Sandra João Carrascalão Clune

One of Sandra’s strongest character traits is her decisiveness, which less-kind people might call impulsivity. She certainly jumped in at the deep end with Hua Hin.  A visit of a mere two and a half weeks beginning in late August 2022 was enough for her to arrive to reside full-time in Hua Hin on 28th October of the same year. She is a woman who has complete faith in her initial impressions, trusts her gut-feelings implicitly and is not shy about taking a leap of faith. Sandra’s ability to back herself, against the odds at times, is the mark of a woman of outstanding resilience and tenacity, but this aspect of Sandra’s back story will be dealt with in more detail later.  Suffice to say that Sandra has had to overcome considerable adversity to be the confident woman she today presents to the world.

The two factors she finds most attractive about the local area are its climate and sense of community, though given the opportunity, she would relocate Hua Hin just a bit closer to Bangkok.  At heart, she is a very urban woman, who relishes the experience of stepping just outside her door to confront the complexities and conveniences of city life.

Less than ten months into her residency in Hua Hin, she already found and restyled her dream home and has begun to make her mark on some of the area’s established institutions. At her instigation, the Hua Hin Foodies Facebook group has been refreshed and a monthly dinner party routine established.  Sandra seems to be able to revitalise things wherever she goes.  She claims she is not always full of good ideas, but “only in relation to things that really interest me, like food”.

Sandra was born in Timor-Leste (East Timor) in January 1971, the elder of two children in a family who could be described, now, as “local royalty”. She was born political, with both her father and her uncle founding political parties which fought against each other in the civil war in Timor-Leste. Along with her mother and her younger brother, a mere 11 months her junior, Sandra was forced to flee the country in December 1975, when their lives were threatened by the communist Fretilin movement. As a not-yet-five-year-old, Sandra’s parents had shielded her from all knowledge of the guerilla-based civil war.  She has only positive memories of a “family camping adventure” which saw the flight from Dili, the country’s capital in the back of a yellow dump truck and a perilous climb of two days up the side of a mountain, with her father and other men carrying suitcases in their hands as well as children on each shoulder, to cross the border into the relative safety of Indonesian West Timor, bringing only what they could carry.

Sandra and her family eventually made a new start in suburban Sydney in December 1977, but not before spending 7 months limited to a hotel room in Indonesia, of which she has no recollection, but now knows her father was under house-arrest, and then a brief period in Portugal prior to the resettlement in Australia.

Sandra started her formal school education later than the Australian norm, and with no English language skills at all.  But, within a month, she had people she could count as friends, and had happily learnt that the word “banana” is the same in Portuguese, her mother tongue, as it is in English. Sandra encountered some cultural dissonance, but quite quickly was able to integrate into the multicultural environment she found at primary school in western Sydney.  She has a distinct recollection of her first encounter with the children’s party treat “fairy bread” a concoction of buttered sliced white bread, topped with multicoloured cake sprinkles, a previous unencountered Australian “delicacy”.

So, starting her schooling behind the eight ball as it were, as a political refugee with no English, was the first of Sandra’s big life challenges.  Her schooling was very successful and lead to her beginning tertiary studies in Education at Nepean University (now Western Sydney University). Here is probably the right time to divulge that my friendship with Sandra here in Hua Hin is not actually the first time we encountered each other.  By sheer coincidence, on our first face-to-face meeting in May this year, we learnt that I taught Sandra lessons in Italian language in her first year in high school, myself in my very first teaching appointment.  It really is a terribly small world!

As a young woman growing up, Sandra had been surrounded by politics.  After the civil war in Timor-Leste and then its invasion by Indonesia, Sandra and her family were constantly immersed in the political turmoil as the country tried to get back on its feet as an independent, democratic nation.  Sandra’s mother is the younger sister of the President of Timor-Leste, José Ramos-Horta, currently in his second term as President, having already served from 2007 to 2012, and as Prime Minister from 2006 to 2007.  So, it came as no surprise to Sandra’s family that she enrolled to vote in Australia as soon as she was eligible, joined the Labor party a week later and a week after that attended her first Labor Party branch meeting, quickly finding her home in the Left faction.  She retained membership of the party or a strong affinity with it, over 33 years, while living in a variety of places in the world. 

