Nationally awarded community representative and environmental activist

It was with eager expectations that I began school at BGGS in 1949.

The bleak decades of the thirties and forties were closing, and the future looked full of promise and growth. The Editorial of the December 1949 BGGS magazine included the following:

‘With us lies the responsibility to make permanent a peace wrought in human blood. The great task of reformations falls to educated minds, sound in their philosophy of life and sincere in their devotion to higher ideals.’

With our futures ahead of us and a world opening up with unknown promises, our six groups of Third Formers (IIIA – IIIF) embarked with optimism our life at Grammar. I chose to pursue a science course, so I landed in IIIB as the School’s science wing was already well established.

My favourite time at BGGS (1949 - 1952) was on the tennis courts, where coach Edgar Moon, a retired Davis Cup player, was always at hand to improve one’s game. This sport enriched my whole life, and I still play tennis every week. My private piano studies were continuing and in 1952 I won the Wight Memorial Medal for music.

However, because of a serious eye accident towards the end of my sub-senior year I missed much schooling. The headmistress at the time was Kathleen Lilley, ‘Bloss’ for short. To prop up my academic performance, Bloss volunteered to give me private French lessons. This lasted into my senior year, during which time I got to know a better side of a headmistress who terrified us students. I loved the lessons and was even given the task of minding her dog Geordie when she went shopping.

With good marks in French thanks to Bloss and high qualifications in music I was able to matriculate to enter university. I began Year I, Science, in 1953. However, by the end of the year it was obvious there was not much offering in the science field in Brisbane, especially for women. Urged by my mother, I joined the Commonwealth Bank, where I worked for the next 10 years, the last years in Sydney. Then I got married. In those days, banks & other institutions did not employ married women.

In the mid 1960’s with the thawing of conditions in the Soviet Union, several relatives there made contact with our family here in Brisbane and my mother bravely set off to find them. I requested my mother to bring home a Russian cookbook- remembering the wonderful food and torts prepared by some Russian ladies for my birthday.

My parents arrived in Australia at an early age and with no extended family, I grew up in a fairly typical Australian family. Apart from a handful of words, no Russian language was spoken. To be able to read the cookbook, I spent a year at Worker’s Educational Association, enlisting in a Russian language night course where, due to the difficulty, most people left. All I learnt was the Russian Cyrillic alphabet.

I found employment as secretary of the newly formed School of Russian at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. This new Russian department, a by-product of the NASA space race, was set up specifically for English speaking students. My lack of language was not a problem in the early stages. Besides I was also attracted to the also newly formed School of Drama at the same campus. I liked writing and participated in some play writing courses and became President of the ABC Youth Concerts Committees in Brisbane and then Sydney, also contributing concert notes for the orchestral concerts. In Brisbane I represented BGGS on the ABC Youth Concerts Committee.

Before classes started, to establish the pace at which this new Russian course could be taught, my first year was spent with the newly appointed tutor learning the basics of the Russian language. Grammar, vocabulary, and long sessions in the language laboratory, I discovered I was quite good, and I attribute this to the confidence gained during my French lessons with BGGS Principal Kathleen Lilley.

I re-enrolled at university, gained a scholarship and changed my earlier science direction to an Arts course. Here I completed one year with the Drama department (the academic side of NIDA) before I switched to an Honours degree in Russian Language and Literature. As an Honours degree is one and a half times longer than a basic degree here, I was also able to complete two years each of Psychology and Philosophy. I specialised in 19th C Russian literature, studied in the original Russian text.

In the later turbulent years at the School of Russian and as my Russian was now quite fluent, I joined the translation team at Macquarie University, Sydney. This team was established to service international conferences around the Pacific as it was too expensive to bring a team out from Geneva. Attending after work each week, I completed 10 postgraduate diplomas which enabled me to work at United Nations level as a simultaneous translator as well as translator. I have worked for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and my translations are in one of the Antarctica Treaties.

After a few years freelancing and due to the ill health of my parents, I moved back to Brisbane.

Finally landing on Tamborine Mountain, I quickly joined the Garden Club and the long-established community organisation, the Tamborine Mountain Progress Association (TMPA). During the 1990’s, the area’s population started to explode, and the latter’s big job was to establish a sound Development Control Plan (DCP). We owned a local newspaper, and we were able to muster support and input for the DCP of 1997, which remains the basis for the today’s local Planning Scheme.

I became TMPA’s Treasurer in the early 1990’s, and remained in the executive as President since the early 2000’s. As the most visited destination in Southeast Queensland, Tamborine Mountain receives about 1.5 million visitors each year and it is famous internationally as an environmental and semi-rural destination.

Much time has been spent trying to counter both the big inappropriate developers and also council decisions which do not align with resident expectations according to their values within the Planning Scheme.

Over the last several years, I fronted my twenty first court case, in Brisbane, on behalf of TMPA and the community.

In June I was named in the King’s Birthday 2024 Honours list for “Services to the Tamborine Mountain community”.