Moira McDade is not from a 4th or 5th generation Lismore family but she now calls Lismore home. Moira has lived a very interesting life from her birthplace in Forbes to Canberra, Papua New Guinea, Cairns, Tasmania and the Northern Rivers. She started one of the first neighbourhood centres in Queensland. Lilly Harmon sat down with Moira to get the complete life story.

I was born and raised in Forbes in central New South Wales, a very rural small country town. It’s very well known for being a farming area with a lot of wheat fields and sheep about.

I’ve actually been doing a lot of digging into my family ancestry in the last few years and I’ve discovered how my great-great-grandfather settled in Forbes during the Gold Rush. I’d found someone who knew information about my grandmother’s ancestry and I have just been sort of piecing it all together since and going down all the rabbit holes and deep dives finding out about amazing stuff. 

My fathers family were shoe retailers for many generations, beginning by selling boots to miners in the 1861 gold rush. This evolved into selling boots to farmers and then into a more general shoe store. The story of the gold rush is interesting. Forbes currently has a population of about 9000 people but during the gold rush, it swelled to 30,000 people. The street where the shoe business was actually the richest gold seam.

I just had a standard primary school and high school upbringing in public schools. My grandmother was Catholic and my mother was Protestant so there were a lot of disagreements that came out of that regarding my education.

My grandmother desperately wanted me to go to Catholic school and my mother said absolutely no. My grandmother made sure I got a lot of Catholic input by sending me over to the convent across the road from her house. I was sent for singing, speech and drama, dancing and piano. 

Of course, growing up in a small country town, everyone wants to leave and get as far away as possible. I did work briefly with Dad in the shoe shop, but I knew I needed to get out of there.

(Moira and her family during the 1954 floods in Forbes)

I went to Canberra for a little while and I fell in love with a boy named Greg from out of town. That's what you do, because you want to get out so you find the first decent boy that looks like he’s not from Forbes. He was what I call a ‘baby Pilot’, he was learning to fly and building up hours to join the airlines.

We first came to Lismore early on in our marriage where, after I received a Speech and Drama qualification, I became a Drama teacher at St. Mary’s which is now Trinity. Even though it was a brief time here initially, I fell in love with the place and always knew that I wanted to come back to the area, which I did. After several years, the pilot needed to get hours so we went to live in Papua New Guinea which was a very radical decision made by us. 

I was a child bride as they say, so I got married at 20 in Forbes with the big shebang and we ended up in the eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea, right in the middle in Highland territory.

There were a fair few expatriates there so they went out of jobs incredibly fast. Obviously, there were no available positions for a speech and drama teacher in the small town of Goroka, so I had to reinvent myself. I had done a bit of drafting as well as drawing buildings and maps in my early career so there was one job in town that was for a draughtsman which I applied for.

I wasn’t the best-qualified person for the job, but I really personified the phrase fake it till you make it, but I got it! That job was to draw the maps for the roadworks required to link to the outposts.

The Goroka and Mount Hagen areas are still pretty primitive there, so it was amazing learning about their culture and also the impact of church groups coming and trying to impose their beliefs. Groups made natives wear bras and shorts, when they’d previously had only been wearing modesty garments.

But I had a lovely time in Papua New Guinea, and towards the end of my time there, I even started teaching young people how to draft. We drew the road plan for what now is a famous road at an 8000-foot mountain called the Daulo Pass. Every time I drew the plan for the bulldozers to come in and cut through that bank and fill that thing. I’d go back the next day and dirt would be all down the steep valley. We drew a lot of crowds from the locals in that project, and I learnt how to speak Pidgin to make sure I'd be able to communicate with them. 

We left Papua New Guinea just before their independence in 1975. It was beginning to be unsafe because of constant uprisings and riots. We had to have a German Shepherd protecting us in the house, staying on alert and bars on all of our windows.

We came back to Brisbane and Greg got offered a bit of flying work, but ended up getting a flying job for the Bush Pilots which transported supplies, undertook rescue operations and transported people as well. We went to live in Cairns for a period of time after Brisbane for him to undertake that job. 

By then I had two little kids, Adam was going to primary school and Joanne was just a little preschooler. I needed a job again, and the pilot travelled a lot. He was very dangerous flying all over. He was even making a map of Papua New Guinea by having a camera mounted under the plane doing aerial photography.

I got a job as a draughtsman again, working for an architect in Cairns. We were drawing up a plan for the first-ever high rise on the esplanade.

Aquarius, the eventual name for it, was a radical and wide high-rise building. I'm a bit ashamed of it now because they shouldn't have had a high rise go along that beautiful esplanade as an eyesore along the coast.

