Imagine starting an entirely new career at 50 years old.
Tina Fitzgerald first learnt to dive a few years ago and was instantly hooked. She’s now creating a new course that combines yoga with scuba diving.
Tina is not shy of hard work in the face of adversity.
As a teenager, she left her family behind in Malaysia to sit Year 12 in an Australian high school to improve her chances of getting into a Western university.
“I waited on tables every Friday and Saturday night and earned my way, with the help of somebody else with the visa charges,” Tina said.
“Having left to come to go across Australia to live independently to a whole new culture at 18, having to fend for myself and it certainly has helped with my independence.”
She now spends her time between her Australian home in Canberra and the tiny island of Mabul off the coast of Borneo, Malaysia where she teaches diving.
But it’s not just diving.
“Unfortunately, I developed a macular hole in my eye and for two months there I couldn’t dive, so I became a yoga instructor!”
Tina is now combining her two loves to create a yoga scuba diving specialty course and is in the process of the writing the course spec with PADI.
The course involves a series of yoga exercises, meditation and breathing, and not only keeps nervous divers calm but reduces air consumption.
“I encourage them to think, to visualize what they’re doing, to be meditative and to be aware about the environment and the surrounding when they dive, to be mindful about what they do.”
“I’ve noticed with older divers that come through, they find that with the meditation, it helps to relax them, makes them less nervous.”
“Or divers that have phobias about closed spaces, they find that it relaxes them and it opens up a whole new dimension for them to be able to conquer their fear,” she said.
“So that’s a work in progress.”
Working at a Malaysian diving school for half the year, Tina says she also plays a mentoring role to young locals helping them seek out careers in the diving industry.
“The young ones here on this island, where education’s very limited, to become a dive master, it’s a great achievement,” she said.
“It brings them up, it gives them great opportunity for employment anywhere in the world. It’s really a stepping stone for them to be independent.”
“My other job [is] to bring them up to maturity of the dive industry, to show them the ropes of management – rather than the skills of diving – and to help them liaise with people.
There is very little environmental education on the small islands so Tina encourages the local divers to respect the ocean and teach the local children not to litter.
“It’s habitual to just dump the rubbish in the ocean,” she said.
“But I think if we share that knowledge, or we encourage or educate the younger generations, that will be passed on to the older generations.”
Tina says picking up a new career as a 50-year-old woman is not without its challenges.
“In an industry, especially in a small community where male dominance takes precedence, it’s a challenge,” she said.
“I’ve come across a few young ones – male, I’m talking about – who find it difficult to accept that I could do as well as them.
“But that doesn’t faze me. At the end of the day I’ve had very good training and I became a really, relatively good diver and I know my theory and I know my stuff.”
Tina teaches scuba diving at Big John Scuba in Mabul, Borneo, Malaysia.
