2020 Shine Awards Dedication winner and finalists
Bwgcolman woman and kidney disease specialist Lauwana Blackley is the deserving 2020 Shine Awards Dedication winner. Read her extraordinary story, and meet 2020 Dedication finalists Sarah Mostyn and Nadine Tipping.
2020 Shine Awards Dedication winner
Lauwana Blackley, dialysis nurse, Palm Island, Queensland
LIFEBLOOD OF HER ISLAND
IT IS nearly impossible to quantify the contribution Lauwana Blackley makes to her island community.
As a dialysis nurse, with specialist skills in kidney disease, the amount of time and care she devotes to her people is huge.
Lauwana runs Palm Island’s dialysis clinic, which treats 12 patients with severe kidney disease, some as young as 30 and the eldest in his 70s.
“Dialysis is relentless,” explains Lauwana, 41.
“The thing you are living for is not dialysis, though. It is the thing enabling you to live.”
To stay alive, her patients must attend the clinic three days a week, every week.
Every dialysis session is a gruelling five hours hooked up to a blood-filtration unit.
Lauwana’s clinic can accommodate just four people at a time, so she is on call six days a week, making sure every dialysis chair delivers 45 hours of treatment.
And that doesn’t include all the extra hours she puts into community education, providing holistic care to patients and their families and even acting as Palm Island’s locum vet nurse.
Her mantra is, “if you can help, you should help”.
Lauwana is a Bwgcolman woman of Kalkadoon, Birri Gubba and Torres Strait Islander decent who grew up on Palm Island, 70km north of Townsville in Cleveland Bay.
She started her career as a health worker in 1999, at the age of 20, while balancing life as a young single mother with a baby daughter.
“I just always felt that I could do more,” says Lauwana, who pursued a nursing degree as a mature-age student so she could contribute more.
“We need more people from community sitting in key positions in community to make this a viable place to live,” she says. “I went off to university and did the things I needed to do; spent the time away from community to learn my craft and then came back so I can care for my people safely and give them the best I possibly can.”
Helping her people avoid debilitating disease is her main aim, with Indigenous Australians four times more likely than the general population to develop type two diabetes. “I feel privileged I can come home and care for them so they can stay in our community,” she says
For her commitment and the inspiration she offers other young Palm Island women, Lauwana is a deserving winner of the Shine Award for Dedication.
FINALIST
Sarah Mostyn, goat farmer and market founder, Cohuna, Victoria
FRESH PERSPECTIVE INSPIRES COHUNA
COHUNA’S Sarah Mostyn sees huge potential in her small north Victorian town.
The 37-year-old former accountant uprooted her life on the Gold Coast eight years ago, moving to the creek-side hamlet in search of a tight-knit community. Cohuna certainly delivered, throwing firm support behind the boutique goat dairy and goat milk soap business that Sarah established with her husband, Shayne.
She has paid back the warm welcome in return, founding Cohuna Farmers’ and Makers’ Market to help other local artisans and producers realise their own business dreams.
“We are really lucky it is a supportive community that really gets behind people,” says Sarah, who launched the market in 2018.
“The day of the launch was cold, wet and windy, and I thought no one is going to come,” she says. “But Cohuna, true to form, everyone came and walked around with umbrellas. It has been a success ever since.”
Pre-coronavirus, the market would run 14 times a year with about 30 stallholders each time, and attract visitors from far and wide.
Due to COVID-19, trading is on pause for the moment, but Sarah organised an online portal so producers could continue to sell to their regulars.
Friend and Kyabram farmer Deid Schlitz says Sarah has breathed new life into the region.
“Her involvement in the market has not only helped fulfil her dreams, but inspired others in the community to realise that anything is possible,” Deid says. “Sarah is definitely a huge inspiration to our community.”
FINALIST
Nadine Tipping, CareFlight nurse, Darwin, Northern Territory
GUARDIAN ANGEL EARNS HER WINGS
NADINE Tipping swoops down to help when people in remote regions need it most.
As a flight nurse and midwife with CareFlight, based in Darwin, Nadine provides critical care and patient evacuations by air across the Top End.
From trauma and accidents to chronic or mental illness, the scenarios she is prepared to deal with are endless.
“I like being able to provide care for people that don’t normally have that access to it, and knowing that I can make a difference with my knowledge and experience to people in remote or underdeveloped areas such as developing countries,” Nadine says.
Having trained in critical care, neonatal intensive care, midwifery, child and family health, and rural and isolated practice, Nadine is dedicated to bridging the gap between what health care is available in the bush and city.
As she puts it: “getting people to the right place at the right time when the care can’t be provided any longer in the remote communities”.
Before she took her expertise to the bush, she worked in hospitals in Melbourne and Bendigo, then spent five years with the Royal Flying Doctor Service in Queensland.
All that experience is now put to good use in extreme settings.
She has delivered babies on airstrips by torchlight, been the first to respond to major emergencies and accidents, and landed on remote dirt airstrips in the middle of the night to reach patients in need.
She also volunteers with Australian Medical Assistance Teams, responding to medical crises in Vanuatu and Fiji after cyclones hit the Pacific Islands, and last year went to Samoa to assist with a measles outbreak.
From volunteer work in Papua New Guinea to delivering babies in African hospitals, her zeal for helping rural communities at their times of greatest need is incredible.
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