WHILE other ten-year-olds dreamed of becoming firemen or fairies when they grew up, Fiona Robertson had a different career in mind.
She wanted to be a pharmacist.
“My grandmother was a pharmaceutical chemist,” Ms Robertson recalls.
“She used to take me to work with her… my job was to count the tablets into the bottle.
“I just remember she was giving people medicine and talking to them and they thought she was wonderful.
“It wasn’t the tablets, it was the way that she interacted with them.”
When Ms Robertson was 12, her grandmother took her along to a an open day at the Victorian College of Pharmacy, sealing the fate of her ambitious granddaughter, who would graduate from the same institution in 1986.
“I remembered the work benches being chest height and when I went back they were waist high so I’d grown at least a foot,” Ms Robertson laughs.
Now a successful pharmacist and partner at Swan Hill’s Marraboor Pharmacy, Ms Robertson has dedicated her life to continuing what her grandma started.
And she is currently on a mission of her own: to improve mental health care in pharmacies.
For more on this story, grab a copy of Wednesday’s Guardian (November 25).
