When I was thinking about writing this biography for the website I tossed up whether or not to write it in the first person or in the standard third person format. It strikes me as disingenuous to write a biographical description of yourself while pretending to be a stranger, when after all the sole purpose of this “About” section is to let your readers know a bit of the reality of you.  And because deception is never a good way to start a relationship I tell you upfront I am writing the following bio myself. I have attempted to document only things that seem to me to be newsworthy - acknowledging that I have probably left a great deal out.  Ultimately what I have chosen to include is an answer to this question : “What would I want known about me should I die tomorrow?”  So here goes…

 

There is much of the middle about me.  I was born in the midwest of the US, in the middle of the last century - a middle child in a middle class family.  My grades were somewhere in the middle and any skills and talents I have accrued are middling at best. Yet somehow, for reasons I have yet to discover, I have ended up, despite my ordinariness, having an extraordinary life.

 

When I was born there were still some people alive who were children during the American Civil War and the stains of enslavement and disenfranchisement remained throughout my childhood in Oklahoma.  It was not uncommon to see the black children from the other side of town blocked from swimming in the public pool, or from drinking from a water fountain.   I wasn’t aware of it at the time but those scenes, and the thousands of things that were said by those adults around me to justify them, shaped me. It was one of the greatest moments of my life when, many decades later, I witnessed a man become president who looked like those children.  

 

Somewhere along the line I developed a commitment to making things a bit better, if I could.  This turned out to be many small things that perhaps made a difference and some momentous achievements, initiatives that changed things quite dramatically.  I was involved in launching equal opportunity legislation and programs across a number of states in Australia.  And in creating and managing education programs that changed the way thousands of young people experienced learning.  I am equally proud of the small and the major, while humbly accepting that in the course of a lifetime it really has not been that much, certainly not enough.

 

In general I mostly managed to not make too much of a mess of my life, although I did embarrass myself while having tea and biscuits at Government House in Canberra with the Governor General by leaving a mess of crumbs on the carpet, and when having a giggle with President Jimmy Carter on a plane flying to China.   Then there was that time when the seam of my skirt split just before I was meant to give a speech at an ASEAN conference in Japan,  fortunately my pride was saved by a stapler. 

 

I have been on a first name basis with more than a few politicians, a couple of celebrities and billionaires, and many hundreds of other ordinary people like me.  Inevitably it was the ordinary people who touched my life in more ways than I can fathom.  As for the others - knowing them was certainly enlightening but also revealing.  It can certainly be quite dysfunctional “at the top”. 

 

I was witness to quite a few historic events including being in the office of a certain Deputy Prime Minister on the night she disposed her leader, Kevin Rudd in 2010, and in Tiananmen Square in Beijing (even though it was forbidden) the moment Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997.

 

Along the way I raised three children, earned four degrees, learned to fly a glider and was once chased by a three meter crocodile in the Northern Territory when I got too close to her nest of eggs.   I ran in two City to Surfs through Sydney (and improved my second run by 13,000 places) and was once woken up in the middle of the night by a herd of wild brumbies silhouetted against a huge full moon as they thundered past only a few feet from my sleeping bag.  Oh, and there was the time we were kidnapped by a gang of car thieves on the East/West German border - but that’s another story.

 

I’ve had a song written about me and a boat named after me - two of the greatest compliments a woman can experience.  I have lived for 40 years with a wonderful man on two continents in a vast array of housing including tents, house boats, sheds, and as I write this today, in a shipping container on an island in the middle of an ocean.

 

Over the past six decades I have experienced catastrophic bush fires and floods and personal challenges that turned sections of my hair white overnight, and among those challenges, so many moments of pure joy and awe that I have to  admit I take them for granted far too often. 

 

These are just a few of the not so middle things that have bookmarked my life and have led me here, to this point, where I am attempting to take some of these experiences and turn them into fictional tales that will interest and amuse you.  I’ll let you work out how much is true and how much a figment of my imagination.

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Connie