In Jan Hoffman’s Nuriootpa living room, the repetitive hum of a domestic office printer marks an unlikely pas de deux with the rhythmic pendulum of a cherished family grandfather clock.

Files, paperwork and stationary overflow onto tables and into other rooms, while dozens of blue flyers stamped with bright yellow sunflowers arrive in waves on the printer’s tray.

Jan moves barefoot through the organised chaos of her home – the administrative ‘back end’ of Barossa’s Suicide Prevention Network, Seeds of Hope – not in the least bit fazed.

If Jan “is” Seeds of Hope, as she is often described, her home – on this day and many others since the SPN’s establishment in 2019 – is its wheelhouse.

“People embarrass me left, right and centre,” Jan says, her bright blue eyes sparkling with good humour as she describes what it feels like to sometimes be singled out as the face of Seeds of Hope.  

There are, of course, many people who have made the SPN what it is today, but there is rarely an event in its history at which the 73-year-old’s trademark black outfit and yellow scarf have not been present; an enduring dedication driven by a very personal ‘why’.

To learn Jan’s ‘why’, one has to begin with Bruce and Betty Hoffman, two “delightful human beings” who brought Jan into the world just when everyone else thought they already had the ideal suburban family. 

“Dad did say, when we were first talking about my arrival on the scene, that I was ‘PBC’, as in ‘pure bloody carelessness’, because they had a boy and a girl, but he then said, ‘we’re really pleased about the fact that we managed to organise you’,” Jan says with a laugh. 

It was from this household of unconditional love and easy-going humour, along with an education in worldliness gained from spending time at her father’s Port Adelaide barber shop, Jan was able to confidently spread her wings into a teaching career, specialising in mathematics.

Her first assignment was at Port Lincoln, which resulted in “a fabulous nine years of learning the ropes”.

For city-born Jan, the switch to country life came naturally.

“The folks always laughed about the fact that they really considered I was a country kid that had been born in the city, because I’m pretty laid-back, in case you hadn’t noticed,” Jan says with a grin. 

Some years into her time at Port Lincoln, Jan completed a graduate diploma in educational counselling, an opportunity which evolved organically out of an unmet need. 

“I started doing counselling in Port Lincoln because the two counsellors we had in the school were both six-foot-plus males… so I had lots of females come and approach me wanting a hand. I didn’t feel like I had the skills, which is why I did the counselling course,” explains Jan.

It was the beginning of a new vocation for Jan, who went on to roles as school counsellor at The Heights at Modbury, followed by Seaton High, and in 1997, Jan moved to the Barossa to take up a counselling position at Nuriootpa High School.

“You had everything from ‘my friend’s not talking to me’, and the high level of harassment stuff, the bullying, sorting out dramas between friendship groups… through to sadly, loss,” Jan says of the types of issues she helped young people navigate over the years.

Jan relied on training and her own strategies to cope with the heavy topics that often came her way, like putting her own problems into a mental ‘shoe-box’ for the duration of her working day, as well as changing clothes as soon as she got home. 

“If it was a really tough day, I’d have a shower and then get changed,” she adds.

“My star sign is Cancer, so I always consider that is like the tough outside shell, and then soft inside. And so, I found that I could use that tough outside shell to somehow manage to deal with – if you can call it – the ‘a…holes’ of the world that were causing pain to these kids that I was working with, and not letting them taint my vision of humanity. 

“Because I am still ‘Madam Positive’, I still have a great belief in humanity.”

Jan admits she’s had some tough times of her own, including the year she moved to the Barossa, in the midst of a divorce from the father of her only child, Amy, who was just five at the time. On top of that, her own beloved father passed away.

“I have no idea what quality of a counsellor Nuri High got in 1997 because I think I was probably shell-shocked!” she admits.

Bruce Hoffman’s passing from complex health-related issues was also a significant factor in prompting a dramatic wake-up call for Jan some 20 years later.

Despite having always been a ‘sporty’ person, including playing hockey right up until the age of 59, Jan admits she had allowed herself to become “morbidly obese” in her later years.

“My father was a ‘cuddly’ human being, and so the genetic makeup is his rather than Mum’s,” she explains. 

“I’d got into bad habits of eating far too much takeaway foods and far too little cooking myself.”

By this time, Jan had returned to roles at other local schools as a classroom teacher, and it was during a contract at Gawler she experienced a major health scare.   

“One afternoon, I’m in the maths office and there’s these pains… They thought I might be having heart problems,” recalls Jan. 

She was rushed to the Lyell McEwin Hospital where it was discovered the pain was related to her gall bladder, but the scare was enough to prompt Jan to take a serious look at her health.

“There were lots of late-night conversations with the nurses because I was sitting at 110 kilos. We worked out that that was really not a good weight for Jan to be,” Jan says. 

“So, we rang through to Angaston Medical Centre to try and make an appointment with my doctor, who was Ben Baker.”

While Jan’s inherent compassion, personable nature, and years of experience as a counsellor have all played into the ‘why’ of her involvement with Seeds of Hope, none is more relevant than the impact Dr Ben Baker had on her life from that point forward.

A young, respected and caring doctor in the Barossa community, Dr Baker tragically died by suicide, not long after helping Jan overcome her health challenge.

“He helped me drop from 110 to 88kg, and then soon after that, we lost him,” Jan says.

“It was not only a shock that somebody that caring, and that warm and that willing to help out everybody else… but the fact that nobody was aware that he was in strife.”

When the opportunity arose soon after for a Suicide Prevention Network to be established in the Barossa, Jan felt overwhelmingly compelled to be involved. 

“It was just this dreadful loss…” she says. 

“So, I thought in terms of, ‘okay, Ben had helped me out, and I couldn’t help him, but I could pay it forward’.”

In Jan’s living room, the printer finally falls silent. The clock, which captivated Jan as a child when she visited her grandparents’ home, ticks on.

The stack of flyers waiting in the tray will be posted on noticeboards and shop windows, an invitation for the community to attend a ‘Sunflower Celebration’ – just one of the many local outreach events Seeds of Hope will be involved with this year. 

Jan, among other dedicated volunteers, will attend, inviting conversation where it’s needed, providing that all-important link for people to access services and support.

Despite all the work that goes on behind the scenes, the dining table mess, the meetings and the run around, these are the moments that matter most to Jan. 

“When we’re out at an event and someone has come over… and after the conversation you see them walk away with the world lifted off their shoulders, I might say to somebody, ‘I don’t care how many flaming hours went into it. That one conversation was worth it. Just that’,” says Jan.

“And that’s what it’s about.”