General News
9 March, 2025
A Mum's World Turns 21
Wow, what a big week for The Wimmera Mail Times, new owners and a new publishing schedule, congratulations team!
Wow, what a big week for The Wimmera Mail Times, new owners and a new publishing schedule, congratulations team!
Now, I don’t want to make a fuss, but it’s also a bit of a big week for me too.
My column turns 21 this year – woohoo!
For most of the past two decades, I met my deadline for ‘A Mum’s World’ to be published in the Monday edition of the tri-weekly newspaper. I don’t like Mondays – I love them! Farewell Mondays.
Can you believe that back then, in 2004, I actually saved my piece onto a floppy disc and dropped it into the office?
Thank goodness I eventually sorted out the email system, because I was happily pinned at home with three small children for nearly a decade, then in the car running three daughters around town for the next ten years.
I wrote from hospital when Tiani was born, when I had my thyroid surgery and when Yasinta’s lung collapsed.
I wrote when dad died and when mum followed him to heaven 17 years later.
I needed to write then more than ever.
everything else in between.
I’d only been writing for a couple of years when dad died, and as a publisher of poetry and prose, he appreciated me having a bash.
We shared a laugh about why anyone would get a kick out of reading ‘A Mum’s World’, which is not insulted by being called a column about nothing.
This weekly piece has been the thoughts of a country girl who grew up to become a woman, a wife and a mother of three in regional Victoria, Australia. Even so, my column has become a record of my inner life and how my external world has impacted that.
The Mail Times has never baulked at my raw honesty, covering birth, death and eternity.
I have never been rebuked for my Bible believing faith and I hope by speaking truth, I have never offended anyone.
In Australia, freedom of speech is one of our most cherished freedoms – the essence of which is not only to express ideas, but to disagree, dispute and cause controversy as we discuss different paradigms without the threat of censorship.
I’ve played word games for the past decade, only sending in my column when it was written with exactly 377 words.
Just another crazy thing I do to keep my brain interested.
Today I’ve gone wild and a spent an extravagant 500 words talking to you, because 21 is a special Birthday.
With my youngest daughter moving out of home two weeks ago, my eldest daughter asked me if I would still write ‘A Mum’s World’.
The thing is, I’m still feeling very much like a mum, but what do you think?