PEOPLE OF THE COAST

WORDS SUZY JARRATT

In post-war Cambridge, England, Mei-Ling Venning was expected to become an academic, nothing else was acceptable to her parents. But she strayed from their desired path. Even some of her toys were different. While other English girls were serving cups of pretend tea to neatly dressed dolls, young MeiLing was holding sherry parties for tiny make-believe bohemians. Now in her early seventies, Mei-Ling is still breaking the mould. ‘I had the type of childhood, which I don’t expect many Australians to understand,’ she said from her friendly comfortable home overlooking Shelly Beach Golf Course. ‘I had an academic father and my Chinese mother was a barrister, but she never practised. It wasn’t what women did in those days and she resented that all her life.

‘I travelled overseas with them a great deal, spent time in Jamaica and, for a while, boarded at a quirky Quaker school in Somerset. There I learned the art of letter-writing which was compulsory every Sunday. My much-loved brother would send chocolate if I wrote more than the required number of pages, and to this day I still love chocolate!’

(Her athletic figure belies the fact that she has ever eaten anything sweet, greasy or fattening.)

‘After doing a post-graduate degree I began teaching.’ It was during this time she married Bob who became a highranking civil servant, and they went on to have two children. For most of her adult life Mei-Ling has worked as a special-needs teacher for both children and adults.

‘In those early days there were no procedures or courses to which teachers could refer, it was up to you to work out what a child needed to assist in their development. There were some people in my class who were predominantly Down Syndrome and I asked head office if they ever participated in exercise classes. They didn’t.’

So Mei-Ling formulated some appropriate workouts which ‘became a flagship program that attracted the interest of other educators in that field,’ she says proudly.

Two novels Mei-Ling has written are about characters having, or living with others, who have special needs. She wrote them some years after arriving in this country in 2005. Her husband had retired early and their daughter and her Australian husband were based here so they decided to leave Kingston-upon-Thames and come to Australia.

Mei-Ling is very committed to having goals and doing things properly.

‘My only requirement was we had to live close to an ice rink as I was skating regularly in the UK. Shelly Beach is near Erina, but then that rink closed down, so now I have to train twice a week at Macquarie.’

She has been a member of the Toowoon Bay SLSC since 2006 and, in 2017, the surf club made the news for finishing 11th out of 171 at the Australian Masters Championships on the Gold Coast. At the age of 72, Mei-Ling won four of her club’s six gold medals.

She also participates in a modified Nippers program for children with additional needs. Known as the ‘Stingrays’, many have

graduated into the mainstream Nippers programs and competed in beach sport carnivals. In 2018, Luke Martin, a 9-year-old ‘Stingray’ on the autism spectrum, made the news when he came to the aid of a young swimmer being dragged out by the current on Myuna Bay. Thinking quickly, he pushed his boogie board out to the little girl and helped her reach the shallows where she could stand and be safe.

The surfing beach lifestyle, which Mei-Ling dearly loves, provided the backdrop to Pelican Bay, her novel about an 18-yearold girl with Down Syndrome, a ‘hybrid coming of age/romance novel’.

Mei-Ling’s publishing company, ‘The Oaks Press’, publishes her print and e-books.

‘And Bob creates my websites. When he retired, people asked ‘isn’t he always under your feet?’ Not at all. He knows all about computers, he can play classical and flamenco guitar, as well as the baroque flute, and he cooks beautiful meals which I find incredibly hard to do — juggling with my time is very difficult.

Leading up to the end of 2019, Mei-Ling was busy contributing to a book, Community and Belonging — Stories of the Central Coast by Wyong Writers. It is described by Trevar Langlands, from the Fellowship of Australian Writers, as ‘an interesting selection

of stories which bring the characters to life and give the reader an idea of coast lifestyle, plus little personal insights into how coasties spend their time’.

How Mei-Ling Venning spends all of her time would take up every page of a very big book.

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