My name is Kirsty Wilson, I'm Australian and I'm twenty years old. I was born near Shepparton in a little town called Dookie. My family and I moved from there when I was in grade two and we went to my Grandparents house in Woodend whilst our house in Melton was being built. I stayed in Melton until my parents separated when I was sixteen and I moved to Bairnsdale with my mother and my younger brother. I lived for about five months. I became very bored and missed a lot of my friends in Melton so then came home to live with my Father. About one year later we sold the house and moved to a different part of Melton and started to rent. Two years after that we moved again to the end part of Melton towards Gisborne where we stayed for two years -- well my father and other younger brother have been there for two years. I was only there for about one year. During that time I finished Year 11 at Melton High and then found a job as a receptionist for a transport company in Maidstone (McColls Transport). I worked there for about two months until unfortunately they had to let me go just before Christmas last year due to lack of work. But it was there that I met my boyfriend Adrian and eight months later, I moved in with him. Things are still going great today one year later.

At the moment I am unemployed but looking for work. I am in the middle of completing a six month CES (Commonwealth Employment Service) course called LEAP which stands for 'Land Environment Action Program'. The main focus of the course is to create a magazine for the Western Suburban community but another important part is the two weeks work experience placement. I have chosen to work at 'Imagine The Future' in Fitzroy on a project called 'Painting the future real', and here I am learning how to transcribe interviews.

In the short time that I have been here, I have transcribed three interviews, all of which have been quite interesting. The first interview that I transcribed was with a guy named Nick Pastalatzis and he was a young Greek man who explained what it was like for his family when they first came out to Australia and how hard it was for non-English speaking people to survive in an unknown country. The second interview was with a lady named Carol Skinner who was with the Bureau Of Meteorology and she had an interesting point of view about how we could design our cities to take account of climate and make them much more comfortable places for people to live in. My last interview was with Trish Edwards, an artist and teacher who lives in Geelong and works mostly with women and adolescents.

After this course I would like to get a job -- but then so does every-body else hey! I don't really know what to expect for the future. I like to live each day on it's own because life's too short to be speeding down the track. However, I would like a lot of the violence to stop in the world, especially all of the petty violence like stabbings over drugs and bashing old ladies for money. I think that's horrible and there's no need for it. So I suppose that's what I would like for the future, a nice pleasant society.