Good evening,
Noting that it is mid-May already and that it is some months since the ‘FRENSHAMgovernors' sent out a missive telling us that they were actively considering Sturt’s future and that we would be hearing from them soon etc. etc. The silence is deafening.
Clearly, the FRENSHAMlawyers are picking over what’s left of Sturt’s legacy/ies (the bones and the carrion?) in the hope of gleaning something and heading off anything that might be taken as a resurrected ‘Sturt’ given all the implications – philosophically and financially. Moreover, recent developments relative to the national CULTURALlandscape are quite probably a concern as well.
The ‘institution’ that Winifred West founded and built, Winifred West Schools Ltd, for all its promise has changed. Notwithstanding, the intended ‘schools’ purpose for being has transmogrified, and the Sturt idea has become something that would give Winifred West cause to despair – a dream held, a miracle realised, a legacy left, and an endowment squandered and lost.
The Frensham motto "In Love Serve One Another”, on the evidence, has been sullied, and sadly, it remains as hollow rhetoric and a kind of window dressing.
The ‘pausing’ of Sturt is something the adherents to the status quo put to work in a CULTURALmindset where the likes of Machiavelli preside as HIGHpriests. It was, and remains, a dastardly act, unforeseen as it was and delivered without anything vaguely resembling GOODwill. It was as if someone had read of Winifred West's musing in 1940s on the prospect of Sturt “going phutt” and said under their breath, ‘ now that’s a thought’.
Sturt was an experiment, and it was for many illuminating for all of that. The FRENSHANgovernors have shut all that down and euphemistically they’ve turned off the lights at the switch and then cut the power and water.
For so many Winifred West made a place where ‘making mattered’ albeit in the language of her time she used different words. In her memory we might ‘make something’ on say the second Saturday in October and do it with friends and especially with children. Making ‘stuff’ is what makes us human, and the making could be sharpening a stick, creating a bowl, fashioning a seat, or making something quite grand. Interestingly, no matter where we are social media allows us to share our making and to muse on making and how it matters.
We might all give a thought to those who were enlisted on what now looks for all the world like a cynical charade and a process set up to fail.
So, in the memory of an ideal, a concept, a life well lived, a place made and more still we might be together making something and keeping something alive through the sharing of our making. Wherever we happen to be and in making something we might need, something we might be able to ‘make’, we honour memories, and the makers in lives – and simply being in the world. One wonders just who among THEgovernors might value ‘making’ given where we are at!
Materials and resource in their realities plus, and in placemaking plus, imagination and need has given us many useful, and sometimes wondrous things. Imagination without skill gives us astounding things too but it is the making that matters most.
Consider what might be done yet, but let us honour the making.
Ray Norman
Sturt alumni , Cultural Producer,
Cultural Geographer, Researcher
