Geelong Grammar School and its Place in Australian History

Former Head of History at Geelong Grammar School, and curator and friend to a host of old boys and girls, Michael Collins Persse has helped to educate some 10,000 youngsters who have passed through its halls and playing fields, over the last 58 years. For many, Geelong Grammar School is a bastion of an elite far removed from ordinary Australians. Yet, for Michael Collins Persse, the boys and girls that have attended the school are an eclectic round-up and each is special in his or her own way. To reflect on the long history of the most prestigious Australian institution and its contribution to Australia’s history, Michael Collins Persse addressed The Sydney Institute on Thursday 23 May 2013.

GEELONG GRAMMAR SCHOOL AND ITS PLACE IN AUSTRALIAN HISTORY 

MICHAEL COLLINS PERSSE 

I am honoured to have been invited to address The Sydney Institute on a subject close to my heart, “Geelong Grammar School and its place in Australian history”. Having served the School since November 1955 in an overlapping succession of roles – mainly as teacher of History and English, Head of History, Keeper of the Archives, author of related articles and books, and now Curator of the School – I have known it “warts and all” for 57 and a half years; and, while I speak as an insider and cannot pretend to objectivity, the place of the School in the larger scheme of things has always intrigued and inspired me.

Indeed, in only my second year on the staff, I wrote a pageant-play, Their Succeeding Race, which was performed by vast numbers of boys in celebration of the School’s first 100 years, and which attempted to weave together (largely in verse) three strands: the School’s own history, that of Australia, and the Divine purposes for humanity (I was only 25, and I suppose correspondingly bold) – seeing the School, if you like, as part of both Australia and the Kingdom of God. I still, incidentally, tend to see it thus: as a church school serving the world for ends both temporal and eternal.

I think I know what a Jesuit headmaster meant, at a conference when everybody else was talking of education for life, when he said, “I believe in education for death.” At Geelong Grammar, defined as an Anglican school (though open to all comers), the aim is a good Anglican blend – educating for both temporal and eternal life: a continual subconsciousness, raised at times to consciousness, of the dimensions beyond Space and Time: an awareness of the absolute importance, and therefore the absolute equality, of every boy and girl committed to our charge, and of their parents and mentors.

To Christians, this is equality in the only sense that ultimately matters, or indeed is practicable: equality as an object of God’s love. And, equally with Christians, to those who would not go so far or be so absolute in professing their aim, it is equality in the deserving of opportunities for fulfilment, both as individuals and as members of the community. To me the School’s highest purpose is in keeping the knowledge – or perhaps the rumour – of God alive. Its motto, Christus nobis factus Sapientia, means: Christ for us became (or was made) Wisdom.

Geelong Grammar School had its small beginnings on or about 1 October 1855, when the Colony of Victoria was four years old, and when 14 boys arrived at a building (now demolished) in Villamanta Street, Geelong, in response to an advertisement. Five Anglican clergymen were the original Founders among whom the senior figure was an Old Harrovian and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Charles Perry, the first Bishop of Melbourne, who had assumed that office in 1847 when the Diocese of Australia was divided into four Dioceses – Sydney, Newcastle, Melbourne, and Adelaide – and William Grant Broughton (founder of The King’s School, Parramatta, my own school as a boy), having hitherto signed his name as “W.G.Australia”, now became merely “W.G.Sydney”. New South Wales was well into its seventh decade as a British colony, Victoria barely started on its third.

From the United Kingdom it all seemed very new, and perhaps still does. King’s is now 182 years old, Geelong Grammar 157; and, although Stowe, Bryanston, Gordonstoun, and a few other famous British schools are still in their first century, and a good many others (such as Marlborough, Wellington, and Clifton) in their second, Eton is in its sixth century, Winchester is in its seventh, Balliol (my own College at Oxford) this year celebrates its 750^th anniversary, and the King’s School, Canterbury (in some sense progenitor of King’s, Parramatta) dates itself from the year 599, two years after the arrival from Rome of the small band of Benedictine monks, led by St Augustine of Canterbury, at the kingdom of Kent to reintroduce Roman Christianity to Britain at the behest of Pope Gregory I (Augustine is the subject of one of the stained-glass windows in our Chapel of All Saints – a vivid reminder of that reintroduction, just as neighbouring windows depicting Saints Patrick and Columba tell of the Celtic Christianity already there).

I like the story of the Australian at Cambridge, well into the twentieth century, who was invited to tea by a good lady of the Victoria League. Having established where he came from, she said, “Ah, you must know my friend, Mr So-and-so. He is the parson out there.” “No, Madam,” replied the undergraduate, “I’m sorry, I don’t. We have two parishes now, and I’m in the other one.”

