FORMER Willaura resident Melaine Robinson admits she is a natural born story teller.<\/p>\n
51-year-old Melaine is legally blind and her life took a different direction in 2020 after she became redundant from a job she loved at the Lost Dogs Home.<\/p>\n
\u201cI worked 31 years for the one organisation, started off as a trainee veterinary nurse and then stayed in the organisation all that time and as my vision deteriorated, I moved into other more admin type roles.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the start of 2020, and nothing to do with COVID, there was a restructure and I found myself redundant,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
All of a sudden, Melanie had time on her hands, but was uncertain of her next challenge.<\/p>\n
She eventually enrolled in a course run through Vision Australia on audio journalism.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t even know what audio journalism was, I knew about podcasts but I had no idea where to go to access them.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a small group, only four of us, and we would meet once a week with a facilitator who also had an interest in community radio, we\u2019d get on line to talk about audio material, producing it and story structures and so on. It made me realise I had a creative side to me,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThrough the course, the facilitator said to us if you\u2019ve got an idea that you might like to do an audio piece on, lets do that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Melaine decided to do her first piece on Spoonville \u2013 an initiative where during the pandemic, people painted wooden spoons and placed them in parks and gardens.<\/p>\n
With the help of her support worker, they packaged up an audio story and took it back to the group.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were like, this is great and as a result of that, I was encouraged to come up with another idea for the CBAA (Community Broadcasting Association of Australia) National Features and Documentaries (awards).\u201d<\/p>\n
Melaine decided to produce a 12 minute news feature on the benefits of horses as therapy animals.<\/p>\n
Titled \u201cRideability\u201d, she wrote, interviewed and researched how the programs run by groups like Riding for the Disabled can be beneficial for people with various disabilities.<\/p>\n
\u201cDuring this I was paired with a radio producer mentor in Brisbane, so I had a lot of to-ing and fro-ing with her during the process and she was fantastic, she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI did also manage to do a lot of the interviews face to face.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDoing this was timely because my vision had been deteriorating over the years and I\u2019m starting to realise that I need to look for things where I use my voice and my brain rather than relying too much on the residual vision I\u2019ve got and may not have in a few years.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a natural storyteller. I\u2019ve got Irish ancestry and I like to talk,\u201d Melaine said.<\/p>\n
As a result, Melaine recently won the 2021 CBAA Community Radio Award for the National Features and Documentary Series.<\/p>\n
Her news feature has also featured on radio stations across the country, including the Vision Australia Network.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Melaine was born at Willaura hospital in 1970 and attended Willaura Primary School and Marian College.<\/p>\n
While she now lives in Melbourne, she gets back to Willaura frequently to see her parents Karen and Graham, who are well known members of the local community.<\/p>\n
So, where to from here for Melaine?<\/p>\n
\u201cI do have an idea for a series of children\u2019s books on accident awareness with pets, that\u2019s my pipeline dream to do that eventually,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
You can listen to Melaine’s winning piece at https:\/\/omny.fm\/shows\/national-features-and-documentary-series\/rideability-vision-australia-radio<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
FORMER Willaura resident Melaine Robinson admits she is a natural born story teller. 51-year-old Melaine is legally blind and her life took a different direction in 2020 after she became redundant from a job she loved at the Lost Dogs Home. \u201cI worked 31 years for the one organisation, started off as a trainee veterinary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":557,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[31],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/melaine.jpg?fit=480%2C640&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdqUu4-90","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theadvocate.net.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}