Purposefully breaking the glass ceiling

Karen remembers being fascinated when hearing her grandmother and great-grandmother speaking in their native language to each other. While she never learnt the language she and her siblings, like most Indigenous people around the nation, acquired a healthy vocabulary of individual words that still get used when in the company of family members today.

Great-grandmother Nanna Weare (Jidabal elder) featured prominently in Karen’s cultural reminiscence, and it was during visits to her Innot Hot Springs humble abode that she was taught how to pan for tin. Karen said her great-grandmother would retreat, from time to time, further into the bush to escape town life where she sought refuge in her little humpy.

The amazing childhood adventures for Karen resonated with me in her words from those years: “When we stayed with Nanna Weare in the bush, it would be pitch black except for the light of the camp fire.”

Karen’s passionate lineage recollection, in essence defines her traditional roots: “It determines who I am and where I've come from and it gives me an identity.”

When I asked Karen of the best advice her parents gave her as a teenager Karen said it was that “coming first wasn’t important, but giving 100 per cent of my effort was”. It wasn’t until years later that she put that saying into practice: first, when working as a tracer for an engineering company in Cairns and second, as a mature aged student at university when she chose engineering as her preferred course to “reacquaint myself with drafting work”.

Books are a passion for Karen and she informs me that she is on track to achieve her goal of reading six books in six months - mostly achieved through commuting to and from work in busy Melbourne.