Driven by a curiosity for people

Curiosity may have killed the cat but for Pearl Retirement Resort resident Wendy Beresford-Manning, curiosity has given her a fulfilling life.

"Both my parents stressed to me and my brother that you had to be kind to people, you had to be prepared to help people out if you could and just be interested in them," Wendy explained. 

"I just find people interesting."

This curiosity has led Wendy through a remarkable academic and professional journey. 

A "persistent little bugger" who survived a life-threatening illness at just ten months old, Wendy spent much of her early life continuing to be impacted by poor health. 

Wendy chose a career in teaching and worked for the Department of Education, then Loretto Mandible Hall.

Never one to settle for long, Wendy took the opportunity to apply for scholarships for further study and all the pieces fell into place when she moved to Darwin in the 1990s for a PhD looking at C.S. Lewis’ Science fiction and contemporary cultural theory (post-modernism).

‘Which all my Christian friends dammed to Hell because post-modernism is terrible, it’s of the Devil. It’s not really. It’s really very refreshing, very liberating and I had a ball,” Wendy said.

“The only problem was it was my supervisor’s first supervision so he had to have an assistant, and he hadn’t supervised anyone either.

“So within about three months we were still regularly having coffee together at the uni canteen but they had no idea what I was talking about.”

The Darwin weather proved to be good for Wendy’s health, and she lived with a colleague from her previous school, Jan, who was a Loretto sister and a friend.

Just as she began to get bored again, Wendy decided it was time to study her second PhD and add the title of professional historian to her list.

“I’d become friendly with three of the older Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, who are the missionaries in this part of the Territory historically. One was well advanced into his eighties, the other one was heading that way and the third one was going blind,” Wendy explained.

“I figured that between them they had so much history of the missions, the Territory and the Catholic church up here, someone needed to get it.” 

Eventually Wendy became Jan’s carer, and that was when she became connected to Southern Cross Care.

Wendy’s sense of purpose is now found in sharing hope and joy with others. 

She preaches at the Palmerston Uniting Church once a month and leads a reflection for the residents of Pearl Supported Care. 

For Wendy, these services are about making sure the residents feel valued.

"It matters to me that I can bring some joy to people," she said. 

"If I can just make them feel that they matter, they’re important, and I want them to enjoy as much as they can of what’s still left of their lives."

Living at Pearl for ten years, always accompanied by her dog Ollie, Wendy encourages others to look at life through a lens of optimism. 

Wendy’s advice is to focus on hope and joy, and “chuck a dog in and it’s even better”.

"The older you get the easier it is to focus on the things you can’t do…and it’s easier to lose hope than it is to think there’s a lot of hope left in life," Wendy said. 

"So I think focusing on the hope, having a crazy sense of humour I think helps infinitely, but the hope and the trust, and just looking at each day as a bunch of opportunities that you might not have thought of, rather than ‘oh god not another day’."