I am currently reading “One Good Turn” by Kate Jackson and I love it. I am not quite sure why. I know I love the way she gets inside the characters, I love the humour or perhaps its those innermost thoughts that the characters share that make you reflect on your life
Lets look at Martin the school,teacher who hates his job working in a boarding school, despising he fact that he lets people walk all over him and can see life passing him by yet writes best selling detective novels ,
“I’ll just do this for a bit and then perhaps I will go travelling or take another qualification or get a more interesting job and a new life will start, but instead the old life carried on, and he felt it spinning out into nothing, the threads wearing thing, and sensed if he didn’t do something he would stay there forever, growing older .. until he retired or died … He knew he would have to do something proactive, he was not a person to whom somethings simply happened. His life had been lived in some sort of neutral gear’”
I must admit ten years ago I felt just like Martin and I just had this gut feeling my time must come and I just couldn’t spend the rest of my life working 24/7 to fund and support other people’s dreams.
Tonight they will announce the 2013 Rural Woman of the Year. This is a very important award because it provides a highly visible platform platform for the winner to get their “cause” in front of the people who can make it happen
Tonight I am hoping that person is Alison Fairleigh, not because she necessarily stands above all the rest but because I think her cause stands above all the rest and I know that she will not rest until rural mental well being is elevated to level of priority it should have
It takes a special person to pour their heart and soul and every waking hour to lobby for something that is beyond the 3’c’s (‘cute, cuddly or cancer”). In this country and many other first world countries we embrace warm and fuzzy and elevate people like Lyn White to hero status and put so many human social issues in the too hard basket.
I want Alison to win for all those farmers and people living in rural and regional Australia who so need some-one to take their emotional problems seriously.
