The eyes have it.

Brooke Eggerling

First impressions do not always give us the whole picture.   

For anyone meeting Brooke Egglerling for the first time, she impresses as the epitome of the confident, adventurous life traveller.  At only 19 years, she speaks enthusiastically of a future in which she will be able to travel overseas, armed with a great profession and free to discover whatever the world has to offer her.   

But for those who know her a little better, her lovely eyes betray a deeper side of her character – a sensitive, vulnerable side which has not always made her life easy.  She remembers, for example, her unhappy experience at the Rockhampton Grammar School where her life was made wretched by bullies.  This clearly had a profound effect upon her but, significantly, Brooke does not try to erase this painful memory.  “It is part of who I am,” she says.

For many, this experience would have entrenched a victim mind-set which would have made it very difficult to progress but this was not Brooke’s response.  Having moved to a smaller local school, St Ursula’s College in Yepoon, she set about completing the remainder of her high school years, and then took the plunge, in her “gap” year, into further schooling at Hak Judenberg in Austria.  Many of her subjects were delivered in German and she clearly returned to Australia at the end of that year with a sense of accomplishment and pride.

Brooke was to be one of the first in her family to take up studies at university level.  She enrolled in J.C.U. but here again she was to find two big challenges awaiting her:  the first, the discovery that the course she had undertaken was not really “right” for her; and the second, her feelings of discomfort when faced with some of the traditions of life in a university college (including the time-honoured initiation rites inflicted on new students).

Brooke could have given up but, typically, she did not.  Undaunted, she has re-enrolled in this, her second year of tertiary study, in a multi-media degree course that she feels is much more in keeping with her interests and abilities, and she has moved into a little town house where she resides happily with two other young people. 

For Brooke, her increased independence of spirit is helping her to forge a new, and stronger, sense of self.  She is tackling her university studies with gusto, working hard to gain her Certificate in Tourism through the Flight Centre Academy and embarking upon paid employment as a bar tender.  She has shown great courage and determination and these qualities are as important to an understanding of her character as the pain her earlier experiences imposed upon her.

Brooke’s eyes in fact reveal that she is a sensitive, gutsy, person whose grit  has been forged in the fire of some real adversity.  Now the girl who was once bullied by others is firmly setting her compass to a future of her own choosing - a life of adventure and discovery.