Me ... in a nutshell

I thought this might be a good time to let you know more about me. A few people have asked for that in the comments and in emails. I understand if you're not interested, just return tomorrow when I'll be returning to simple living subjects. Tomorrow's topic is bottling/canning/preserving.

I was born in Sydney and have one sister, Tricia, and one pretend sister, Kathleen. Tricia and I grew up at Strathfield and went to a convent school. When I left school, I worked briefly at an advertising agency, then started nursing. I did my nurses training at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. After graduation, I worked at the Transplant Unit at Sydney Hospital and the Emergency Department at Balmain Hospital.

Sick of city life, in the mid-70s I went to live on Cape York, which is the pointy bit on the top of Australia. I ran a small hospital there on an aboriginal reserve and found a whole new wonderful world living with tribal aboriginees. They taught me a lot of things I still use today. Important things like showing respect, not judging others, loving one's family, generosity, kindness and how to live within nature without doing too much damage. Older women hold an esteemed place within aboriginal culture - they are teachers and are expected to pass on information to those younger. It is a position of trust and honour. I have often thought about those older women I knew when I was much younger. They are a big part of the reason I am blogging. I am trying to emulate their example by passing on what I know to younger people. It is something that used to be done in our culture in the past, but now older women are invisible and often viewed as passed their use by date. Not me though! I hope I am improving with age.

After Cape York I lived for a few months on Thursday Island, which is in the Torres Strait between Australia and Papua New Guinea. I was on my way back to Sydney from there when I called into Mount Isa to visit a friend I had known in Sydney. It was just before my 28th birthday and my friend convinced me to stay and have my birthday in Mount Isa. It was on my 28th birthday there that I met a very handsome German man named Hanno.

I didn't continue my journey.

In March 1979 we decided to go to Germany so I could meet his parents. He met mine on the way over there as we travelled back to Sydney then so he could meet my mum and dad before we left. We were going to stay in Germany for two months but ended up staying for two years. We were married there and ten months later in July, Shane was born. When he was three months old, we came back to Australia. Shortly after we arrived home, Hanno's mother died.

We stayed in Sydney with my parents for a couple of months but both of us wanted to leave the city and go back to the bush, so just after Christmas we headed back to Queensland. We bought a caravan and decided that Hanno would work in the coal mines. Just after we got back to Queensland, on the day John Lennon died, and when Shane was 12 weeks old, I realised I was pregnant again. Kerry was born in July.

After living in various towns with Hanno working as a heavy equipment fitter and me looking after our babies, we eventually settled in a mining town in Central Queensland. When the boys were in primary school I went back to serious study. I did a degree that I could study at home and majored in Journalism, Literature and Communication. I was already working to produce the local newspaper and went on to create a business on contract to MIM Holdings to write and publish the paper. I did that for 12 years. During that time I was often asked to write technical manuals for the mine and went on to form technical writing business. When we left there, I gave the newspaper business to my good friend Susan, who worked for me. When I was living in the bush I learnt a lot of the skills I now use like gardening, keeping chickens, stockpiling, baking bread, preserving etc. It was through necessity then as we were over three hours from the nearest supermarket.

In 1997, we moved to where we are living now. Shane had just finished school - he and Kerry went to boarding school in Townsville - and Kerry still had one year to go. Kerry used to fly home for school holidays and we'd ring him a few times a week. Shane went to university and started a degree in environmental science. He dropped out in his last year to become a chef. Kerry went straight into his chef's apprenticeship when he left school. They're now both fully qualified chefs.

Hanno retired when he left the mines, they asked him to go back, he went back but hated being there alone. He left after a few months and came back home to retire again. I was supporting the family with my technical writing business and Hanno settled in to be a house husband. He nearly drove us all nuts because he wanted things to be perfect all the time. We convinced him he needed to do something else. LOL He bought a shop in Montville, which is a small tourist type town fairly close by. We ran that shop for almost seven years.

While all this was going on, I was working in my business, occasionally travelling to the mines to collect information and take photos. I had two other people working with me. Every year I grew more discontent with my life and when I finished a year long contract with BHP (Australia's largest company) I knew I didn't want to do that kind of work any more. I saw unhappiness and backstabbing in the corporate world and I didn't want to be part of it. When my BHP contract ended, I closed my business.

I had no idea what I would do but I did know that if I wasn't going to work, I had to get rid of my housekeeper and start saving money so it would lessen the impact of me not working. I'd had a computer since 1988 so I used it to find information about how to live frugally. I discovered there was a name for what I wanted to do although the American version of frugal living in those days had every little environmental awareness. I found simple living through those frugal living sites. I searched my memory for how my mother and grandmother used to work in their own homes and I read as much as I could find on sustainability within a household context. I learnt all I could about frugal and simple living but with an emphasis on environmental issues, that lead me to the permaculture forums, which lead me to start aussieslivingsimply with Dan and a few others. Over this time I slowly developed my version of simple living. I started writing a book about it but now here I am blogging. I have used a lot of that book information here and I'm now working on some ebooks that I'll soon be selling here.

Well, that's me in a nutshell. We'll be moving on to more important things like preserving in the next post. : )