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Sailing away into the wild blue yonder
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CUPUNCTURIST Shelley Beer has had a busy life so no wonder she and partner Jill de Vos have decided to sail off into the wild blue yonder. But before they hoist sails on their catamaran, from their soon-to-be new home of Mooloolaba, back to the start.
Shelley, pictured left with Jill, right, found her way into Chinese medicine and acupuncture through a rather serendipitous route. The Glenlyon resident was 18 when she was reading Runner Magazine, later to become Nature and Health, and read an article by renowned Australian naturopath Dorothy Hall which serialised her natural health book. She decided then she wanted to be a Western herbalist. After doing her more traditional degrees of Botany and Zoology at Monash University, Shelley found tai chi. It was after a car accident that left her with a whiplash injury which she found actually improved through movement, at the time, sheep shearing. She then wanted to find a therapy that would give her the same energy, or chi, as in tai chi but it was not until she answered an advert for an acupuncture course that things fell into place. “I had been going to acupuncture courses for six months before I felt the chi, the stuff that moved me in tai chi, and correlated the two. Acupuncture was the natural therapy I was looking for. “What I also noticed that was when I went to acupuncture theory classes I would go ‘yes’, there was a real visceral gut feeling, but then when I went to natural therapy courses during the day I would go “why, why”, I would be hearing what they were saying but my intellect kept interfering. Acupuncture just makes sense, and I had really just stumbled into it.” It was her “feminist” intellect that also stopped Shelley’s foray into the Australian Army Reserves, although it took five years, from 1976 to 1981, for the penny to drop. “At uni I wanted to be paid to get fit so I joined the army reserves. I was a drill sergeant and I was so good at yelling that they got me to train their regular warrant officers when I was still a corporal at Puckapunyal. “But I had been in five years when I finally realised I couldn’t have consensus decision making for my platoon. My feminist mind was getting in the way of army rules. I thought (originally) that because I wasn’t actually pulling the trigger I wasn’t supporting killing people but I realised that we were. I was part of the (killing) machine so I eventually left.” After an internship in Beijing in 1989, Shelley returned to employment as an acupuncturist in Melbourne, the first to be on a wage to her knowledge. She worked with Ruth Trickey for a few years and then opened her own clinic with Robbie Todd at the Greville Street Clinic in Prahran.
Not long after she met Daylesford regulars, including masseuse Jaya Saunders, she spent time in the town and then moved in around the Christmas of 1993. Plans to slow her Melbourne practice didn’t quite work as she found herself offered work in Daylesford with Dr Chris DArramberg before opening a private practice at home, followed by Daylesford Health Professionals in Raglan Street. Finally in 2014 she opened Central Highlands Pain & Wellbeing in Albert Street, where she introduced low cost community style acupuncture. But last year Jill had the chance to crew a catamaran from Vanuatu to Australia and “got the bug” and Shelley is now “following [her] heart”. The pair plan to moor their boat at Mooloolaba in Queensland’s Sunshine Coast and then undergo any training they need for planned blue water rallies. The rallies, for example from Cairns to Indonesia, will see them accompanied by up to another 50 vessels. “It’s a safety thing, a comfort thing. People who would not do a blue water crossing alone are happy because they know the boat over there and you have lots of people around. The organisers also take care of customs to make it easier to enter countries.” Shelley has already let her clients know she is moving on but it is not the end of her craft. Just a few weeks ago she and Jill decided that pro-bono work might be possible in countries like Vanuatu or East Timor. “We have this idea of developing a non-profit organisation to see if local suppliers support that. And then just do it.”
Words: Donna Kelly | Image: Kyle Barnes
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