Bio
I was born on a dairy farm in the small rural town of Yeoval, in the middle of New South Wales, birthplace of Banjo Patterson. My parents decided to return to Sydney after 12 years on the farm so that my brother and I could get a good education without being sent away to boarding school. So I grew up in the idyllic setting of the bookstore my parents bought in Chatswood after they sold the farm, with thousands of books to choose from each night for my bedtime story. Perhaps this gave me an early taste for the world beyond my borders.
As a teenager, I became involved with a local church youth group, and in time I was asked to take on a role in the leadership team of the 200-strong group. It was here that I cut my teeth on the difficult lessons of leadership, learning skills that would one day be useful on the other side of the world. Through my church, St Andrew’s Wahroonga, we met one of the community leaders from South Africa who was working for social change. My friends and I then received an invitation to join a youth leadership programme run by his organisation. What began as a three month visit soon turned into a decision to move to South Africa permanently, ill-prepared as I was for the political violence and turmoil of the late 80’s. But that decision allowed me to take part in the most extraordinary transformation in modern history. Holding up the Sky describes in detail the events that followed.
I returned to Australia in 2003. My Dad’s health was in decline but I also felt less useful in South Africa than I had been in all the years before. Khumo, Rags and I, along with another friend, Gloria, had set up a boutique consulting firm called Tsimeni Consulting. For five years we worked with government departments, aid agencies, non-government organisations and the private sector to transform themselves to keep pace with changes in the country and the rest of the world. But after three or four years, there were many companies doing similar work and I felt I was competing against South Africans well equipped to do what needed to be done. I had chosen to stay because I felt there was so much to do and so few to do it, but by 2002 that had changed. By this time, I had also met Shaun, whom I would marry at the end of the following year. So we began to talk about starting over in Australia.
When I came back, I wasn’t sure how any of my South African experiences would translate in the Australia workplace, but PricewaterhouseCoopers took a chance on me and gave me a role as an HR Director, responsible for the firm’s learning and development programme, something I will always be grateful for. I later went on to Westpac to take on the role of Head of Learning and Culture there. It was Westpac who then allowed me to work part-time so that I could write the book. I now work in Westpac’s Sustainability and Community team, where I’m responsible for building the long term capability of our Community Partners and the not-for-profit sector as a whole – clearly the best job in the bank.
So we are now we are living on Sydney’s beautiful northern beaches. We chose the area to be close to my parents. Sadly my Dad passed away in May 2007, just two months before I finished the book. The hardest part of writing the book was going back through the text and re-writing him into the past tense. Though he never got to read it, I’m sure he would have been proud.
