Author Biography
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 Australia 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 in order to shoot. Fortunately for them all, 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.
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