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Barbara Fitzgibbon lives in Kingscliff on the Far North Coast of New South Wales. She has also lived and worked in Queensland, the Northern Territory, the Territory of Papua and New Guinea, Israel, South Africa and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). During this time she has crossed many cultural, psychological and physical coastlines.
She has dabbled in real estate, considered going into the poultry business and toyed with buying a caravan park, but for almost twenty years she worked as a teacher with her students ranging from preschool through to teacher-trainees. After escaping from her bell-regulated life, she worked first as a liaison officer for Aboriginal Affairs, then as a social worker.
Marriage and her happiest years followed. Since early retirement, she has been an activist at local government level. She has been subpoenaed by a State Government Standing Committee on Coastal Planning, been involved in several commissions of inquiry and has been involved in a number of fights, including one to keep high-rise off Kingscliff’s beachfront. These and other activities have seen her labelled as everything from ‘rabble ratbag’ to ‘community icon’.
She has had poetry, short stories and articles published, and a case study about local government activities also found its way into the state government library.
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