Media and Press

The Sky's Her Limit
Christine Hogan, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 Apr 1997

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She overcame horrific injuries to walk again. Now Janine Shepherd is flying - and motivating others with her amazing story.

At first glance, Janine Shepherd appears so normal she just about defines the concept. A sweet-faced, green-eyed blonde in her mid-30s, Shepherd has a husband and two little daughters. There are some bantams in the backyard, an albino rabbit and a comfortably spreading blue heeler. Together they form the very picture of domestic bliss and normality in a rambling house on a large block near Pittwater in Sydney's north.

Under her T-shirt, Shepherd has got muscle tone in her upper arms that suggests a custom for women at her age and stage of life - regular visits to the local gym. To complete the mundane picture, she even drives that suburban cliche for middle-class mothers, a white Volvo station wagon.

No matter how ordinary she looks, Janine Shepherd is not normal. A decade ago she was a sporting dynamo, dreaming of Olympic glory. Then, in an instant, the promise was obliterated.

A near-fatal accident left Shepherd a partial paraplegic with no feeling in her feet or her haunches, wasted calf muscles and a plate in her upper arm. She has a fused spine, fused toes and faces an uncertain medical and surgical future - more operations, possible osteoarthritis, constant antibiotics to combat the regular infections she suffers because she has to self-catheterise.

Normal? Not a bit of it. She's a walking, talking marvel who flies planes, is a motivational speaker and a successful author.

"Janine is a pretty extraordinary, focused human being, one of the most focused I have ever met. Her body was pretty much a write-off, but she came back," says film producer David Elphick, who is working on a movie that traces her life from Olympic hopeful to folk hero.

"Janine's an elite individual," agrees Dr Adrian Cohen, who first encountered Shepherd in the spinal unit of Sydney's Prince Henry Hospital more than a decade ago. The two became friends and have stayed in touch throughout Shepherd's fight back from the brink of death. "She's a remarkable person with incredible determination."

"Janine is a never-say-die woman," says Jane Palfreyman, publishing director of Random House Australia. "When she starts to tell her story, it's just electrifying."

Janine Shepherd's story is incredible - at once so horrifying and so life-affirming that Palfreyman got goose bumps listening to it for the first time. "You must write this story," Palfreyman told Shepherd.

That became Shepherd's first book, Never Tell Me Never. A best-seller after publication in 1994, it has since sold about 80,000 copies in hardcover and paperback. Her second book, Dare to Fly, has been prompted by public reaction to that initial story.

In Australian publishing, Shepherd is a younger, hipper version of author Sara Henderson, the woman who translated her own experience of running a property at Bullo River in the Northern Territory, raising children and managing an increasingly despondent husband into an autobiographical series beginning with From Strength to Strength, constant speaking engagements and a place in the national consciousness.

Like Henderson, Shepherd is a regular on the speaking circuit. She's a proven motivator who's in demand at conferences throughout Australia and overseas, and can command about $4,000 a speech. Last year, she gave 35 talks in all, including two in Bali, two in New Zealand and one in Hawaii. The year before she did 40.

And her realm is expanding. She's collaborating with (David) Elphick and writer John Cundill on the screen adaptation of Never Tell Me Never, she has negotiated the sale of the publishing rights to NTMN into Japan, another book is in the works and she is planning for the arrival of her third child in August. But first, she's off on a two-week promotional tour of Australia and New Zealand for Dare to Fly.

Janine Shepherd is on stage in a gloomy and cavernous function room at a golf-oriented resort on the Gold Coast. Outside on the emerald greens, Karrie Webb is trying to win the Australian Ladies Masters. But the real drama is inside as Shepherd relives her past, particularly the past 11 years of it. She's retelling her story and it has reduced some of her audience to tears.

This is Shepherd at work, sharing her journey to hell and back. This time, she's addressing about 200 independent travel retailers near the end of a four-day conference. A combination of sun, surf, golf and a looming gala dinner seems to have sedated them.

