Rural scholarships: Melissa Jardine gives back to Maryborough school

One woman’s sense of gratitude is making a world of difference to young rural citizens from her former school.

HAPPY New Year. Is that too optimistic a wish for the world and for Australia, given the challenges we face?

There’s global warming, and its associated losses. There’s very slow progress, and sometimes regress, when it comes to closing gender gaps in political empowerment, health, education and employment. And there’s the world’s apparent abysmal record of welcoming the growing waves of humanity fleeing persecution and poverty. I could go on. Yep, it’s easy to feel downhearted.

Yet so many are taking positive personal and local action, not out of fear, but from gratitude. Melissa Jardine is one such person.

Sydney-based Melissa, 41, was raised on a farm at Rathscar, about 20km northwest of Maryborough in central Victoria. She attended Wareek Primary School, one of just 23 students, before going on to Maryborough Regional College.

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In Maryborough, people once worked in printing and knitting mills, their occupations predominantly blue-collar. Now they work in supermarkets, health and aged care, though a print business remains. Today the highest education level for 17 per cent of the locals aged over 15 years is Year 9, and unemployment is 7.9 per cent.

Melissa remembers borrowing books from her school libraries to learn more. She knew a bigger world, beyond Rathscar and Wareek and Maryborough, existed.

“Living on a farm in the pre-internet age, I was always really fascinated with what was going on in the world and with different ways of living and different cultures.”

Melissa left the region as a 19-year-old, went to university and worked as a cop for 10 years. Then, ever curious about the wider world, she returned to university to complete a Masters in Asian Studies and a doctorate on policing in Vietnam.

These days she works with the United Nations, as a lead researcher on prioritising women in law enforcement in the 10 ASEAN countries of Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos.

She says policing needs more women, and more women in positions of power, to eradicate the notion that women are less powerful.

Before Christmas she returned to her old school, now called the Maryborough Education Centre, to address the students there and to lift their awareness of the wider world.

For five years, she has sponsored two Year 11 girls from the MEC to attend the International Conference in Law Enforcement and Public Health. (Melissa is a director on the Global Law Enforcement and Public Health Association. It’s a not-for-profit organisation that improves practices around the new demands in policing, for example modern slavery, child sex exploitation, domestic abuse and mental ill-health.)

With Melissa’s scholarship funds, two MEC girls attended this association’s conferences in Amsterdam in 2016, another two went to Toronto in 2018 and last year Caitlin Britten and Rose McNabb went to Edinburgh, where they presented their observations of how childhood adversity affected their community.

Helping hand: Maryborough Education Centre scholarship recipients Caitlin Britten and Rose McNabb with Melissa Jardine (centre).

I asked Melissa why she created this scholarship, why she was not like many who leave their country home towns without looking back, why she wanted to give back there.

“For me the scholarship was to let the young people there know that there are really exciting things going on that they might not know about, and to help them realise that young people can go on and do great things.”

There’s no doubt a plus for the police policy wonks who attend the conferences too. They get very practical and real insights from a country community where, overall, crime is decreasing but where police-reported domestic violence and sex offences are increasing.

Melissa loves this connection and, much to my delight, she doesn’t do it for the tax advantages. In fact she didn’t know these existed. There’s more motivating her scholarship investment.

“When I was at school I was able to go to Canada to compete in a javelin competition. My aunt and uncle helped pay for that.

“All through my career people have helped me so generously and this is a little bit of paying it forward. There’s a lot of joy in investing back into your community.”

So that’s my message for the new year. We can worry and stress about the big picture but acting locally and out of gratitude, acknowledging the help we enjoyed from our country beginnings, is a better alternative.

So this year maybe we could take Melissa’s lead and give back to where we came from and be grateful.

Happy new year.