You've Got This!

3Dial Up Your DaringBe bold in the vision for your life

At sixteen, after nearly a decade in Catholic convent schools in Melbourne, my mother decided to enter a religious order to become a nun. After nine years in the convent, just a few months shy of making her final vows, she decided to leave the cloistered world of the convent and started teaching at a Catholic school in the rural town of Sale, in the south-east corner of Australia. Sale just so happens to be an hour’s drive from the even more rural place of Nungurner, where my father lived, milking cows on his parents’ dairy farm.

To cut a long story short, they met, got married and had seven kids. Francis Patrick came first. Then fast on his heels, yours truly … Margaret Mary. Followed by Pauline, Stephen, Anne, Peter and Catherine.

My parents assumed traditional gender roles. Dad managed the farm and most jobs outside the home. Mum managed everything inside. My siblings and I largely followed suit. The boys did more of the outside ‘boy jobs’. The girls did more of the more domestic, indoor ‘girl jobs’. By age ten I could whip up a batch of scones in between preparing baby bottles, washing dishes and folding nappies for my younger siblings. (As soon as one was out of nappies another one would be on the way, and disposables were never a budgetary option.)

Growing up on the farm, my horizons extended little beyond the back paddock. (Which wasn’t all that far back.) Yet I sensed there was a whole lot more world out there ...