Aunty Neta Kirby retired much later than most; a testament to the level of genuine care she had for the unique therapy she did and the people she helped while doing it.
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First, a childhood educator, the literal flip of a coin decided that she would train to be a kindergarten teacher.
Originally from metropolitan Melbourne, she took her first teaching role in Mansfield.
In 1976, she relocated to Shepparton to work at the new Dolena Young Preschool.
After having four kids of her own, she returned to the workforce as an outreach teacher with Rodney Shire Council, visiting small towns in the area.
Throughout the years, she’s been a mentor and supervisor in those fields, as well as working at Melbourne University as a lecturer within the Aboriginal community.
During the early 2000s, while the Millennium Drought of the late 1990s and 2000s was wreaking havoc, Neta was teaching in Merrigum, where a lot of families had lost their farms.
“A lot of the women brought their children in to kindergarten and stayed around because there was nothing to go home to, or they were concerned,” Neta said.
“So the windows were always clean and lots of stories were read, but I thought there had to be something else I could do to help them, so I Googled and found this thing called sand play.”
The rest, you could say, is history.
But not in this story.
This was only the beginning of a whole new rewarding career that spanned 17 years, taking Neta eight years past the typical 65-year retirement age in Australia.
Still not widely known or facilitated, sand play therapy is a non-verbal therapeutic technique where a client selects and places miniature objects and symbols that represent their life — emotions, thoughts and experiences — in a tray filled with sand.
The therapist observes the scenes created without directly analysing or interpreting them.
They are there to support their client in a non-threatening environment, whether that involves talking or not; that is for the client to decide.
Neta was introduced to sand play therapy in Melbourne, where she created her own scene in the sand to learn its significance, before going on to gain her Certificate III in the field.
Later, she was one of 20 people from across the world who travelled to Switzerland, where the technique originated, to learn from a guru.
“Then I’ve done nature-based therapy and a few other bits and pieces to be able to have different modalities, because we’re all different,” Neta said.
One of those was handling K9 therapy dogs.
Around nine years ago, Neta introduced Connie, a Labrador with a touch of golden retriever, to her team.
Three years ago, Meg, a golden retriever with a touch of Labrador, was also welcomed on board to help clients in their healing.
From her Tatura office, Neta worked with a broader age range of clients than most therapists, with some as young as two and some as old as 90.
A blessing to the clients at the extreme ends of that scale who struggled to find help with other therapy, it was the hard-to-sever heart string that tied Neta to her job long after she could have been enjoying her early retirement years.
“When there’s no-one else who works with two- and three-year-olds, they now miss out because there’s still nobody here,” Neta said with a tear.
As life has a way of making decisions for us that we can’t make ourselves, it threw Neta a frightening challenge that forced her to rearrange her priorities.
She was diagnosed with breast cancer in January last year.
Thankfully, it was caught early and she didn’t need chemotherapy.
However, she did get sick.
Still, she kept working in between treatments with the people who really needed her help, until she was down to five clients, including a woman with dementia whose daughter reported it was her one big outing that she responded well to afterwards.
At the time, she was also Rotary’s district governor, leading 60 clubs from Broadmeadows to Mansfield, Albury to Kyabram and down again.
She saw her condition as an opportunity to spread awareness about cancer and talk to clubs and organisations about the importance of health checks.
“I had to make a decision to look after me; I was 73, what the hell was I still working for?” Neta said.
“It was the biggest decision, because I get emotional even just talking about it.
“But it was time, and all my children, who are all adults now with their own families, said, ‘Thank goodness, Mum, spend some time on your own and do things’.”
Now, happy and well, after getting married in February and enjoying travel to Thailand and Singapore, Neta and her wife, Anne, from Traralgon, are looking to settle in Bendigo, once Neta finishes renovating her Tatura home to sell.
Members of both the Bendigo Art Gallery and Shepparton Art Museum, the pair has (adult) kids, step-kids, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in Melbourne, who can be easily visited via a quick and affordable train ride to the capital.
And what does the therapist do for her own therapy?
She jumps on her luxurious reverse-trike motorcycle — a 1000CC Can-Am Spyder — and hits the open road.
And now she’s free of the shackles of work, she can keep riding until she comes across a whole desert full of healing sand any time she wants to.
Senior journalist