Sunday Blog 209 – 16th November 2025
Last week I noted that my mother was a diarist. She also obsessively catalogued her photos. Even, or perhaps especially the unflattering ones. Aesthetics were not her jam; it was all about capturing the moment. I have ended up with the floor to just-about-ceiling bookshelf stuffed with her photo albums.
Often, she wrote on the back of her photos. Important details of who was in it, where it was taken, the auspiciousness of the occasion. But in the thinner, early album of her youth, before the crush of we six children arriving in her life, there are a couple of events she has written up in and put in to their own pocket. As if there should be a photo but there isn’t. Like this one on today’s blog.
Like so many young people of her generation, Mum had to leave school early, even though she loved learning and was very bright. At fourteen, she entered the workforce doing administrative work at the State Government Insurance Office-SGIO.
But the Second World War brought other opportunities, and she had the chance to finish her education, and then to train as a teacher. But she hesitated a moment, feeling the pull of duty. What would happen at SGIO to the people she left behind? Would she would be letting the management down? She must have shared her conundrum with a work friend.
‘Don’t you be minding them, because they won’t be minding you,’ this senior colleague advised her.
I picture him (because, no photo) as a kindly, avuncular man who saw a smart young woman wasting her talents in her job. He wanted her to know that SGIO was not worth turning down this life-changing offer of qualifying as a teacher. It was advice she may not have found anywhere else among her people, and she took it. She remembered it enough to write it down, to share the story with us.
She went on to qualify as a teacher and eventually met and married my father when they were working at the same school.
I love this little written note, a reminder that the advice we give out can turn the course of people’s lives.