Pearls and Irritations

Patricia Weston, aka Patriciawa.

I am a well-trained fact checker from BBC overseas news room in London some sixty years ago. I also spent time with the CBC in Toronto on my first overseas trip, 1960, before going north to Alaska. After marriage and very happy motherhood in the midst of Mau Mau terrorism I became a successful high school language teacher by default before ‘assisted’ migration to Australia.

Here I continued as a married ‘temp’ in low socio-economic area schools. Finally I had a brief, but enjoyable, four years’ running an Australian wheatbelt DHS, where success retaining ‘black’ students was not popular with local pastoralists. After 1985, though technically very generously ‘retired’ I ran a Fremantle charitable organisation, Walyalup Craft Enterprises helping Noongah and various other day release prisoners. From 1993 I developed and managed two Sydney centres for the Australian Scholarships Group, meeting thousands of local and migrant families