If you recognise Pamela Cook roaming the streets of Beaudesert, then you would probably know her as the lady with the red streaks.
Well, that lady has a story to tell.
From a tough adolescence of stealing cars and breaking into stores at just the age of twelve, her dysfunctional upbringing is tough to hear, but well worth listening to.
“When I was a teenager, I didn’t know how to clean a house, how to cook – I couldn’t boil water without burning it,” Pamela said.
“It was easier for me to go and rob the neighbour and get food out of their fridge than to cook myself.”
Her journey was filled with bumps and curves which ultimately brought her to the path of God, her faith for the future.
“If I didn’t have God in my life, I’d be a mess,” she said.
“When I got God in my life, I knew what I did was not good and God just changed my life – completely changed it around into me now, I wouldn’t pinch anything.”
Pamela grew up in Auckland New Zealand and faced multiple challenges that led to her moving to Australia permanently in 2018.
She had a lot of family living around Beaudesert and Logan and she tended to move back and forth between New Zealand and Australia.
“In 2007, I sold my five-bedroom villa and came to Australia. I was there six months before going back home the first time,” Pamela said.
She returned to Australia in 2014 as her uncle was unwell.
“He wanted to come back to see family over here. He died here – that was really hard because I’d been his carer for about 12 years,” she said.
Pamela unfortunately suffered an immense amount of psychological abuse during her romantic relationships that lasted for 40 years of her life.
“God looked after me – God knew that I could take mental torture, but I couldn’t take physical,” Pamela said.
“It was a generational curse – I had prayed for my daughter and my son and heard the curse broke so it wasn’t going to carry on from them, and it hasn’t carried on from them.”
Pamela said that she first found her faith in God when she was 15 but ignored it many years until she rededicated her life to God in 1996.
“I didn’t really do anything with that, I just went wild right up until I was 22,” she said.
Her local church is Harvest Point Church which she attends regularly every week.
Pamela decided that she wanted to tell her story and has organised with a couple from Church to start writing a memoir of her life.
“I think there’s a lot of stuff in there that’s helpful to people that have similar lives,” she said.
“It’s just more there for the public that things do come right if you want it to come right – if God’s in your life, you can’t go wrong.”
