Ruth

My name is Ruth Punch. I moved from Newcastle, leaving a safe but no longer challenging job as office manager for a company with duel entities where I had worked for eleven years.  Since then, I have experienced the problems of finding satisfying work in an area of small jobs growth, even before the current financial downturn. I am now in the process of setting up my own business, promoting my photography, graphic art and computer skills.

I was born in the Southern Tablelands of NSW and was the eldest of six children. I am now sixty-three years old and vacillate between feeling five years younger to feeling much older. In my teen years I suffered from a huge inferiority complex but by the age of twenty-one I was comfortable with who I was and really "marched to the sound of my own drum" from that time on.

My proudest accomplishment

My proudest accomplishment is that I raised two happy, balanced children on my own after the death of my husband. I am also proud to see what sort of parents they have turned out to be. I now have six beautiful grandchildren.

How I define success for 2020 women

It has been proved that educating girls and women is one of the most effective methods of improving the living standard of a country. Encouragement and access to good quality education should not only be for the privileged elite.

Access and control of a woman's fertility should not be decided by anyone other than the women themselves. Education and access to birth control methods must be free of interference from political or religious ideologies.

As women will probably always be the primary carers of young children, even with supportive partners, it is vitally important that there is reliable, affordable childcare to enable women to further their education and careers.

More about my life

As the eldest in a family of five girls, I had a wonderful and unfettered childhood, growing up on a property on the Southern Tablelands, two miles out of a small town. I roamed the paddocks, caught frogs in the dam, played with the animals, wandered in the dark looking at the stars that stretched from horizon to horizon and climbed the seventy-foot pine trees that surrounded our house. Activities that would make the modern parents blanch.

When I was eleven I went to boarding school in Sydney which, if nothing else, gave me a resilience and an independence which combined with the happiness of my childhood saw me through the challenges that life was to throw at me.

After school, I did one year of introductory art and then a diploma of dress design. I worked in this field until my marriage at twenty-six. My husband was a marine engineer so I had both the independence and security that I had though would be hard to find. Unfortunately my husband died of melanoma just six years later when my son was only nine months old. Just ten weeks later my adored father died suddenly of a heart attack.

It was at my father's funeral I made a decision that probably shaped the direction of my life for many years. I was at that time thirty-three years old and not sure that I would meet someone else I would want to share my life with, but having come from a large close family with many siblings, I worried that if something happened to me, my son had no one as close as a sibling. I made the decision that I would have another child. I discussed this decision with both my mother and my late husband's family. All were very supportive, in fact, my sister in law acted as birth support at the subsequent birth of my daughter. My children and I are still in close contact with my in-laws.

I continued my studies of Visual Arts at Newcastle University, which were some of the most creatively absorbing years of my life, but after graduation and needing a job in the real world, I was offered a job as office manager with an emerging research company. Here I was exposed to the world of IT and not only found it very satisfying from the organisational aspect but I was also exposed to graphic art software, which allowed me to combine my art background with modern technology.

Important influences in my life

For me, it is not so much as who but what has been important and played a part in forming the person I am today.