Vanessa Amorosi is evicting her own mother from the place she's called home for more than two decades.
Despite enduring a bitter court battle, and losing all contact with her daughter 'Ness', Joyleen Robinson says she still loves her but can't figure out why it all fell apart.
"She was my best friend," Joyleen told A Current Affair.
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"We could talk for hours at two o'clock in the morning."
Joyleen recalled, in her first TV interview, how her daughter became an international pop star.
"When Vanessa made it, she was a young girl - 17. She came out with Have a Look," she said.
"And we all ran down with the radio to the kitchen to say "Vanessa! You're on the radio!"
Vanessa Amorosi was a household name, but in this household, she was 'Ness', the eldest of Joyleen Robinson's three daughters.
Her mother still has one of Vanessa's cars, a 1955 Maurice.
"She was passionate about horses and animals and she liked her little cars," she said.
But she said fame didn't change her.
"I don't believe it did, but I'm talking about when she lived in Australia. When she lived in Australia, she was very down to earth, very caring, very loving."
She said she doesn't know what changed, but reflected.
"It is very sad, how the music industry can make or break you."
It was after an illness Joyleen said her daughter stopped talking to her,
"It was after she had the aneurysm she changed," she said.
"Apparently, it was a brain aneurysm and she had to have all this medication.
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"I got an email one day saying she wanted to know a little bit about her business, so my younger daughter and I wrote it all out for her and sent it off.
"I'm a very honest person, I don't take nothing from anyone so to be questioned I sort of went 'what's this all about?"
Joyleen said she was devastated her daughter had detached herself from the family.
From the moment she was discovered singing at a Russian restaurant in Melbourne, Joyleen didn't miss a beat of her daughter's rise to fame.
After an iconic performance at the Sydney Olympic Games, Vanessa's career took off - touring the world with lucrative returns of more than $2 million in one year alone.
Part of those earnings paid for a sprawling semi-rural property in Narre Warren that Joyleen has called home for about 22 years.
"We've never had secrets in this family. Everybody knows there was an agreement," she said.
Amorosi successfully sued Robinson in the Victorian Supreme Court for full ownership of the Narre Warren property where her mother lived.
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The house was purchased as a result of Amorosi's success but Robinson argued it should belong to her as she had paid her daughter the $650,000 they agreed to back in 2001.
"It was horrible, to be honest. She didn't even look at me," said Robinson of the five-day trial.
"And we did have mediation before we went to court and she wouldn't come to the same room as me."
But it wasn't entirely a win for the pop star, who has lived in California for over a decade.
Justice Steven Moore agreed Robinson should receive close to $900,000 in restitution from Amorosi, taking into account the $650,000 payment plus interest.
Outside of the courtroom, Vanessa has never spoken publicly about falling out with her Mum.
Alexis Daish, then US Correspondent for 9News, met the singer - and Joyleen's grandson - in 2019, when this was bubbling away in private, and fire had destroyed precious belongings on her Californian property.
Joyleen will leave behind the family home and all the memories that come with it, Vanessa has to cough up hundreds of thousands of dollars and a relationship between mum and daughter is perhaps even more broken than before.
