Life of Service with Jocelyn Walker
From service stations to serving the community. John Caruso sits down with a remarkable individual. Jocelyn Walker was alone in the house when the letter arrived. She read it at lunchtime, sat with it for a few hours, then drove to her son’s place after dinner and put the envelope on the table without a word.
He picked it up, read it, and said: “Mum, that’s pretty special.” He’s not one to overstate things. But then, neither is she. The letter was from the Australian Government. It informed Jocelyn that she had been awarded the Order of Australia Medal, King’s Birthday 2024 – for services to the community of the Sunshine Coast. The ceremony was held later at Parliament House in Brisbane, with The Governor Dr Jeanette Young presenting.
Jocelyn Walker AM, in her own words, counts it among the most memorable days of her life. Those who know her well would say it was overdue.
She was born in Allora, a small town on the Darling Downs between Warwick and Toowoomba, and left at 19 to take a job at the Ipswich Post Office, working the telephone exchange. From there she moved to work the reception desk at the Ford Motor Company in Brisbane, which is where a friend’s brother brought Vic Walker into the picture.
He was area manager for Townsville at the time. The distance was considerable, the relationship required effort, and they made it work. That combination – distance, effort, result – would come to define much of what followed.
In 1980, after Vic had spent years in the corporate machinery of Mobil Oil and decided he’d rather own something than manage it for someone else, the Walkers opened the first 24-hour self-serve service station in Queensland – on the old Bruce Highway at Glenview.
There were no fuel stops at all between Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast at that point. They filled the gap, literally, and discounted heavily to bring drivers around to the idea of filling their own tanks, which was a novelty that not everyone embraced. Jocelyn recalls more than a few motorists winding up their windows and moving on.
“We had the least expensive fuel on the Sunshine Coast and even in Brisbane, and we were providing a supply where there’d been none,” she says.
They operated the Glenview site until 1989, eventually adding both sides of the new Bruce Highway as it opened, timing their northbound launch to coincide with World Expo ‘88 – a decision that proved as astute as it sounds. Jocelyn also worked at the Australian Pavilion during Expo ‘88 – three days a week, four or five hours a shift, in uniform, walking the floor as one of Lorraine Martin’s Expo hostesses. She had two children at home and a husband who in those early years barely slept. His mother lived across the road. The family managed.
The afternoons were Jocelyn’s preferred shift. She’d take the kids to the beach in the morning, drop them at her mother-in-law’s, then drive out to the site. At the end of the night, she’d count the cash – and in those days it was a great deal of cash – roll it into a leather clip bag and drive home through Caloundra alone to deposit it in an afterhours safe. Different times. Vic Walker passed away in 1996. Jocelyn was, as she puts it, reasonably young. The business years were behind her, the children older, and the shape of what came next was not yet clear.
Professor Paul Thomas invited her to join the foundation board at the University of the Sunshine Coast from its earliest days, and she accepted. She would stay for 23 years.
“After my husband passed away, I built a wall of friendships,” she says. “And being involved with the university was an opportunity for me to make a difference and get out of bed every day.”
That phrase – a wall of friendships – is worth pausing on. It’s not the language of someone who drifted into philanthropy through comfortable circumstance. It’s the language of someone who, faced with loss, chose to build. The wall metaphor is exact: deliberate, structural, constructed piece by piece over time. It is also, it turns out, an apt description of everything Jocelyn has done since.
The Jocelyn and Vic Walker Legacy Scholarship at UniSC is ongoing, managed by the university, and now available to students as far north as Gympie. It is a two-year scholarship, chosen and administered by the institution, funded by Jocelyn. It keeps Vic’s name in the building long after his passing.
Then there’s LifeFlight. Jocelyn has been connected to the organisation for around 30 years, initially through the founders – Bill Freeman, Hayden Kenny, Jim Campbell – attending small fundraisers and charity balls. Nine years ago, she was invited to chair the Regional Advisory Committee for the Sunshine Coast base, with a first order of business to secure funding for a new hangar.
The $18.5 million hangar was funded by the Queensland Government and was the most significant infrastructure project delivered in LifeFlight’s 46-year history on the Sunshine Coast. The base features crew accommodation for six, a patient transfer room, new training rooms and simulators to assist with doctor training and seminars onsite.
Jocelyn chaired that committee for three years before being appointed Vice Regional Patron for LifeFlight Sunshine Coast and South Burnett – a role that took her to every base in Queensland, from maintenance centres at Archerfield, to training academies in Brisbane, and to the Roma base, Mount Isa, Toowoomba.
“That role has provided so many opportunities to me around all of Queensland. Until then, I hadn’t realised the magnitude of it and it’s been a privilege,” she says.
In 2025, the impact of LifeFlight in the Sunshine Coast and South Burnett showed 672 people helped, 990 hours flown and 174 of the most frequent mission type: trauma. A significant impact on the region it serves.
The Lifeflight Jocelyn Walker Visitor Experience and Education Centre at Sunshine Coast Airport – named in her honour – officially opens on 29 June. Another wall. Another piece of built legacy that will carry her name long after the hard hats come off and the ribbon is cut.
Her diary, she admits, stays full. Her son lives 15 minutes away at Point Cartwright; her daughter is at Yandina, where she runs Fraser Isle Spanner Crab, supplying high-level restaurants along the coast and across Australia. The grandchildren are close. She has, to use her own metaphor, built well.
She has also travelled widely, mostly in pursuit of golf – Augusta, Pebble Beach, courses through Europe and America. She has one place left on the list: the Maldives, where she intends not to play a round but to swim in a lagoon. It is a good goal for a woman who has spent the better part of six decades in motion.
“I’ve lived a magical life,” Jocelyn says. “The first part was a lot of hard work, and once I was in the position to be able to travel, I’ve had the most extraordinary experiences.”
When I told her, at the end of our conversation, that her story was remarkable, she said she felt like crying. She explained that compliments of that kind tend to have that effect on her. Given everything she’s built since 1996 – the scholarship, the committee, the centre, the wall of friendships – it’s not hard to understand why recognition still lands with such force. She has spent nearly three decades giving without making much noise about it.
The wall holds. The name endures. The diary stays full. Thank you Jocelyn for all you have done and all you have given to our community. We are at your service.
EXPERIENCE & EDUCATION
The LifeFlight Jocelyn Walker Visitor Experience and Education Centre is an immersive experience for the community and visitors to learn about LifeFlight’s history in the region and its impact. The Centre will officially open Monday 29 June.
Visit www.lifeflight.org.au to find out more about LifeFlight and to donate.
WANT MORE?
Listen to the full interview with Jocelyn from our podcast.