Shepherd had been relying on the crowd to lift her since she's feeling a little flat. "I always find it difficult to leave home, to leave the girls, particularly on the weekend," she says to Good Weekend during her flight to the Gold Coast. "The sun was shining, they were playing, my dad had come over to mow the lawn ... I miss them so much, even when I am away for short periods of time."

On stage, no anxieties are evident as Shepherd launches into her speech, a speech she makes entirely without notes. Dressed in a floral shirt, a skirt which grazes the ankles and flat lace-up shoes, she's folksy, irrepressible, bold and courageous. She's an incarnation of Pollyanna, writ large. At the outset, it sounds as though she's talking to the local preschool mothers' club. Shepherd opens with a poem that ends: "He started to sing, as he tackled the thing that couldn't be done ... and he did it !" taking her audience back to the beginning of the Janine Shepherd saga.

"I was not an easy child. I was a brat, an absolute brat ... I started my athletics career at the age of six. I represented the State in netball and softball, I was a NSW triathlon champion," says the woman who revelled in the nickname "Janine the Machine". "If I had a choice between training over flat country or hilly country, I would take the hard road. I learned to love the hills.

"My goal was to put Australia on the map as a force to be reckoned with in cross-country skiing. I was training for the 1988 Winter Olympics and nothing on earth was going to stop me." She pauses for effect, because something did. A utility truck stopped Janine Shepherd, aged 24, in her tracks. And just about killed her.

Shepherd set off on a bicycle training ride up the Blue Mountains one afternoon at the end of May, 1986. After almost five hours on the road, close to the end of the ride, she was knocked off her bike.

Now, she describes her injuries matter-of-factly: a broken neck, back broken in four places, five broken ribs, a broken right arm and collarbone, broken bones in her right foot. She had massive internal injuries and the right side of her body was ripped open from her ankle to her torso and filled with road gravel. "I lost five litres of blood, my blood pressure was 40 over nothing," she says, then makes a joke: "I was having a bad day."

Shepherd tells her increasingly fascinated audience an epic of horror and gore, of near-death and despair, of recovery and repair. It's a classic in the motivational speech genre, a message from a survivor who confronted seemingly insurmountable odds, faced death, and came back to tell the tale.

In the aftermath of that catastrophic split second, Shepherd found herself in the middle of a nightmare that went on for years, one which changed her life completely. Dreams of Olympic medals disappeared as she struggled during almost six months in the spinal unit of Prince Henry Hospital to get back on her feet. Cross-country skiing wasn't her aim anymore - walking was.

The grit required to survive such an ordeal is chronicled in Never Tell Me Never. Shepherd opens the book with the moment she regains consciousness after the accident, "my body consumed with pain".

Close to death and saved principally, possibly only, by superb physical condition, Shepherd describes the immediate aftermath, then relentlessly, she continues with a long, painful and protracted recovery and rehabilitation that saw her not only walk again, but undertake new challenges.

It's a story that's hard enough to listen to, but only she knows what it was really like. "It's probably everyone's worst nightmare, to be in a spinal ward," she says, walking across the stage with a halting step. It's the first - and for many the only - outward sign of the ordeal Shepherd has endured. "I had been active and in control, I wanted to be an Olympian and a sports physiologist. I had to completely rethink my life."

She had a long time to reflect, flat on her back with sandbags propping up her head, oscillating between a positive attitude and the encompassing loneliness of a ward where soft sobs punctuated the long, sad nights. "I was a prisoner there," she remembers. When she got out, things still looked bleak. "I'd lost half my body function; it simply didn't work any more. I was in a full-body cast, in a wheelchair. There were times I felt it might have been better if I hadn't survived ... I thought I had rather a lot to be depressed about."

Kleenex come out of pockets, the audience starts to sniffle. The speaker knows it's time to change gear. After the litany of horrors, she moves on to the story of her resurrection.

"Every part of my life was affected. I knew I had to do something to replace all the things I had lost. I was sitting at home with my mother and a plane flew over ... and I knew I had to fly. Right then, I had a dream."

