Hamish, the Mayor, the TV crew and a Taste of Harmony

Well you can all breathe a sigh of relief now because I was not washed away to sea by Cyclone Hamish. Thankfully he passed us by with little damage to Mackay, but a little further down the coast a container ship was damaged in the storm and thousands of litres of oil flowed into the sea, washing up on nearby Bribie and Moreton Islands near Brisbane. This environmental catastrophe was all the more upsetting for me because only the week before I had visited the beautiful beaches of Bribie Island … but I’ll tell you more about that later.

On 25th February my celebrity status in Mackay excelled to even dizzier heights when I was invited to have morning tea with the Mayor of Mackay. I was chaperoned by the head of the library service, Jan Kilbourne, and enjoyed tea and cakes with the councillors. Col Meng, the Mayor, formally welcomed me to Mackay on behalf of the council and said that the rain we’d been having was just like the snow back in England … no, I don’t really know what he meant either but it was very pleasant to be so warmly welcomed. Col then asked if I’d like to say a few words: I was totally unprepared for this but I managed to garble something about it being a great honour etc etc and I thanked the council on behalf of both Donna and myself for enabling the exchange to go ahead. Jan later assured me that I didn’t make a complete fool of myself, so that’s OK. I am now famous right up to the very top of Mackay society! :-D

A few people have asked me to tell you more about work, so in order to satiate the desires of my adoring public I shall do just that ;-) I am the Information Services librarian at the Gordon White Library, as I think I’ve already said. I do three reference desk shifts a week, which mainly involves answering stupid questions and trying to work out why the computers aren’t working. I do occasionally get a nice interesting enquiry, which is always welcome. My counterpart at the city library is Louise, who’s very nice and enthusiastic and we get along very well. We make up the Information Services team and we are responsible for organising and running the IT classes, which are designed to help people who are not confident at using computers, particularly older people. Despite my initial terror at the prospect of ‘teaching’, I have since found that I actually quite like doing them. Louise and I are also responsible for updating the library pages of the council website, which is fairly familiar territory for me. We are also in charge of maintaining the Reference collection and the online databases, of which we have quite a lot of work to do when I go back next week. Last week we re-launched a service to school children called My Tutor, which is an online real-time instant messaging service to help kids with their homework and assignments. There were teachers, librarians and students from all over Mackay there and we even had a visit from the local TV news crew – yes my celebrity status is now being used to endorse all sorts of initiatives! Unfortunately I wasn’t able to speak on camera because I had to go and run a computing class :-( but Louise ably filled this position! There are a few other bits and bobs that I do but these are the main core tasks of my role. I think things seem to be going pretty well at work and I feel like I am making a valuable contribution, so that’s all good.

On Thursday we had a celebration for A Taste of Harmony Day, which is a celebration of multiculturalism. The library organised a huge lunch where everyone brought in food from a different country. I contributed French onion soup and baguettes. It was a really good communal experience and I stuffed my face full of lovely food. I even got curry all down my clean white shirt – luckily I didn’t have to be on Ref Desk that afternoon!