The kids did some of their primary schooling there, and then we went back to Brisbane where Greg got a job with TAA, which is now no longer but from that he went to Qantas. 

At that time, I had a major illness that I was battling. I had a leaking artery in my brain and I was at risk of having a brain haemorrhage. I had to have major surgery to prevent it, which took a big toll on me. My kids were little, and so it was fairly traumatic and testing time for all of us and I had taken a long while to recover.

In that recovery period, I had people from an organisation called Sunnybank Family Care and Support come and help me with the kids, housework and stuff like that. I was so impressed by the whole community work thing that I thought to myself, that's what I want to do. So I volunteered to help them after my recovery period at a family crisis centre. After about three months of volunteering, they offered me a job, so I began my work there which lasted for several years. 

At that time, there was no such thing as neighbourhood or community centres in Australia, but they started to be developed in South Australia which had Don Dunstan as Premier and was incredibly socially progressive. I went to a conference to look at what was happening in South Australia with these things called neighbourhood centres, which no one ever heard of. So I begged to go and my boss let me, and I came back and said, “We're going to have one of those in Sunnybank.”

My boss tried to support my endeavour as much as possible but there was not much money freely available and no free available building. She told me to see what you can do, but you can do it. The local council had an old hall, near our family crisis centre. We supported victims of domestic violence, children at risk, and other people of poor means. 

I asked the council if I could make a neighbourhood centre in the hall, and I got support from them. I just ran around getting donations and started this little neighbourhood centre. We had a painting program and cooking, but we very much orientated the programs to people who didn't have many family skills. We also ran a playgroup where we were modelling to the mothers how to play with their children, or cook, or even how to shop on budgets.

It became very successful and by the time I left there were 600 people a week coming through that neighbourhood centre and it still exists. I take a lot of pride in that centre in Brisbane and look back with so much happiness on the contribution I made in that community. 

Then my marriage began to fall apart, so I needed a source of money because even though I loved the Neighborhood Center, it was very poor pay.

I got a job with the Queensland Cancer Council and it was my first job in the Big Smoke. I had to commute into the city and my job was coordinator of volunteers. They extensively use volunteers for things like breast cancer support, brain tumour groups and men's prostate cancer groups.

I had a really good boss again. One thing I think about my working career is that I had some really good bosses. He interviewed me and said, “I want the best volunteer program in Australia”. We had 3000 volunteers that I managed doing all kinds of things, plus money from fundraisers while I was there. 

I also received a scholarship. Someone nominated me to a leadership program at QUT and I was part of their leadership program they offered.

You were to dream something big for yourself in your career and research it and then share it with the world. So we had amazing people talk to us including Quentin Bryce.

I got it in my head that I was going to be a consultant and work for myself. In my project, I went out and interviewed women who left organisations, because the men so dominated the lead roles, and went out and set up consultancies. I had to do a presentation for the final assignment of the leadership program so I announced that I would do what those women had done and start my own consulting business.

I had two kids, no money, out of the house, and I said, I'm going to do this. Once you announce it to everybody, it's like you've shut a door behind you. I had to do it from there. I was very, very lucky indeed because I went looking for a mentor who was pretty assertive. When I asked the head of the Australian Institute of Management if he'd mentor me, he said he’d helped me get my first jobs with companies. He’d find places that needed people to be trained up, I worked with fighting staff and all sorts of HR organisational development work.

I went back to study, which I hadn't done since my teaching degree long ago, which landed me my job at Trinity as a Drama Teacher. I enrolled in a masters of management, cause I thought that would be best suited for my dream career.

After I'd been to a few economics classes I immediately knew that this was not for me in any way. So I got some help inside the uni and I swapped Masters to do a Masters of Education specialising in workplace learning.

I was very interested in how people learn new skills on the job rather than in a formal environment, and I found that similar to my previous teaching degree I had. I had that consultancy job for around 30 years just working for myself, and still do a little bit of work every now and again here in Lismore and beyond, where I now have come back to. It’s really a job that you can never predict what cashflow will be like, especially with the floods, COVID and droughts.

Midway through my career, after about 13 years as a single parent, I remarried Geoff who lived in Tasmania. We loved this area, sometimes coming here for Bluesfest, and we had family connections here. So we chose to live in the outskirts of Lismore.

I hope to stay in this region and eventually downsize while still contributing to community by doing some part-time work as well as volunteering. My last consulting job was writing a tender application for a Women's Refuge in Byron.

I’m mostly still passionate about community development and bringing the community together, and I try to do that in my own community. Just tomorrow we're having a curry night for our street, to just bring us all together for the holidays. Everyone brings a curry and it pulls the whole of the street together.