Liz Cosson - Daily routine

Transcript

So a typical day for me, after getting up in the morning and having breakfast in our house, so we're all traveling to Lololo, and we'd see the troops there and have a breakfast potentially with them. if we haven't had it in the house, and then we'd go to our headquarters which was in Arawa and I would get, I'd have a briefing out with the ops team and the log team and the medical team and just work out what was happening around the day.

So it'd be a full briefing session, then the commander would call myself in with these other commanders and we'd debrief him on what was happening around the island and what was the week ahead in the events. And, of course, we'd have a call into Australia, to let them know what was happening.

And we work with our local negotiator on what were some key events for the commander to be briefing the local community. And so a typical day, up until about lunchtime was full of briefings every single day, as I mentioned, that situational awareness and that, just knowing and having great connection with our team sites to understand what we should be preparing for was really important.

And we spent a lot of time in all that preparatory work in the briefings in the morning. And then, at lunchtime, we often get into our vehicles and go to Lolo, again, that's where our main team site was, and have lunch with the troops and talk to them, visit the medical centre. We'd often support local community if we evacuated anybody from the remote areas of Bougainville into our hospital, our field hospital, so we'd visit them and a lot of it was just connecting with people and just talking to people and getting out and about.

So as a female, senior female in the peace monitoring group, certainly no female could go anywhere unaccompanied and so I always had somebody, either the commander with me or the S3 or somebody, then we'd go for drive out onto the sites and just visit people.