My professional teaching career began in 1974 when, at twenty-four, I migrated from Denmark to Canada. It was no ordinary teaching job. 
The Canadian Children’s Aid Society (CAS) offered me a live-in teaching position to work as a childcare worker and be a group-home mother for eight juvenile delinquent boys aged between five and fourteen years old. 

Instead of going to school, the boys had a habit of going shoplifting. One eleven-year-old boy burned down an entire glue factory in Brantford, Ontario. Abandoned by their parents, these homeless street kids were placed under the guardianship of the CAS in Brantford, Ontario. 
My main purpose was to help the boys learn social skills, how to stay out of trouble and prepare for a better life in foster or adoption home placements. I engaged them in individual behaviour-modification programs designed to encourage them to change their offending behaviour. 

The CAS’s objective was to keep the kids out of juvenile detention and reduce the number of juvenile delinquent kids going to jail at the age of eighteen. 
Having been a young and naughty ‘troublemaker’, a child refugee, homeless, an orphan, pregnant at fifteen, abandoned by my parents, expelled from school, and kicked out of home myself, I felt deeply empathetic towards the boys. 

Three years later, with sponsorship from the director general of the South Australian Department of Community Services, I migrated from Canada to South Australia (SA). I took up a position of live-in teacher/house mother and introduced the Canadian group home concept at Cooinda, Mount Gambier, SA, in March 1978. 
Cooinda was a boarding school for nineteen school-aged children with physical and mental disabilities. Their parents, who were living in regional areas, had heard about the good results achieved in Canadian group homes. They much preferred a more family-home type of accommodation with a live-in housemother to nurture and care for their special children instead of an institution with a matron and various nursing staff in charge. 

The group of parents had successfully lobbied the South Australian Government to enable this change to occur. 
For the next eight years, I lived with nineteen school-aged children who were born with various physical and learning difficulties. I cared for and about them as if they were my own children. 
Most of them attended the Mt Gambier Special School except one older lady, who worked in a sheltered workshop. 

I involved all the children in individual, learner-centred behaviour-modification programs aimed at stimulating their motivation for learning basic hygiene and independent living skills. 
After eight years, most of the boys and girls had learned those skills necessary to live independently in smaller apartments. I decided this was a good time for me to embark on a new career. 
Having worked mainly indoors, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day over the past eleven years, I felt a strong longing to spend more time outdoors. 

After completing a full time, twelve-month certification course in intensive horticulture at TAFE (Technical and Further Education), my dream job was to be a national parks ranger.
This dream came true in 1988. There was the expectation that I would enrol to study applied science, geology, ecology, conservation, Aboriginal culture, and park management to better perform in my new role with National Parks and Wildlife Services. The University of South Australia accepted me as a mature-aged external student, and four years later, at forty years of age, I graduated with a Diploma in Applied Science, Conservation, and Park Management. 

I learned that Australian ecological systems had the richest variety of plants and animals on the planet because, living on the oldest continent on Earth, biodiversity had millions of years to adapt and evolve. 
The more I learned, the more I appreciated nature’s complexity and its function in sustaining our web of life, including all plants, animals, and humanity—all of us. 
But almost 200 years of large-scale clearing and massive changes in land use have threatened the survival of native flora and fauna. Many plant and animal species have become extinct or are rare and endangered. 

I felt a deep yearning to help protect, reconnect, and restore the small, isolated local remnants of native habitats for the sake of their future survival and for future generations to be able to enjoy and appreciate nature, our interconnectedness and mutual dependency on natural, sustainable environments. 
Rescuing and caring for orphaned and injured wildlife turned into a passion. I actively volunteered for the Threatened Species Network, started a local Finger Point Conservation Group, joined a local Landcare group, rehabilitated bushland areas, coordinated Landcare work-experience programs for TAFE and university students, supervised offenders undertaking community Landcare service projects, served as an environmental consultant for the Lower South East Water Resources Advisory Committee for two years, and was the secretary and the chairperson for the local tourism association for over four years. 

I loved sharing my newfound knowledge, appreciation, and passion for nature conservation with many locals and tourists visiting the small, historical conservation park near Port MacDonnell, where I worked and lived onsite for almost nine years. When I talked to Australian tourists, some said they were amazed that a park ranger with a foreign accent was interpreting for them to help them better understand and appreciate their own country’s unique Australian nature. 

My studies and work made my life meaningful again and gave me a new sense of a higher purpose. However, I still suffered from depression as a result of my horrendous memories connected to past traumatic events, and I was still grieving the painful but unavoidable loss of four of my own children. 
In 1995, I accepted an offer to start a new career in the correctional services field as a work supervisor at a privatised, newly built prison on the outskirts of Mount Gambier. I was fortunate to continue living onsite in the conservation park and working there on weekends as well as working offsite at the prison during the week. 

I knew that having two jobs was taking on a greater challenge, but more importantly, it was an opportunity to learn new skills as part of my search for personal growth and self-development. 
Over the next fourteen years, I remained in the correctional services field—five years in South Australia and nine years in Western Australia. I was grateful to be able to train and learn new skills for new positions in various areas and capacities within the prison, from horticulture and ground maintenance work supervisor, security officer, case management and crisis xvi care officer, unit manager, visits manager, workplace trainer and assessor, smoking cessation coordinator to becoming a registered teacher, program facilitator, and a certified Tai Chi instructor. 
In my mid-fifties, I completed a degree in education in my spare time. 

In October 2010, aged fifty-nine, I accepted an offer to transfer from a prison in Perth to immigration detention services, working as a client services manager (CSM) at the North West Point Immigration Detention Centre on Christmas Island. 
A year later, I joined the Christmas Island Detention Centre’s Welfare, Programs and Activities team as a teacher and program facilitator. 

I retired in 2016 aged sixty-five, but continued volunteering for the Christmas Island Women’s Association (CIWA) as secretary. Occasionally, I run Tai Chi sessions for the island’s seniors. Christmas Island is my permanent place of residence. 
I am immensely grateful for all opportunities that enable me to continue learning and contributing to the community and the environment in positive and meaningful ways.
©Regine Andersen