Giddy and guileless Grammar Girls Cartoons

Serious dedication to academic, sporting, and artistic achievements forms the backbone of our School and its ongoing history. We recognise the high aims and achievements of our students across the years, with great store invested in the studies and activities of our broader curriculum. Recording this history is important, but should we always see school life and our students through this official lens of our structured intent and public profile as a School? There is another perspective, an underlayer of students portraying daily student lives. When school life is depicted by students themselves, seen through the prism of young women inside the picket fence, we see the humour and the perceptive satire that is also seeded in our students. Their ability to uncover and undo any pretence and hubris brings school life into a realm of fun and reveals the perceptiveness and mischievousness this School has nourished—and even encouraged. Perhaps the best evidence of this sense of playfulness is the plethora of cartoon sketches appearing in various School publications, especially the School Magazine. Cartoon has its origins in Latin. The word cartone was about paper and design on paper. In the 1700s, cartoons came into their own as social and political commentary, in an amusing and often unflattering and subversive manner. Furthermore, cartoon art is a particular form of art drawing. The cartoon form does not aim to replicate reality except as a means of flipping that reality to show an underside of truth that could be unsettling to the viewer but is also offset by humour.