Matt Brown started barbering in a garden shed in Aranoi and discovered clients across all backgrounds carried shame about family violence and trauma. His own childhood in women's refuges and food banks shaped how he listened to their stories.
I fell in love with barbering. I started cutting hair in my little garden tin shed in Aranoi here. And the more it was from this space, the cutting hair, where I soon learned that we were more alike than we are different. That shame, pain, trauma, family violence did not discriminate. You know, I would have men in gang patches to men in uniforms. You know, firefighters, policemen, two men in suits, suit and tie. And when I cut these men's hair, I soon learned their stories. And fuck, we are more alike than we are different. And so being a barber listening to men's stories has been the greatest honor of my life. And so that book at the back really came, was birthed from the place of my lived experience, watching my dear mum be a rehab center to my father. By the age of 10, I lived in every woman's refuge home here in Christchurch. And that was hard, you know, lining up at the food banks, not knowing if we were going to eat that night.