In 2015, a marital scandal involving the incumbent local member of parliament in the seat of Katherine hit the headlines.  With an upcoming preselection for the Labor candidate for the next election imminent, Sandra knew she could do better, and raised her hand for preselection.  She quit her job,  supported herself and paid for her own campaign over a period of 10 months, calling on all her savings to do so.  She aimed merely to raise the profile of the Labor Party in the seat of Katherine, and ran a relaxed campaign characterised by engaging with the local community through door-knocking and leaflet dropping.  She never even entertained the possibility of actually winning the election, despite her mastery of organisation, planning and logistics.

There were signs before election day that were positive, and after polls closed, Sandra and her supporters were gathered for a barbeque in her backyard when word reached them that she had won the vote as one particular polling booth was counted, then another….. But it was to be a further 9 long days before postal ballots were all counted and the election results were officially announced. Sandra got a call from the First Minister of the Northern Territory congratulating her, the new Member for Katherine.  Out of seemingly nowhere, with no solid personal experience, Sandra Nelson, as she was known at that point, was a Member of the Northern Territory Parliament, with a margin of a mere 21 votes.

She called her family to tell them the momentous news.  She called her uncle José for advice. Having never expected to win, not even for a moment, she was caught on the hop, no agenda, no plan.  Knowing that there was a miniscule likelihood of re-election in 4 years’ time, Sandra realised she had to hit the ground running.  This win was a precious gift, and she was not about to waste it. She quickly developed an action plan for Katherine for the next four years, and a personal one for herself. And she is proud to say she signed off on virtually every one of the items on her action plan in her time as a parliamentarian.  Professionally, she counts her efforts in having sex work decriminalised in the Northern Territory and guaranteeing access to the so-called “morning-after pill”, RU486 as her greatest achievements.  Sandra will always stand up for, and beside, women demanding their human rights.

Being a female Australian of refugee status, a woman of colour, and daring to be a parliamentarian in the Northern Territory of Australia left Sandra open to criticism and abuse. It is still a very chauvinistic environment, though she would add bigoted and racist, in her usual forthright manner. She was attacked via social media and labelled with terms I choose not to publish here.  Her response?  Print out all the offensive comments, with names attached, and table them in Parliament so that they become a perpetual record through Hansard.  Nice one, Sandra!  Do the wrong thing, and this woman will call you out, publicly.

Sandra is somewhat of a workaholic, and would welcome being interrupted more often with a refreshing iced latte, which would force her to sit and take a moment’s well-earned break.  She still spends a lot of time on self-reflection and on improving her interpersonal communication skills, despite being officially retired.  She finds this particularly important as she embarks on a new marriage and is working at being comfortable in allowing herself to be more vulnerable in the relationship.  One powerful learning Sandra took away from a 7-day silent retreat is the power of words, to do good, or to harm. She internalised that “words really matter”, and that “your word is golden”.

At the very top of Sandra’s bucket list is more travel.  She is particularly looking forward to taking her new husband, Matt, to Europe and wants to see the beauty and wonders of Portugal afresh through his eyes as he experiences them for the first time.

Sandra describes herself as energetic, optimistic and determined.  She has a self-belief and resilience that has stood her in good stead so far in her life.  Her best ever compliment she lists as a Mother’s Day card from Patrick where he wrote about how much he loved her positive energy,  which happens to be fuelled by her fondness for milk chocolate and rocky-road icecream.

As Sandra embraces this new retirement stage of her life, in the home she has lovingly styled for herself and her family, Sandra richly deserves to encounter peace and tranquillity.