More than words

Sabine had originally left Germany for Melbourne aiming to continue working as a radiographer, but her qualifications weren’t recognised in Australia.

So she went into sales and marketing – which landed her in Broome.

“I saw Broome on TV, the Malcolm Douglas Crocodile Park, and I thought, that’s where I want to live,” she says.

“I wanted to live in the real Australia, the outback. Have I found it…yes, I think so.”

In 2001 she arrived, with her famous cat, and fairly soon was working in sales for Spirit FM. “I also did the roadrunner in the mornings, and people used to ask the (then) manager Andrew Metcalfe,‘who is this person on the radio, we can’t understand her’,” she laughs.

“But they just had to really listen. The best advertising campaign I’ve ever done is for myself – people meet me and hear my voice, and say ‘you’re the lady from the radio, I would know your voice anywhere,

we listen to you every day – and how is Miss Josephine?’.”

Who is Miss Josephine? She is Sabine’s famous cat. People remember her appearance on Good Morning Australia with Bert Newton 13 years ago, when purebred ragdoll cats in Australia were few.

Today she features on the odd Spirit FM radio advertisement, relaxes and eats. “She has trained me well,” Sabine says.

“She eats mainly prawns, only one variety – cooked with tails on, and God help me if Coles doesn’t have them! “She’s 17 - 85 in human years, but is not showing her age. It must be the prawn diet.”

But behind the glamorous life of a Broome radio station manager, beats the heart of a philanthropist who wants to give of what she has got, to someone who hasn’t got.

It all started with Africa’s mountain gorillas. Sabine saw them on TV and promptly took off on a Rwandan safari – an amazing experience, which left her wanting more.

“You can go on holiday in nice hotels, but if you volunteer you get to know the community,” she says.

Once home, she was already planning her next trip. In September she returned for five weeks as a volunteer in a program which allowed her to share, with women in Rwanda, skills in business, sustainability, marketing and promotion.

She met and worked with four cooperatives attached to a local medical clinic, and the first thing she suggested was to work together better.

“For example, one of the cooperatives was paying for a market stall but hadn’t used it yet because they didn’t have enough products yet – but if they all sold their products on the one stall, they could use it more effectively,” she says.

She found joy in giving what seemed a little to her, but meant the world to someone – for example, helping a man pay for his driver’s licence – a valuable skill in Rwanda, where tourism is growing, but industry and employment is scarce.

“The earth is fertile, everyone has their hut and a garden to grow bananas and corn, they have enough food, but they need money for health insurance and school for their kids,” she says.

“The Belgian missionaries have a lot to answer for. The people are Godfearing, but they pray for something to happen in their life “God-willing”… they don’t have drive or vision to create opportunity…not like us in Australia, we get up off our arse and make our own luck – they don’t think that way.”

Sabine would love to return for good, one day, to the country known as the “land of a thousand hills and a million smiles”.

“My dream would be to have enough money to live in a house on a hill in Kigali (Rwanda’s capital), and just do philanthropy – help people to become entrepreneurial, to set up businesses.”

And if there was one woman who could make a life of it, in a world so different to what she’s used to, it would be Sabine.

“One woman, Salama, was so proud that ‘this rich Mzungu (white person) came all the way from Australia just to visit me’. She hadn’t been going to meetings of her cooperative, but after we walked the three hours to see her, it lifted her spirits and she didn’t miss a meeting the rest of the time I was there.”

Six months on, Sabine is still in contact with her friends via email, or gifts in the post - and they always inquire of Miss Josephine!

“A woman who makes beautiful beads asked me if I had kids, and I showed her a Miss Josephine’s picture. It turned out this woman’s name was also Josephine, so they all made fun out of it! “We just clicked. I don’t speak the local language, but sometimes you don’t need words to understand people.”