The tiny school of 1855, starting in the parish of St Paul’s in Geelong but soon moving to that of Christ Church, now has about 1600 pupils, more than 100 times its original population of 14 – and many of these are girls: there were little girls in the Kindergartens earlier, but we first took big ones in 1972 (though one arrived from Canada late in 1971), and in 1976 we became coeducational at all levels with the amalgamation of Geelong Grammar, The Hermitage, and Clyde School. We have virtual parity of numbers between boys and girls in Senior School (Years 10-12, after Timbertop) with eight boarding-houses of between 60 and 70 – four for each gender – and two day-boarding houses (of 57 and 59) for both girls and boys, and so called because, from Monday to Thursday, their school day doesn’t end until 8.30 at night.

Timbertop (Year 9), in the foothills of the Australian Alps near Mansfield, has 126 boys and 102 girls, all of them boarders for that year. Middle School (Years 5-8), which shares the main site at Corio (near Geelong) with Senior School, has 111 boarders (in three houses, two for boys, one for girls) and two day-houses composed of both boys and girls – 143 in all. On two other sites are the preparatory branches of the School: the Toorak Campus (formerly Glamorgan) in Melbourne, embracing Kindergarten to Year 6, and Bostock House in Geelong, which has Kindergarten to Year 4 (there are thus parallel Years 5 and 6 at Corio and in Melbourne).

It is all vastly bigger and more complex than 100 years ago, when the School was in its last year in Geelong before the move in 1914, seven miles out, to Corio, then a bare and often windswept plain. But it is still one school, with one Principal (Mr Stephen Meek), one Vice-Principal (Mr Charlie Scudamore, who doubles as Head of Corio), and a Head for each branch as well as for each house at Corio. The governing body is a Council of about 14 – sometimes called Directors since the School is a company in the legal sense – and they include at least one Anglican cleric and the President of The Old Geelong Grammarians – an important body, formed in 1900 and now including several supporting clubs and 23 regional and overseas branches (the oldest of which is the United Kingdom branch, which has dined annually since 1920).

The Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne is the School’s Visitor. As well as our beautiful Chapel of All Saints at Corio (the first half or more of which was the gift in 1914 of five Old Boys, the Falkiner brothers of Boonoke), the School has also a very beautiful, but very different, Chapel of St John the Baptist at Timbertop, given by Miss Margaret McWhae and built (largely by the boys) in 1958. More than 100 pupils hold scholarships of various kinds, including 19 for Indigenous students (one of these is given by the staff), and all the public funds we receive from Government grants are devoted to scholarships.

There are three Chaplains – two at Corio – and since last October the Senior Chaplain has been, for the first time, a woman priest, the Reverend Eleanor O’Donnell. Although Anglican in foundation and ethos, the School contains members of many other denominations (especially the Roman Catholic) and of several other faiths – Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and so on. At Corio and Timbertop all come together for the weekday and Sunday services, and those who choose to be readers, servers, or House Chapel Captains are often from other faiths. I think of the very first of several hundred Thai pupils to attend the School, in 1947, Kasem Kasemsri (later his country’s Foreign Minister), whose mother, a royal princess, said to the Headmaster, James Darling (who was deeply moved by her words), “Kasem is a Buddhist, but I want him to experience the beauty of the Christian religion as well.”

The growth of the School’s Asian connections can be seen as the fourth of seven major steps so far in its progress to what it is now – still in active and vibrant evolution. The first was the gradual predominance of boarders, evident by the 1870s, and the simultaneous growth of a character that was unconventional among schools deriving from the English “public” or independent school tradition. This character reflected that of the second Headmaster, John Bracebridge Wilson, who held that office for nearly 33 years from the revival of the School in 1863 after a temporary closure. Wilson steadily established it on lines still evident today, until his death in 1895.

He was the son of a Norfolk parson who was himself a younger son in a peerage family, the Lords Berners, descended from King Edward III, and he and Canon Goodman, vicar of Christ Church for half a century, devised for the School a Coat of Arms – or more strictly a Badge – whose Shield bears, in two of its quarters, the Royal Lions (or Leopards) as in Wilson’s own Arms, and in its other quarters the Southern Cross. Thus our Badge (often miscalled a Crest) symbolises at once the Old World and the New. The Anglo-Australian character thus suggested is fairly persistent, although the School now contains boys and girls from every Continent of the world (except Antarctica).

