Goonellabah’s Lynne de Weaver has led a fascinating life, multifaceted life, that’s taken her from education, to the heady heights of the advertising industry, community engagement and regional economic development.

Because I speak with an American accent, most everybody I meet asks me: “where were you born?” And I say Glasgow, Scotland. It's kind of funny. My family moved to the US when I was six years old and the first thing you learn to do when you move to a regional town in western New York State is to speak like everybody else or they make fun of you.

I've been in Australia since 1969, when I was 26. The whole time I was growing up we had snow and cold so my father would say to my mother: "We should have gone to Australia". His best friend came out to Australia - he was the thriftiest, nicest man you'd ever, ever, ever meet - so we've always been in contact with Australia because of my “uncle” Horace.

After we came to Sydney, I did my degree in early childhood education at Ku-Ring-Gai College of Advanced Education. That's where I first heard about the Northern Rivers College for Advanced Education because they used to come down and put on concerts for the Ku-Ring-Gai people.

Then my husband and I had to go back to the US for family reasons. I taught first grade there and I got my master's degree but we couldn't wait to get back to Australia. We came back for good in ‘84 and I've been here ever since.

I've always been a writer and when I was in the US I wrote a lot of copy for vitamin advertisements, because I was interested in natural medicines and things like that. I got very good at writing direct response copy, which is anything used on a coupon or a 1800 number. They’re all calls to action and you describe products by their benefits, not by their features. There's a whole bunch of little tricks.

So when we got back to Australia I ended up working at the advertising agency Wunderman’s, copywriting there, because believe it or not, direct response copywriting is a very special skill. Then I went to work at Brand Direct, which is an international agency, and became their creative director and we opened up offices in Melbourne as well as Sydney and I got to travel back and forth to the UK, to their head office, which was really great fun. And then I had my own business, De Weaver Integrated Marketing. Which was kind of fun to do too because it had some really neat clients.

We didn't move up to the Northern Rivers until December 1999. I was going to work remotely because as a writer you can choose to work anywhere you want and I had a great art director in the US. But when we arrived up here to live in Yamba we discovered, believe it or not, that they had pair gain wiring in the houses and you couldn't get any kind of decent internet.

So I started working, trying to get them a proper ISP there, and improve the bandwidth going into Yamba. I'd been so used to using the Internet in Sydney and I just thought it'd be no problem, but it would take eight hours overnight to download stuff and that was if your line didn't drop out thanks to the pair gaining. That lead me to my first role in community engagement.

I helped Yamba get a community ISP and get themselves up to speed and then I found out about the Community Technology Center program, which the state and federal governments were rolling out, focusing on introducing small regional communities of under 3000 to the internet, how to use it and do work with it and all this stuff.

I wound up working for the Community Technology Center New South Wales program as the Northern Rivers coordinator for two years. I had to move up to Lennox because most of the clients were up this end. I worked in, I think, every small community in the Northern Rivers. I just loved it. So many really interesting people worked in Uki and Nimbin and Kygole and Evans head and Woodburn and all of little communities all along the way. And it was just a fabulous experience.

That's how I got hooked on regional economic development. I was asked to join the Northern Rivers Regional Economic Development Board, which morphed into Regional Development Australia Northern Rivers. I went from one board to the other and kept my interest in regional economic development.

When the CTC program funding ended, I started working at Southern Cross University in their marketing department and I had a wonderful time and then I decided I would do a PHD. I think I was probably one of the older students to get a PHD, but it was all based on the work I'd already done in regional development.

My PHD was called Jumping Through Hoops, How to Apply for a Government Grant. Because I had been a writer and a copywriter and a marketing person, I incorporated all that and all the things that I did when working with communities to help them achieve their goals. I finished my PHD but in the middle I got sick. So it took a little longer than normal.

I’ve also written three books. The first thing I had to do when I came up to the Northern Rivers, because I had just done a book deal with Pearson Education, was write a book called Marketing for Small Business. I wrote another book about direct marketing for small business and I edited a book for Ric Richardson, who lives at Byron Bay. He’s the man who founded Uniloc and took on Microsoft in court and won. I got to work with him when I was on the Regional Economic Development Board and when he decided he was going to write a book about getting patents approved, he got me to edit it.

I think there's a tremendous amount of social capital in the Lismore community. I think Jenny Dowell’s just the most phenomenal person, the energy level that that woman has is just tremendous. Brett Adlington at the gallery, I think he's doing an amazing job. What's happening in the Quad, I think is a fantastic example of Lismore at its best. I think that's why Keen Street has more of a buzz to it than Molesworth St because they're tying in more to the things that are going on in the quad.

I think Lismore has great potential but I think people just have to realize that the only way you get things done is to get up and do it. One of the classic things that I think is just absolutely fantastic is the Knitting Nannas. I mean they are the most amazing group of women. I participated with them for a couple of years until with my health I couldn't go on all the road trips they go on anymore. There's an example of community engagement that's just phenomenal. They've got probably over 80 groups all around Australia and there's even groups of Knitting Nannas in the UK and the US. And that all started from the Bentley blockade. There's an awful lot of little pockets of amazing people here and the Knitting Nannas are right up there.

I’m retired now but I never really retired, I just got sick. I got guillain barre syndrome which is an autoimmune disorder, about seven years ago, and then it morphed into a more chronic version. I still don't have full use of my hands, but I just make do with what I have and just keep on trucking. I've been keeping myself rehabilitated as best I can. I do Tai Chi and swim and exercise and things like that, but there's no more running on the beach for me and I used to love doing that

Now I'm trying to turn my PHD into a book. There's so many people who do regional economic development and community consultation, but a lot of it is just understanding how to talk to people and getting on the same wavelength. A lot of the stuff the government puts out is kind of like double dutch.

I still work. It's just finding the time to sit down and nail myself in front of my computer and I've got so many things, almost half done, but you get interrupted and once you've done a PHD and written all those papers, you look at it and you just shudder. But I’ll get it done. There's a lot of good stuff in there.