Join the Navy (Cadets) and see the world

ROD WISE

Watch Me Soar: that’s the motto on the ceremonial life-belt that stands outside T.S. Albatross, the Navy Cadet facility on the shores of Lake Illawarra in Northcliff Drive, Warrawong.

And were she not so disarmingly modest, Petty Officer Christina Sesia might justifiably boast that the motto aptly describes her own soaring flight, that she is a Lake Illawarra version of that old adage, local girl makes good.

For the 21-year-old Christina, from Unanderra, is about to leave Australia to take up a six-month posting as a journalist with the world-famous, London-based Daily Mail newspaper.

But more than that, her posting will be in Germany, at one of the Mail’s local bureaux, either in Berlin or Hamburg, filing copy to the Daily Mail’s online international edition.

“It just doesn’t seem real,” she said, “because it all happened so quickly. But I’m so excited – it’s the chance of a lifetime.” If it is, she’s not boasting about it; mostly she gives the credit for this stunning windfall to the time she spent in the Navy Cadets which gave a focus to her life.

“I was driving past with my Mum when I was 12 and saw them,” she said. “They looked funny in their uniforms, but kind of cool.

“So I joined and have done lots of courses that can help you, like first aid, cooking, communications. And I sailed on a Navy frigate from Wollongong to Sydney and flew in an Air Force C-130 aircraft – where else could I have done those things? And I learned to sail, which I love.

“More importantly,” she continued, “at Cadets I was learning life skills as well as water skills. If it wasn’t for Cadets opening my eyes to a wider world, I would never have thought about the possibility of a job overseas.”

The commanding officer of T.S. Albatross, Sub-Lieutenant Anne Wearne of Koonawarra, concurs. “We’ll miss Christina, but this is a learning centre,” she said.

“In partnership with the parents, we accept kids at 12 and help them realise that anything is achievable, whether it’s later in the Navy or in any other field where they excel.”

Christina Sesia might be a case in point, having started off in Cadets as a raw recruit, worked her way up through the ranks until now she holds the highest non-commissioned rank at T.S. Albatross, where she is also an instructor to young local kids in safe boat handling skills.

And this focus did not desert her in her private life. After leaving school at 16, she tried odd jobs before deciding that she could do better than that. So she went to TAFE, to the Illawarra Institute, to do her HSC.

And, after that, because she had always loved writing and had, as she puts it, “a curious nature”, she began a Diploma in Journalism at the Macleay College in Sydney, where her lecturers included the well-known television weatherman Mike Bailey.

A stint of work experience at the R.M.Williams magazine Outback led to a full-time position and then … well, the rest is yet to be written.

But is her family apprehensive about her embarking on this great adventure abroad, to a country where she will have to learn the language just to survive?

“No, we’re a travelling family,” she said of an Australian mother who met her Italian-born, English-educated engineer father while both were working at a mine in South Africa. “They want me to experience for myself the opportunities that life offers.

“Mum’s almost pushing me out the door.”