Jenny Rae

Jenny Rae was born in 1958 in Sydney. She was lucky enough at university to meet talented people who became influential in Australian theatre, and she worked with some of them, working front-of-house at Nimrod and then Belvoir Street theatres while she did her Arts degree. She then headed overseas. Back home she returned to Sydney University to do a Dip.ED., studying English as a Second Language.

She taught ESL in small private colleges and made some good friends. She had a couple of kids and did a post-graduate Communications Diploma at University of Technology, Sydney. Bumping around in search of fulfillment, she got a job on the Australian Film and Literature Classification Board. There, she was lucky enough to meet the man who is now her husband; he also had two children.

They moved to a property outside Canberra, and Jenny returned to teaching ESL. When she retired from teaching, she studied Migration Law at ANU and became a migration agent, assisting migrants and refugees with visa applications. She thought it was a good idea to work as a volunteer and never earn enough to pay back her student loan – she enjoyed the fact that the Morrison government was paying for her to help refugees.

She did not renew her registration after the pandemic, and now works as a volunteer helping people apply for citizenship. She is lucky enough to have some lovely grandchildren.