Wilson was a layman (in itself unusual for a church school in the nineteenth century) and a marine biologist of distinction (a Fellow of the Linnaean Society). Religion, to him, was something better caught than taught. He would sometimes take boys in his yacht, out into Port Phillip, collecting mollusca and algae, and over the Bay to his property at Sorrento to work in his laboratory there (he raised the money, and gave the land, to build St John’s Church at Sorrento in 1873). He encouraged boys to roam and ramble in the Bellarine Peninsula, and a tradition developed of Saturday Parties – expeditions from dawn till dusk – that survived the move to Corio and from 1953 was channelled into Timbertop, with much longer hikes and a more formal study of the natural world.

Like many others from gentle and noble families, Wilson had not been to school himself but was privately tutored for entry to St John’s College, Cambridge. Thus, although he knew from contemporaries there a good deal about the recent reforms in the Public Schools emanating from Thomas Arnold at Rugby and others, he worked largely from first principles. Central to his school was concern for the individual boy. Each one had his own timetable, different from everyone else’s. A wise and fatherly figure, he was the School’s chief Founder, albeit not an original one except in the sense that he was well ahead of his time.

Incidentally, but not unimportantly, Wilson was one of five among the so far eleven Heads of the School (now called Principal) who have been sons of Anglican clergy, even though only two have been in Holy Orders themselves. One other is a son of a medical missionary. I am reminded of the prevalence of “clergyman” as the avocation of the father of so many post-Reformation men and women who have attained distinction enough to warrant entry in the now 62 volumes of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography – ahead of doctors, soldiers, lawyers, and others. We owe much to the good upbringing, literacy, conversation, and care for others typical of rectory, vicarage, and manse at their best.

Nine, too, of the eleven have been English by birth, the exceptions being the one Old Geelong Grammarian among them, Lister Hannah, Principal from 1994-99 (who is Australian, though born in Africa – and has headed six schools in six countries), and John Lewis, a New Zealander, who after 14 years at Geelong Grammar returned to Eton in 1994 as its Head Master for the next eight years. It is not, of course, the policy of the School to appoint Englishmen – or, indeed, men: rather, the person best fitted to the needs of the time in the judgement of the Council. Not the least of Geelong Grammar’s services to Australia – and farther afield – has been the provision of educational leaders: more than 100 of its staff have gone on to head secondary schools or university colleges in five Continents. Examples are Jeremy Madin and Nick Sampson, successive Headmasters of Cranbrook here in Sydney.

The second big step in the School’s progress was the move to Corio in 1914, made possible by the generosity of benefactors typical of the School community throughout its history. A corollary was the near-trebling of its boy population to about 350 by the time, in 1930, that the second very long (and also very influential) headmastership began when the 30-year-old James Darling succeeded the Reverend Dr Francis Brown, who had, with grave, somewhat austere, dignity and meticulous attention to every detail, seen the School through its move after succeeding Leonard Lindon in 1912, and through its first 16 years at Corio. As to him, its most priestly Head, so to all the others – from the Very Reverend George Vance on – the School owes a great debt of gratitude: eleven individuals, very different in almost all except their dedication to the School, and not a dud among them!

The moving and expansion of the School were a result of fresh blood on the Council from 1908, when the first Old Boys became Members, led by William Manifold and Donald Mackinnon, both of them graziers of generous ideals (and pockets) and deep humanity. Many Geelong Grammarians had already gone on to Oxford and Cambridge (where the School’s early fame was as a nursery of oarsmen, especially Steve Fairbairn), and they knew something of what the best English schools were like. Inspiring them was the influence of Wilson and his great assistant from 1875, James Lister Cuthbertson, poet and inspiring teacher of the classics who had also fostered rowing and other sports.

Athleticism in the Public Schools was at its height in the Edwardian era, and Geelong Grammar was not free from it, although it has been only on the river that the School has been consistently strong over a century and more (the last time it claimed a Football premiership was in 1902!). The girls have notably contributed to the rowing since the 1980s. The School has helped to produce many Olympians (as many as nine in the 1956 Games, led by John Landy, then back at the School on its staff). Probably the Old Geelong Grammarian to have had most influence on sport – cricket and polo at any rate – is Kerry Packer, though as entrepreneur rather than player.

In the early decades many sons of graziers and farmers, particularly in Victoria’s Western District, attended the School, and many of these became pioneer settlers in other Australian Colonies, especially Queensland and Western Australia (more than 150 boys came from Western Australia before 1930, usually by sea). By the 1880s it was beginning to be an all-Australian school – and so it remained, to add an international outreach in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1882 Wilson said on Speech Day that there were boys in the School from every one of the six Colonies – and also New Zealand: “We have,” he said, “a beginning of Federation in the School” – an ideal not achieved in the nation for nearly 20 more years.

