Edgar's Mission Blog

If ever the words gentle soul were personified, it was in our beloved Mister Belverdere. A more gentle, patient and sweet young fellow, you would be hard pressed to find.

In October 2017, we made a promise to a dying mother.

And today, with the gentlest of goodbyes, we fulfilled it.

Dearest Percy, this is not the story we thought we would be writing tonight.

There are some goodbyes for which the heart can never be prepared. And some lives so heartbreakingly brief that, no matter how much love we pour into them, we are left with the same aching thought.

It was never enough.

As a little girl, I didn’t know words like sentience, cognition or agency. I simply knew there was someone looking back at me.

Some Days came to us as a three-day-old Jersey calf. A sweet, doe-eyed beauty born into the dairy industry with a partially formed front leg that could neither serve her nor safely remain.

This morning, an artist left our world. His name was Rembrandt. And although he never held a brush, he coloured our days in ways we are only now beginning to understand.

It was a bitter winter’s day when Heather first arrived at Edgar’s Mission, and one of winter’s finest when she left. Which seems only fitting, for somewhere between those two days our Heather became magnificently, unmistakably herself.

There is a word for what happens when something can no longer hold itself towards the light. It wilts. And once, a very long time ago, Blossom did.

From 1–7 October, Be Kind to Animals Week invites us all to think about the animals with whom we share our lives and our world, while World Animal Day on 4 October brings people across the globe together in a shared vision for a kinder world for animals. 

Many years ago, someone asked me a simple question. “Why do dogs bark?”

On Tuesday, I stood within the grandeur of Government House in Melbourne for the investiture at which I received my Medal of the Order of Australia. And while I was in awe of the architecture, moved by the occasion and feeling a tad out of place in my fancy clothes, there was, strangely, a sense of belonging too.