Beata
Stasak is an Art and Eastern European Languages
Teacher from Eastern Europe with upgraded teaching degrees in Early
Childhood and Education Support Education. She teaches in the South
Perth Metropolitan area.
After
further study in Counselling for Drug and Alcohol Addiction, she has
used her skills in Perth Counselling Services. Beata has been a farm
caretaker on the organic olive farm in the South Perth Metropolitan
area for the past twenty years.
Beata
is a migrant from post-communist Eastern Europe, who settled in
Perth, Western Australian in 1994. She came with her husband and
children to meet her father, who she never knew. He was a dissident
and refugee from Czechoslovakia, after his country was taken over by
Russian communists after the unsuccessful uprising against the
communists in 1968.
As
the daughter of a dissident, Beata was denied the choice of a career.
Journalism was her dream, but instead she was ordered by the
communist regime of the day to become a teacher of Russian Language
and Russian History.
For
part of her studies, she was sent to the Volgograd University, Russia
by train with her classmates. Part of the study was a re-education
camp for the children of dissidents, marked as the enemies of the
state. From the train, the 20 year old girls experienced the
apocalypse of the post Chernobyl disaster while travelling through
the Ukraine a few months after the accident happened.
They
disembarked a few times, unable to continue on their journey. All the
students suffered health problems on their arrival in Volgograd. Many
girls ended up in hospitals - including Beata. Their condition
worsened, as the medical treatment was rudimentary and applied by the
ill trained nurses that looked after up to a hundred patients each.
There
were no washing facilities in the hospital and no food provided,
except for the watery porridge in the morning. Each patient was
labelled and known only by a number. After her arrival back to her
own country, she was forbidden to talk about her experience of
Russia, or the disaster witnessed.
Instead,
she was sent to teach Russian Language and History to year 12
students and prepare them for their final exams. Beata has lived the
first half of her life in denial. Silenced, following the strict
regime guidelines to keep her job and her standing. She was not
allowed to travel, nor have any contact with anyone from overseas.
She suffered miscarriages and blood disorder problems, which continue
to follow her throughout her life.
On
the eve of the Velvet Revolution, Beata stood proudly with her two
young children on the city square with other protesters, under the
watchful eyes of army personnel with guns, waiting on order to shoot.
Fortunately for them all, the communism fell apart peacefully.
After
the end of communism in her country, Beata worked on new curriculum
guidelines for the experimental new schools, built by an American
charity in her town. Her curriculum was successfully implemented. She
continued to showcase new aspects of teaching, while improving her
English, until her application to re-settle in Australia with her
husband and young children was accepted.
Beata
wrote poems, stories and commentaries for magazines and newspapers in
her own language and the Russian language, in Eastern Europe before
her re-settlement in Australia. She completed a few unpublished
manuscripts while studying Creative Writing for Children at
university in 1999.
The
compilation of poems, that you are holding in your hands right now,
has started as an idea during the recent lockdown with the aim to
connect a group of female enthusiastic readers from not only
Australia but from different parts of the world in a weekly online
poetry sharing.
It
took Beata twenty five years of creative writing in Australia, to
master the English language well enough to convey her message to an
English speaking world - without losing her own unique creative
writing style.
Throughout
her twenty five years living in Perth, Western Australia, Beata has
published poems in the Western Australian newspaper, as well as
worked on various creative writing projects with her students -
winning the South Metro Perth Award in 2000 and 2001 for the
Aboriginal Cultural Week and Harmony Week.
Beata
has been actively involved in online writing communities since 2004.