The contribution to the pastoral industry of families with names such as Armytage, Austin, Beggs, Black, Bostock, Calvert, Chirnside, Chomley, Fairbairn, Falkiner, Henty, Hopkins, Macartney, Manifold, Ritchie, Russell, Staughton, Whittingham, and many more, has been immense; and the School’s part in it a great one. More than 50 descendants of Manifold pioneers, over 70 of Mary and Francis Chomley, over 100 of John and Elizabeth Austin, and more than 150 of George and Elizabeth Armytage have attended Geelong Grammar – names present in almost every generation of its members since at least the 1870s. At least two families, the Pincotts and the Cummings, have now achieved a six-generation connection with the School.

The third great step was the adding, in the 1930s under the inspiration of Darling, of art, craft, music, and drama to the essential offering of the School – all of them brought in from the peripheries of the curriculum to occupy a central role and contribute richly to what Weston Bate, in his (1990) history of the School, Light Blue Down Under, called “a little Athens”. The Art School was built in 1937, the Music School (one of many gifts from the Bell and Biddlecombe family) in 1938 – each a pioneer in Australia. Sparta perhaps dominated Athens through the war years, and necessarily so – but not completely. It was in 1942 that Darling rescued the great Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack – an early member of the Weimar Bauhaus and in 1940 a “Dunera boy” – from an internment camp, to be for nearly 16 years a joy and inspiration to our aspiring artists. “It was humbling,” said Darling, “to realise during the war that the most Christian soul among us was a German.” James Fairfax, Daniel Thomas, and Rupert Murdoch were among his pupils – Rupert achieving early fulfilment in the editing of a wonderful literary and artistic journal, If Revived, which was the post-war successor to If, in which the early poetry of John Manifold and Michael Thwaites was published.

It was during the war years, too, that the young Manning Clark coached cricket and inspired many of the brighter boys, such as Jamie Mackie and Tim Burstall. Darling believed in a variety of talents and outlooks on the staff, and had himself been of a Christian Socialist bent in his salad days (inevitably tempered by the demands of the headmastership). The strong literary tradition in the School had taken a largely leftwards turn in the 1930s through the writings of such boys as John Manifold, Geoffrey Dutton, and Stephen Murray-Smith (Michael Thwaites – Rhodes Scholar, Newdigate Prizewinner at Oxford, King’s Medallist for Poetry in 1939 – was an exception), although in politics only Richard Marles, in our own time, has represented the Labor Party in the Federal Parliament, where more than 20 Geelong Grammarians of more conservative views have served, though some of them, such as Sir John Gorton, like (say) Sir Rupert Hamer as Premier of Victoria, have been distinctly small-l in their Liberalism. Other notable Federal Ministers have included the great Charles Hawker and James Fairbairn – both tragically killed in air accidents at the age of 43 – and Sir Alexander Downer, Sir David Fairbairn, and Alexander Downer the Younger – not to mention many in Colonial and State Parliaments, and some in those of other nations: there was a time recently when the Foreign Ministers of Australia, Malaysia, and Thailand were all Old Geelong Grammarians.

The remaining “great steps” can be mentioned briefly. The fourth – the growing Asian connection – was farsighted in its early years: mainly Thai in the 1950s (when Mechai Viravaidya, Senator and promoter of contraception, and Prince Chatri Yukol, a famous film director, were at the School), mainly Malaysian in the 1960s (in both these countries Old Geelong Grammarians have held highly responsible positions – headships of Thai government departments, in Malaysia the throne), and since then embracing many nations including South Korea, Japan, China, Indonesia, and Nepal. The School’s contribution to Papua New Guinea has been considerable, through support of The Martyrs’ Memorial School, and through the leadership of Professor Glen Liddell Mola in surgery and the training of surgeons.

The fifth step, taken in 1953, was the foundation of Timbertop, the original pioneer in its field and still almost unique in the range and extent of its programme towards connecting the young with the natural world: to its founder, Sir James Darling, it was primarily a place for spiritual development. Because, when Prince Charles was entrusted to us for most of 1966, he was placed by the Head Master, Tommy Garnett, basically at Timbertop (though he was also at Corio from time to time), that branch of the School attained worldwide fame (the Prince of Wales’ book Harmony expresses beautifully the ideals that animate the School as a whole and Timbertop in particular). Like our Art and Music Schools, Timbertop has inspired not only many individuals but also many other schools towards a richer education in the joy and fullness of living.

