Staff Profile

When did you join The Friends' School? 

There have been two Friends’ chapters in my life. I first joined the staff when our boys were little. We then left Hobart and, much to our surprise, found ourselves crossing Bass Strait again to return to Hobart three years later. This most recent chapter has been 9 years - the longest I have been anywhere!

What are you excited about this year?

When a new year starts, I’m always excited to get to know the new Year 11 IB Diploma students and my English classes with whom I have the privilege of walking this path. 

When did you know you wanted to work in education? 

I had the immense good fortune of having my gap year, last century (!), in South Africa. At that time the place I was based was a homeland called Transkei. It certainly opened my eyes to a world vastly different to the one in which I had grown up. Apartheid was still in place in the R.S.A. but the Group Areas Act did not apply within homelands and so I had the incredible experience of living in a small town with a raft of people from all around the world and, of course, many Xhosa people for whom Transkei was home. I used to help out at a primary school and it was then that I realised how much I loved working with students. Race relations, of course, dominated daily life which caused me to have an even bigger realisation: that I knew so little about the fraught history of my own country. I recall ringing my (somewhat perplexed) father to tell him I had made a terrible mistake and that he had to ring up the university and get me out of Commerce and into Arts where I intended to study every subject I could from Indigenous linguistics to Koori History to post-colonial literature. I didn’t realise I was setting myself up for a life in education - in my mind I was just getting the education I should have had. 

Where is your favourite place in the world? 

That’s a tough question - I have several favourite places. We used to live on the Yungngora community - Noonkanbah - in the Great Sandy Desert and that was one of the most humbling landscapes in which I have lived. The farm on which I grew up in the Riverina also holds a very special place in my heart. But I think my favourite place in the world is probably the south coast of NSW. That stretch of coast between Tathra and Narooma is a stunning part of the world.

Who is your Hero?

My beautiful mother and father are the people to whom I have always looked up. They were the very best kind of people: humble, community-minded, compassionate, decent, loving.