Nevermind that paraplegics, partial or otherwise, don't usually fly. Shepherd earned her restricted pilot's licence and kept on studying and flying. She then got an unrestricted licence, her instrument rating, twin-engine rating, commercial pilot's licence and eventually became an instructor. She learned to do aerobatics, then to fly a seaplane. Along the way, she married Tim Blake, a fellow aerobatic pilot who now flies with Qantas and finished a university degree in human movement and a diploma in physical education.

Nevermind, either, that a doctor once told her she wouldn't be able to have a full sexual life and no-one knew if she would be able to have children. "When I told Tim he said there was only one way to find out."

She's reaching the finale now, taking her audience with her: "You have to have a goal. You need desire, dedication and determination. It's up to you to do the hard work. We all have the potential, we all need to learn to go further, higher than before. We have to do more than take on the hills ... we have to learn to love them. That's what makes a difference." She leaves them with the motto for life that she learned early in her flying lessons and adapted to her personal life - attitude plus power equals performance.

Outside the function room, she spends an hour talking to members of her audience, selling and signing copies of Never Tell Me Never, listening to other stories of sadness and triumph. One fan clutches seven books. "I saw her speak at one of our conferences in Bali," she says. "I bought the book and couldn't put it down. I told all my friends about Janine and they all wanted me to get them copies of the book."

Janine Shepherd, speaker and author, is an interesting phenomenon. She's remarkably down-home, slightly conspiratorial, definitely perky, able to seduce even the hardest hearts. In a real way, she affects the people she speaks to, or who read her book. Many of them write, confiding their own desperate tales, and she writes back some hundreds and hundreds of letters a year.

Sitting in an airport lounge, she drags one of these letters out of her handbag. It's from a young woman, aged about 18, who has read Never Tell Me Never and thinks it would make a great film. Although she is not an actress, she wants to play the lead.

"Wouldn't that be great?" says Shepherd, who would dearly love to help make this young dreamer's fantasy a reality. "I'm going to give this letter to David Elphick."

The filmmaker might have other views of casting for the lead in the film which he is developing from Shepherd's story. Elphick, whose latest film Black Rock, based on the murder of Newcastle schoolgirl Leigh Leigh opens on May 1, was fascinated by Shepherd's story and her development as an individual.

"While it's been extremely hard for her, she's probably a richer person now than if she hadn't had the accident and had won gold medals at three Olympics. She's maturing, she's opening up."

Shepherd had always told Palfreyman she hadn't planned a sequel to the first book. "But people come up to her all the time," says her publisher, "and ask her what happened next."

Never Tell Me Never ended with the birth of daughter Annabel, now six. Dare To Fly covers the next stage of Shepherd's life - joining Toastmasters, learning to speak in public, buying a plane, getting a computer, writing her first book, joining the public-speaking circuit, appearing on 60 Minutes, having her second child, Charlotte.

Then, she negotiated the rights for her first book outside Australia and New Zealand. Someone must have told her it couldn't be done, which was the beginning of her Japanese adventure. "Sales into Japan are extraordinarily difficult," says Palfreyman. "We've been trying to crack the market for years ... and Janine has managed to."

There is a certain quid pro quo in the relationship Shepherd has with her readers and audiences, Palfreyman notes. "Janine often makes the point that people inspire her as much as she inspires them. She understands the power of the individual is all well and good, but that things go much better if you let other people help you."

Back at home in Sydney with her husband just off a flight from London, daughter Charlotte scratchy for lack of sleep and Buddy the heeler flat out on the back veranda, Janine Shepherd is quietly reflecting on the odd turn her life took in that split second on a late Autumn afternoon in the Blue Mountains. She has had a long time to consider what happened to her and along the way she has discovered the serenity of faith. "I used to ask why, why, why me? But I didn't have any answers. I don't care about the why anymore. I know it's not about the meaning of life, but the meaning in life. It's about what you put into life, that's what matters.

"The greatest happiness is feeling that you can make a difference. [Being able to inspire people] is a great honour. I might have gone to the Olympic Games, won medals, but what I am doing now is much more important. To have people say to me 'You've changed my life' and know that I have made a difference to them is an enormous benefit to me. This whole thing is a huge personal development course."

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