,” he said.

At this age, Jarvis knew he was at a crossroads in his life. He was staring down a dark path, hanging around bad crowds and starting to experiment with alcohol and other substances. School wasn’t working for him, as growing up Indigenous he struggled with racism in the classroom.

“I was hurting … so I ended up chasing that feel good and I got caught up in drugs and crime,” he said.

At 14, he had dropped out of school, and drugs were beginning to become part of his life, taking form in his teen years.

At 17, Jarvis remembers a moment where his luck started to change, when he met his first partner, whom he was blessed to have a son and a daughter with.

“She was the total opposite of what I was becoming. She was strong and safe,” he said.

“She came into my life at this time when I was on this road of destruction, and things were real hard for me.

“But I was gaining too much momentum in that other life and my addictions were starting to really come in. By this stage, I started experimenting with speed and ecstasy and I was bringing all the wrong crowds around my house.

“By the time my son was five and my daughter was two, my partner had enough of the person I was becoming.”

They called it off, and later he had another partner and another daughter, but he messed that up too.

Jarvis was spiralling out of control, fuelled by his addictions. He was filled with resentment, guilt and abandonment, and he was getting desperate.

At 28, he found himself in Port Phillip Prison for armed robbery.

“By this stage, I was addicted to everything,” he said.

“That first time I was locked up was in 2012, and so every year to 2018 I was in and out of jail every year.

“Sometimes I was in there four or five times a year.”

In 2015, he found himself in Port Phillip again, before he was bailed out. But this time, he was sent to a rehabilitation centre, Odyssey House in Richmond.

There, he spent the next eight months coming off the methadone program, which is an opiate replacement drug that is prescribed and administered by healthcare professionals. It is seen as an alternative to injecting heroin and other high-risk opioids.

“I was on a real high dose, I was on like 135 milligrams and I was on that for eight years,” Jarvis said.

“I came off that in rehab, and I thought I was cured, so I left.”

Jarvis wound up back in Shepparton, living out of his mum’s house, promising her that things were different this time, after all, he was eight months clean, the longest he had ever been before.

“I was doing really good for probably about four months at my mother’s place,” he said.

“It wasn’t long after I ended up relapsing and offending again, on the run from the police.

“I remember I came home to my mum’s house and she couldn’t do it no more, she couldn’t put up with me. So she said I had to go.

“I couldn’t think of one place I could go where I didn’t burn my bridges or I wasn’t a burden.”

Jarvis ended up homeless on the streets of Melbourne, sleeping in streets and parks.

“In this time, I was homeless down there for six or eight months, and in that time, I overdosed about five times,” he said.

“All up, I probably overdosed about 15 times (in my life).

“I remember the last time I overdosed, I woke up in the Alfred Hospital and I had all these tubes hanging out of me, I had a catheter and drips and all these things on me and oxygen.

“I looked down at my name tag, and it said unknown.

“I just thought, I could actually die, and my kids wouldn’t even know where I am, my family wouldn’t even know where I am, these doctors don’t even know me.

“So I asked a nurse, I said ‘How’d I get here?’ and she said ‘You were found face down on the train tracks at Flinders St Station unresponsive’.”

He ripped all his tubes out and walked straight out of the hospital.

“I hit this rock bottom, where I just started to accept that this was my life and I’m either going to end up dead or in jail for a long time,” he said.

After an application finally went through for public housing he made years ago came through, he came back to Shepparton with good intentions, ready to do right by his kids and himself.

But he said it wasn’t long before things went south for him again, and he found himself back inside the Shepparton cells.

“I committed another armed robbery and I found myself back in the cells, looking at a really long time,” Jarvis said.

“I remember sitting in there, about to give up, and I really didn’t think any changes were going to happen. I was starting to lose hope.

“I remember the trap door came down and the police officer sticks his head in the trap and he says, ‘Jarvis, there’s someone here to see you’.”

He remembers going to the meeting room to discover a drug and alcohol worker from Odyssey House.

“She said ‘sign this application, give Odyssey House another go and give it all you’ve got’ and I said no way,” he said.

But the worker was persistent, reminding him of his first time at the centre in 2015, when his son came to see him.

“There was a prayer Wishing Tree in the front foyer that they made, and visitors could come and they could write on this piece of paper and they could hang it on the tree,” Jarvis said.

“My son wrote on this piece of paper ‘all I want is for my Dad to get off drugs forever’, she reminded me of that.

“It just broke me, I started crying and it gave me the strength to pick up that pen and sign that application and go back and give Odyssey another try.”

It wasn’t a guarantee that Jarvis would end back up in Odyssey House. He had taken that first step, but now it was all up to the judge.

“I ended up getting bailed to Odyssey House on March 1, 2018 and I went back with this unexplainable determination, commitment and ambition just to finish this program,” he said.

“I ended up doing three years there, and I ended up graduating from there.

“The first of March next year I will be seven years clean, and I’m working now, I’ve got all my children back in my life and I’ve got that respect back in the community, I’m looked up to and trusted again.”

Jarvis now works as an engagement project officer with the First People’s Assembly of Victoria for almost two years, after studying Alcohol and Other Drugs at Swinburne University.

In the Assembly, he became involved with the Yoorrook Justice Commission, where he shared his full story.

“It really brought up a lot for me,” he said.

“It was hard at times, but it was powerful too. Because there’s a lot of people out there that experience similar to what I experienced, and I wanted to encourage them from my story.”

To hear his full story, head to yoorrookjusticecommission.org.au/video/jarvis-tells-his-story/

This story originally featured in Betty & Don Magazine 2024. Find the full magazine, here: https://www.sheppnews.com.au/features-and-magazines/betty-don-magazine-2024/