Carol Pettersen OAM stars in WA Women’s Hall of Fame photo exhibit at Albany Regional Airport

For the coming weeks, one of the first faces people arriving in Albany via plane will see is the smiling one of Carol Pettersen OAM.

Ms Pettersen is one of 16 new inductees to the WA Women’s Hall of Fame featured in a touring photographic exhibit, which for the next fortnight will be situated pride of place in the Albany Regional Airport.

The 86-year-old Menang-Gnudju elder is the only Great Southern representative among this year’s inductees.

“It was quite a surprise when I was given notice that I was a nominee, so that was a bit of a shock,” she said.

“I think nobody sets out to be a hero or to strive for accolades, except when you’re at primary school, you want to win all the ribbons and medals.

“I come from an era where there was no such thing as volunteers.

“Everybody just rolled up their sleeves, you put your back to the shovel, and you just worked to build your community and do the best you could.”

Born at the Gnowangerup Mission in the 1940s and raised in the bush around Jerramungup, Ms Pettersen grew up with 16 siblings where she learnt to “cooperate and to lend support to any situation”.

“We built our life and our community on service,” she said.

“The return is twice what you give.”

Studying community development, Ms Pettersen moved into public service where she worked as an “invisible change agent”.

From there, she spent more than four decades as a ministerial Indigenous adviser, justice of the peace, storyteller, land-care-activist, cultural educator and mentor.

On paper, her greatest achievement involves working under the premier for the Equal Opportunities Act, the legislation that helped open doors for women to work in non-traditional roles.

“We literally canvassed the whole of WA to look at conditions for women,” she said.

“We then implemented the non-traditional roles for women, like truck driving and tractor driving and bulldozer driving that women wanted to do, but also that opened up doors for men who wanted to become nurses and midwives and hairdressers and makeup artists.

“It’s a silent way of working, identifying the strategies, and then working through policy development, that is very rewarding.”

However, it was a symbolic, smaller move closer to home that she counts as her best.

“Our Noongar people couldn’t enroll at the local TAFE (in the 80s),” she said.

“We weren’t on campus; they put us in a building out on Chester Pass Road with just chairs and tables and a whiteboard — they wouldn’t even give us a blackboard!

“The greatest, greatest achievement was the day that we moved into campus, even though it was a building down the back.

“To see these things, these ideas still growing, still alive, that makes me feel good.”

Speaking at the launch of the exhibition hosted by Soroptomists International Albany on Tuesday, WA Women’s Hall of Fame committee member Marie O’Dea said Great Southern women “punch above their weight”.

“I think a lot of women within regional WA, in whatever they do, they do actually have barriers of distance, isolation, and needing to do things by themselves for themselves,” she said.

“We’ve come a long way but celebrating them is so important.”

The exhibition will be on display at the airport until July 17.