Resident of Seddon
I was born in London and moved to Melbourne in 1948, just after the war. Mum had met Dad, an Aussie, on a RAF base in England during the war and we all returned to Australia afterwards.
Growing up in Burwood as the eldest of three children, I bombed out of matriculation and got a job as a trainer radiographer at Box Hill Hospital. It was the only job I could get.
These were the days before seat belt and drink-driving laws. I’ve seen horrendous consequences of car accidents arriving in casualty departments, and they are images you don’t forget.
I married in 1968 and we chose not to have kids. I’m divorced now, but it was a good 20 years of marriage. We bought houses, travelled and had a variety of jobs. When we moved to England in 1975, we planned on going for only 18 months. I ended up staying 30 years.
After I married, we settled in Surrey Hills and I began looking at my options. Radiography was pressured, often a production line, boring and physically exhausting. There was no equal pay, and sex discrimination was legal and prevalent. Box Hill Hospital was similar to Footscray Hospital – it covered the whole of the eastern suburbs and the demands on it were huge.
I decided to go to night school and learnt computer programming. When I was in Year 12, we had one visit from a career counsellor and I remember asking, ‘What about computing?’
The lady counsellor quipped, ‘There are no jobs for girls in that world!’ Dad was a primary school teacher and was convinced that the future was in the world of EDP (electronic data processing). He was right!
After a year or so I’d learnt enough to apply for jobs as a trainee programmer. It took me two years of almost prostituting myself in order to get a job. There was so much discrimination. Being a young married woman meant that nobody wanted to invest in training me because they all assumed that I would soon be pregnant.
I finally got a job at CSIRO, a job which changed my life. I learnt a lot about computers in the three-and-a-half-years I was there.
The truth was, I was a very inadequate programmer but later learnt that I was better at project management. When I moved to England in 1974, I eventually landed a role with Barclaycard (a Visa card company) off the back of my computing skills and over time became an expert in credit scoring eventually co-authoring a textbook on the subject.
By the late ’80s, I was separated and divorced. I moved to a sales and marketing job for a credit-scoring supply company. I was hopeless at sales but marketing was fun and mentally challenging. It’s competitive and honestly, I needed the stimulation.
A company restructure followed, and in my new my role as Chief Executive I was seriously overworked. The old adage ‘sink or swim’ applied here and I sunk. I succumbed to chronic fatigue syndrome and realized I had to change my lifestyle. I had to reduce the pressure but keep the income going, so I went self-employed providing marketing communications services to the credit-scoring world.
I was happy; I had control of my life and my health improved. If I wanted to work at 3am, I could. I worked mostly from home, writing magazine articles, conference papers, ghostwriting and speaking at conferences.
English winters are bad enough to drive you to a very strong drink. I was living in an apartment which had fabulous views of the gardens and countryside beyond. In winter, however, the sky is bleached out, the damp gets into your bone marrow and it’s depressing and oppressing. Every winter I asked myself, ‘What on earth am I still doing here?’
I had been putting off the whole process of shipping and moving back to Australia on my own; it was too hard. When it finally happened, it was almost three years later.
Arriving back in Melbourne in 2005, I was 58 and semi-retired. I began house-hunting while living with Mum in Surrey Hills. My brother-in-law rang one day, telling me about new houses in Maribyrnong. ‘All the big builders are here’, he said. I took one look, and a gut reaction told me that this is where I wanted to be.
I was very clear. Had I gone back to live in the eastern suburbs, it would have felt like I had never moved on in my life. It would have been totally retrograde.
When I was growing up, the perception was that the western suburbs were all heavy industry and full of blue-collar workers. All the ‘nice’ people lived in the eastern suburbs. There was a huge divide. Today nearly all my friends still live in the east or south and most of them still won’t cross the West Gate Bridge. Their loss!
I moved into Maribyrnong in 2006 and spent years working on a film script that never went any further. I joined various writers support groups, including Writers Victoria.
One day, I spied a small classified ad asking for someone to co-author for a book on aged care homes. I responded and got the job, a job I still do periodically today albeit now as a ghost-writer.
The book, called Aged Care – the complete Australian guide, was first published in 2008. We have done five or six ebooks revisions and the latest print edition covers the 2014 aged-care reforms.
Around 2012 I was beginning to look for a smaller place to live and bought a penthouse apartment on Edgewater but lived there for only nine months. I was done with stairs and wanted something single storey.
I had viewed a fantastic house in Seddon. I hadn’t sold the apartment but I went to the house auction out of curiosity. The estate agent remembered me, in spite of not seeing me for six weeks. I told him, ‘If the auction goes pear-shaped, I would still be interested.’
He said ‘It’s already gone pear-shaped!’
I ended up purchasing the property at auction but conditional on the proviso that I sold my apartment. I was the only granny there biding, and I outbid them all. I bought it because I loved it – and still do.
Over the last 30 years, I’d grown curious about past lives. When Kevin Rudd was PM, he gave us $900 each (to help boost the economy) and I spent part of that on a past-life regression from a practitioner in Yarraville.
That prompted me to learn how to conduct these sessions and I found a few friends who were happy to be practised on. One particular friend was very keen and while in a hypnotic state, he talked about his previous lives, and mentioned his spirit guides. That evolved into a long-term working relationship which still continues.
Looking back, the skills I acquired during a working life have led me to where I am today. Programming led to credit cards which led to credit scoring which led to marketing; all involved writing which was great practice for where I am today writing spiritual books.
In 2014 I started a two-year Professional Writing and Editing Diploma at CAE and absolutely loved it! I was the oldest, and the other students were mostly young. It was the most enjoyable education I’ve had in my whole life.
I am now a published author of my first spiritual book with many more to come, as well as the aged care book, and they will all continue until I can’t see the screen anymore!
