Grammar Gazette- Issue 2, 2013

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Being Aspirational

ARTICLE

AN EXCERPT FROM EDUCATING GIRLS BY PROFESSOR ERICA McWILLIAM

Travellers can be roughly divided into two types. There are those who set out with their sights firmly fixed on a distant destination. It may be an ancient city concealed in the deserts of time, or a river whose source is unknown, a mountain peak which has retained its snow-bound secret. The journey is a quest, the traveller searchers who cannot rest until they reach their goal. There is a second sort of traveller however – those who weave in and out among the lives of people they encounter on the way, picking up during their odyssey, a stitch here and a pattern there so that they return wearing cloaks embroidered with the rainbow of the world. (1994, p. 211) Interestingly, some Grammar Old Girls seem to combine both dispositions in shaping their destiny. A pupil who left in 1996, Dr Jo Darby, for example, recounts a nomadic existence in which she, as a young adult, has ‘lived in three countries across the globe, in four states and two territories in Australia, and … moved home nineteen times’. Her teachers gave her ‘a passion for Japan’, which made her restless to move there at the first opportunity she had. Her passion for Japan, however, did not keep her from returning home to study for a career in medicine. She later became an Air Force doctor on Ashmore Reef, tending to dozens of Defence Force colleagues who were victims of an explosion there. The message to Grammar girls about to graduate from the School is to focus on the journey, to dawdle long enough to ‘enjoy the journey, enjoy the ride’ and to ‘see where life takes you’ (Darby, 2010, pp. 42–46). It is a sentiment endorsed by the many graduates who have used their Grammar experiences and achievements as a launching pad for ‘spin[ning] off out of the orbit of the mundane’ (Russell, 1994, p. 224).

IT IS TOO EASY TO overstate, or understate, the role of this School, or any school, in relation to exceptional achievements by many of its graduates. On the one hand, it could be argued that Girls Grammar merely added icing to the genetic cake that was already full of potential and promise. On the other hand, it could be argued that the girls were mere putty in the hands of experienced educators who moulded them into world-beating shape. The importance of a combination of both nature and the particular kind of nurture available at Girls Grammar seems undeniable. It is a combination captured in the reflection of Old Girl Mrs Hazel Burnside on the part played in her early life by one of her teachers at Girls Grammar. Travelling on the same tram to School each day with the much-loved Miss Benney, Hazel ‘happened to say that I thought my sisters were cleverer than I’. Miss Benney’s reply, ‘There is nothing wrong with your ability to think!’ gave her renewed confidence in who she was and could become (Burnside, n.d.). The ability to think can be a much underrated asset in a speeded-up world where stimulation and simulation rule, where every mistake seems to be instantly correctible and every decision reversible, where the sales chart is so often the default measure of worth, and where opinion is so often blurted rather than built. Those who claim, like Hazel Burnside, that Grammar ‘taught us a love of the world’ are unlikely to be flippant or to seek quick fixes in relation to their own or their planet’s future. Like women travellers in the past, they are eager to explore the fullness of the world, armed with relentless curiosity and unflagging enthusiasm. In her book, delightfully titled The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt , author Mary Russell captures the essence of this imperative to discover and engage with unfamiliar people, places and things in women of the past. She writes of two kinds of female travellers – the restless and the dawdler:

REFERENCES Burnside (née Palmer), H. (n.d.). Old Girl recollections, Brisbane Girls Grammar School Archives. Darby, J. (2010). Dr Jo Darby, alumna 1996, valedictory address. In Brisbane Girls Grammar School Annual Review . Brisbane Girls Grammar School. Russell, M. (1994). The blessings of a good thick skirt: Women travellers and their world . London: Harper Collins.

SPRING ISSUE / 2013