“ The reason I bought it was the Post Office in South Lismore was the one place I could go when I was feeling isolated and broken. You’d walk in the door and Terry and Kath would just smile at you. They didn’t know your story and you didn’t feel like you were a story, you just felt like you were home. When things were terrible in my marriage I would go in there and feel like I could breathe.
Terry put the Post Office up for sale and I’d even thought about asking for a job there. I didn’t need to work in a fancy job, that’s how much it called to me. We kept bumping into each other and eventually I took that money I’d put aside and I bought the Post Office. I had to take out a debt which was terrifying because here I am, a single mum, buying in a flood zone, knowing what the consequenses of being in a flood zone were, knowing that if I fail I’m letting down my children and knowing that I can’t fail because I have to be the best mother I can be. There was a lot of terror but a lot of determination.
It took 9 months, doing this dance with Australia Post, going through all the training and getting my licence. It finally settles and it occurs to me that this is the place I am going to bring this program I have been working on through. I couldn’t bring it back through the Uni due to Covid, then flood. It was too big a leap and too much money needed to get it off the ground so I started to think smaller.
I thought, let’s just start connecting children back into the aged community. The whole program is designed around play based learning. I created this compilation of 56 different positive paradigms to offset the limiting negative ones and interlay them with things we are seeing in our environment every day. That’s what I’ve started introducing at the PO through the letter writing system.
We started writing these letters to the elderly people in our community. I came in with this idea that this would evolve and I would be able to slowly introduce this and make a positive difference in a community that was so wounded. I picked the children who still had the capacity to be happy even when things aren’t so good and I picked the older community who are isolated.
We had this huge flood gauge put in front of the Post Office which goes right up to the ceiling which is the height the flood went to. It’s called the Kindness Meter. I said to the kids:-If we can beat the height of the flood in acts of kindness by November, Santa has told me he will turn the Post Office into a gingerbread house. All of a sudden we had all these kids coming in writing letters and I thought OMG what have I done? I have to make a gingerbread house. All these older people were receiving these gorgeous letters and feeling happy. First the kids were doing the letters, then the postcards and then the pictures. I asked the kids to draw a picture of them engaging with an older person in a way that would make them feel joy. It was incredible what was coming in. Kids were bringing pictures of a fishing trip with an older person or knitting or gardening with a grandma. The feedback from the nursing home was amazing…Some of the people with dementia truly believed this has come from family members who love them. The difference is incredible. We ended up with the Christmas cards which was the last part of that campaign…Over 960 Christmas letters over the two days on that weekend. We were able to have the community write to the older and disadvantaged people in our community. It was such a great little start to what could actually be incredible.
I’m just trying to filter out that we actually own our emotions every minute. We can choose happiness. I remember saying to my kids after the flood while we were living in the van. I’d been fighting my insurance company this day, trying to communicate with my now ex husband and knowing I was selling the piece of land I was living on with nowhere to go. We had this little whiteboard in the van and my daughter had written, Not every day is going to be good day Mum but there’s goodness in every day. That was the moment I realised I was doing a good job.
I know that we will flood again. The flood never leaves you. Every time it rains again I find myself checking, doing a stocktake, etc. My new plan is to raise my PO. I want to go up a storey. I call her Etty and she was built in 1880. Ethel Thompson was the first Post Mistress. I did some research and she was hammered by the men on the Council. It was ‘How dare a woman deal with such important business such as the Telegraph, banking and postal services. I love the fact that she succeeded and she was a single woman. Now another single woman has come along and I’m running with that. I did apply for Grants recently and we weren’t successful to raise her. We want to preserve her heritage, paint her back in her heritage colours overlooking the railway station and now the Rail Trail. I’m very much wanting to honour the history of South Lismore.
I’ve always found a reason to find joy, always looked for rainbows and chased happiness. I’ve always been a Writer and a creative. I’ve always painted murals and left little parts of our family all across the country. There’s always been this need to rally my family together and sit in a safe space of connectivity and to really love and appreciate the small things. One of the things that’s got me to where I am is you don’t make the mistake of lining all the tragedy up and that’s why I found it hard when you said…’Let’s start at your childhood’ If I laid everything out for you now, you’d sit here in tears. Hurt is not who I am. These things are parts of my story, this rollercoaster of tragic events but the person I am is incredibly happy. I go to work every day and I am so happy to be there. I absolutely love this community. “