The sixth step was coeducation, towards which – among schools of our kind (independent and boarding) – Geelong Grammar was the first in Australia to change, three years after Marlborough in England, which began to take girls in 1968. Tommy Garnett prepared the way for it while head at Marlborough, and implemented it at Geelong Grammar. His successor, the Honourable Charles Fisher, then (in his too short time with us before his death in a car accident) led the way into full coeducation. Many Australian schools, especially in Victoria, have followed – I believe to their benefit and that of the great majority of their pupils.

The seventh and latest step has been the introduction since 2008 of what is called Positive Education – not in essence a radical innovation, rather a sharpening of focus, an encouragement to build on existing strengths rather than agonize over weaknesses, a fostering of resilience in the face of difficulty and incipient despair. It is leading, I believe (and all the evidence points that way: a book is being prepared on the subject) towards a greater vibrancy, an access of simple happiness – though Geelong Grammar has always, in my experience, been a comparatively happy community: by and large, a gentle, tolerant, and civilising one by contrast with the more “macho” norms.

Of course we have had, from time to time, our bullies: boys of a thuggish kind, girls who subtly exclude and humiliate those who think and behave in “uncool” ways. But they have not been the norm and, increasingly I believe, the culture of the School both discourages such tendencies and fosters a spirit of forgiveness when they appear (the bullies, of course, needing understanding and help no less than their victims). Corio and Timbertop being on country sites, we have been comparatively free from the problems caused by drugs in many city schools.

The School’s place in Australian history is not easy to define briefly since it is in many ways a fairly exotic bloom in the Australian landscape and liable to be stereotyped as “privileged”, “elitist”, and with other clichés by some who, without really knowing the School, are hostile to it. I have suggested ways in which it has been a beacon educationally. In general, however, its place derives from the respect, and often love, created by the characters and contributions of those who have been educated there – that is to say, drawn out towards a fullness of being.

There are many among them who have achieved distinction – Peter Carey in literature, for instance, or John Landy and Craig Mottram in athletics, General Sir John Hackett as both soldier and author, Alistair Crombie (historian and philosopher of science) and several others who as Fellows of Oxford or Cambridge Colleges have advanced learning (they include Lord Broers, first full-time Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, in the field of electronics), several Fellows of the Royal Society, an exceptional number of diplomats including Peter Henderson and Richard Woolcott (both Secretaries of the Department of Foreign Affairs) and Sir David Hay (Administrator of New Guinea, Secretary of Aboriginal Affairs), Sir Russell Drysdale as a painter, James Fairfax and David Roche as patrons of art, Sir Brian Inglis and Sir Rod Carnegie and Hugh Morgan as leaders of industry, Sir John Young as a great Chief Justice, Phoebe Fraser (now Wynn-Pope) through Care Australia, Missie Higgins through her songs, Bob Skene in polo, Geoffrey McFadden in medical research, Tony Holmes in maxillo-facial surgery, and so on (a book by Old Geelong Grammarians on 100 of them is in preparation). But the same is true  of Scotch College, Melbourne Grammar, Sydney Grammar, Cranbrook, King’s, Ascham, Frensham, Churchie, St Peter’s, and other great Australian schools.

What perhaps constitutes the special contribution of Geelong Grammarians has been the faithful, lifelong, and characteristically unsung service of their communities, including many rural ones: a continuation in democratic Australia of a long tradition defined recently by Adam Nicolson in his book Gentry about families through 600 years of English history who have exemplified the characteristics and qualities of those embraced by that word. Perhaps Geelong Grammar’s rather special place in Australian history derives mainly from the transmission and fostering, through ever-changing circumstances, of such a tradition: tolerant, idiosyncratic, with wide interests (as Sir James Darling said of Charles Hawker, “able to converse equally of sheep and Keats”), and contributors to their communities (Darling in particular fostered a sense of public duty).

I used to hear people say, “You can tell a Geelong Grammarian by his manners” (meaning, I think, good ones). I believe it is still essentially true, if by “manners” is meant  not so much an outward show of care and consideration (though that usually follows) as the simplicity and straightforwardness of address, the inner disposition of friendliness, concern, and potential love, which treats others with respect and sees all whom it encounters as potential brothers or sisters. If I am right, the School’s place in Australian history is not so much one of power as of influence – like that of a stream which, flowing both above and beneath the ground, brings life and health to the land through which it flows.