by Helen Brinkman
Learning to see God’s messages in the simple, everyday things of life has enabled 81-year-old Bernie Dewar to share God’s love on the airwaves.
Through a weekly radio program produced by her local St Peter’s Elizabeth Lutheran congregation and broadcast on a northern Adelaide community radio station, Bernie writes, presents and shares short devotional messages that connect everyday life matters with God’s word.
Bernie honed her skill of devotion-writing during her 23 years as a school assistant at St Paul Lutheran School at Blair Athol in suburban Adelaide, where staff took turns to write devotions for a weekly newsletter.
‘God enabled me to see messages from him in the simple everyday things of life,’ Bernie says.
A contributor to St Peter’s past monthly newsletters, Bernie was approached by Geoff Burls – a veteran of the congregation’s 40-year community radio program and Lutheran Media supporter – about using her devotional material on the church’s radio show. Bernie countered with a much more generous offer of writing and presenting several new three-to-six-minute devotional segments per year as time permitted. Her first segments were first broadcast in November 2009, and they’re still going in 2025!
This has been the latest of many activities Bernie has put her hand to throughout her adventurous life. It’s an approach to living forged from a lifelong love of learning and teaching.
‘My confirmation text was Paul’s words on the road to Damascus: “Lord, what will you have me to do?” And it was obviously teaching,’ Bernie says.
At 16, she passed her Leaving Certificate at Clare High School in SA’s Mid North. She had planned to attend Adelaide Teachers College, but first spent a year as a classroom assistant at Hermannsburg (Ntaria) Lutheran mission, approximately 120 kilometres southwest of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory.
‘I loved it! I loved and was loved in return by the Aboriginal people,’ she says. ‘I got to play the old pedal organ for church, supervised the School of the Air kids, worked in the store and, of course, at the school. The next year I did come back to Adelaide, went to teachers’ college, and then my life really began!’
Bernie began her teaching career schooling children of English migrants at Smithfield, in Adelaide’s north, followed by roles at a school at Quorn in the Flinders Ranges, and at the Koonibba Mission near Ceduna in South Australia’s west in 1964.
From there, she went to Papua New Guinea (PNG) to teach at Menyamya, a school accessible only by plane from the eastern port city of Lae. Local people mostly still wore grass skirts and capes of beaten bark to ward off the cold.
Bernie’s first class in PNG consisted of 46 students, including little ones, teenagers and young men and four girls, and by the second week she was asked to take chapel in Pidgin English.
‘It’s amazing what God and the help of a good Pidgin dictionary could do,’ she says.
‘It was at Menyamya that I met my husband-to-be Tony,’ recalls Bernie. ‘On my second day there, a red Suzuki twin motorbike roared up the hill to the mission, off hopped a skinny little bloke – who’d been ill with some unknown tropical disease and weighed 6 stone 12 oz when I met him – and his first words were, “You’re the girl I’m going to marry!”. Says I, arms folded in typical teacher pose, “Well, I don’t think so!!”.’
Her attitude changed several months later after Tony, who ran an outstation hospital with indigenous staff, nursed Bernie back to health after she suffered pneumonia. ‘That was when I discovered he was a truly loving, caring, funny Christian man,’ says Bernie of her late husband.
The pair were married in Clare two years later in February 1967, before returning to PNG for working stints in the capital Port Moresby, Kainantu in the Eastern Highlands, and Madang on the north coast, where they survived experiencing an 8.3-magnitude earthquake.
Their son Steven was born in 1971, and as he approached school age, they were advised to leave. The family departed for Adelaide just after PNG celebrated its independence in September 1975, settling back in Adelaide’s north and joining St Peter’s Lutheran Church.
It was there Bernie regained her piano skills – ‘having a go’ – playing for Sunday evening services. She’s now the congregation’s only pianist, but stresses, ‘I’m not gifted, but an ordinary pianist totally guided by God.’
It’s that guidance from God, affirmed in her confirmation text, that she reflects in her busy life, which is filled with her love of hospitality, a lifelong love of gardening, and her leadership of weekly Bible studies.
And it’s God’s messages of love, revealed in our everyday lives, that Bernie continues to share with the community across Adelaide’s northern suburbs.
