Blaze e-catalogue - Catalog - Page 18
Introduction
Secondary education
The opportunity to complete a quality secondary education has been a common theme
running through the stories of many Blaze women, past and present. The NSW Public
Instruction Act, 1880 reformed the education system and established single sex public
secondary schooling with curricula oriented towards university admission and the
professions. Through the Act, Sydney Girls High School was inaugurated in 1883, and this
began a tradition of quality education for girls. Professor Bashir attended Sydney Girls High
School in the 1940s, following in the footsteps of her mother who was a student during
Lucy Garvin’s tenure as headmistress:
I had the great benefit of going to a superb school. I always wanted to go to the
school which my mother had attended, which was Sydney Girls High School.
I had enormously inspirational teachers. They were superb, both in Latin, in French,
in mathematics. And they were encouraging but also there to support you to strive
for excellence.
Ms Hoddinott has also recalled her secondary school days:
I had the good fortune to have a strong public education. I went to North Sydney
Girls High. I had teachers who understood that I wasn’t a conventional sort of child
and who were able to extend my education beyond the classroom.
Jane Spring, an Executive Director within the NSW Department of Industry, Skills and
Regional Development, credits her all-girls school, Ravenswood, where she spent three
‘pressure cooker’ years, for enabling her to study Economics and Law at university.
For Ms Armstrong, Methodist Ladies College (Melbourne) ‘was a great learning environment.
You were encouraged to do all sorts of things. You were taught there were no boundaries
for women’. Dr Anderson credits her teachers at Taree High School with imbuing within her
a love of learning.
Deputy Secretary, Social Policy at the NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet, Mary Ann
O’Loughlin AM, and Dr Kanga each attended Catholic girls’ schools. There, nuns encouraged
academic achievement and female empowerment. Having been awarded an exchange
scholarship, Dr Dearing completed her secondary schooling in Upstate New York and
subsequently developed a keen interest in architecture at Syracuse University. For Ms Tydd,
‘the discussion, the dynamic environment of new ideas and new thinking’ that occurred
in the 1970s during her time at a traditional Catholic secondary school, led to her lifelong
interest and investment in education.
If formal schooling was a foundation stone to the success of many past and present
Blaze women, the experience of Pearl Gibbs (1901–1983) differs. For Gibbs and other
Aboriginal women, their childhoods were determined by government policies and
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