SOME BACKGROUNDING

With a reputation as a finishing school, Frensham has played host to the daughters of some of our leading political and business figures. But VALERIE LAWSON discovers even this exclusive institution is feeling the effects of the recession. 

THE daughters of Neville Wran, Gough Whitlam and Sir Billy McMahon, and the granddaughter of Sir Robert Menzies, all have something in common other than fathers or grandfathers on the political stage. ......................... All four are old girls of one of Australia's most exclusive institutions -Frensham - the girls high school in the NSW Southern Tablelands whose reputation and fees are much greater than its enrolment of just 280 students. ......................... Depending on your point of view, Frensham is either an antipodean version of a Swiss finishing school, a haven for city drop-outs, or the most enlightened school in Australia. ......................... Among the satisfied fathers and fee payers are Mark Burrows of Baring Bros Burrows, and Lloyd Waddy QC, former Frensham governor and national convener for Australians for a Constitutional Republic. Burrows' daughter Sasha is head girl. Waddy booked in his three girls at birth. His eldest daughter has graduated but he still has two girls there. ......................... Frensham takes perverse pride in nurturing a non-competitive spirit, which is why the school is traditionally known as a breeding ground for young ladies who excel in caring - caring for others - nannies, wives and mothers. ......................... "It's not like that now," chorus the generation of women under 30, former Frensham girls like Clayton Utz's Alexandra Kincross, Blake Dawson Waldron's Sarah Dulhunty and arts graduate Airlie Hawley (nee McCarthur Onslow) who achieved an HSC scaled mark in the top 2 per cent of NSW in the late 1980s. ......................... Among the better known graduates of the 80-year-old school are Rosemary Foot, Judge Jane Mathews of the NSW Supreme Court, barrister Sylvia Emmett(Sir Laurence Street's daughter), Sir Vincent Fairfax's daughters, Ruth and Sally, historian Martha Rutledge who works with the ANU's Australian Dictionary of Biography publishing project, jeweller Darani Lewers, Women's Electoral Lobby founding member, Liz Fell, Joan Masterman, poets Rosemary Dobson, Judith Wright and Anne Fairbairn, Judy White ( ......................... nee Crossing) of Belltrees, Jillian Oppenheimer, the vice-president of the NSW National Trust, and the late Nancy Keesing, the writer. ......................... Frensham is more than a school, it's a slightly eccentric slice of England, whose founders' names seem to spring directly from British repertory theatre circa 1928 - Miss Winifred West and Miss Phyllis Clubbe. ......................... For pupils, parents and teachers, Frensham can be a cloistered community which many enter and never really leave, much like a nunnery. ......................... A rich nunnery. ......................... To send a daughter to Frensham you have to have enough money to face the regular accounts without flinching. The annual fee for a boarder in years 11 and 12 is $15,580 and for a day girl, $8,410. ......................... Like many other institutions, especially educational institutions, Frensham is in a tight spot at the moment, with the recession knocking enrolment numbers and some parents questioning just what they are getting for their education dollar. ......................... Says headmistress Miss Cynthia Parker: "Our numbers in year 7 are less than we would like and we're also seeing a decrease in year 11. Traditionally, we've seen children enter school here for the last two years." ......................... This was the mid-20th-century tradition, - the Frensham boarding school"finish" in the country. ......................... The 1992 accounts of Winifred West Schools Ltd, which incorporates Frensham, Sturt, (a professional crafts centre at Mittagong), and the primary co-educational school Gib Gate, show a small operating profit of $484,000. Income from school fees was $4.9 million and directors reported: "Since the end of the financial year and in response to the general economic climate, enrolments at both Frensham and Gib Gate have declined with a consequent reduction in revenue." ......................... The chairman of Winifred West Schools board, David Uther, who runs pharmaceutical, lighting, and wine and spirit companies, says that the school now has 60 day students from the southern highlands district and that Camden is a growing catchment area. ......................... The school appeals to younger families who've made a lifestyle move out of Sydney. The board hopes it might be able to establish a boys only high school in the area which is now only served by co-educational colleges Chevalier and Oxley and by the local high schools. ......................... Mr Uther and his deputy Ron Graham, chief manager, human resources at the AMP, chaired the committee which has just found a new head for Frensham, Miss Ann Schavemaker, a former Frensham teacher who is now deputy head at St Anne's in Windermere in Britain. ......................... After 26 years as headmistress, Miss Parker is to retire at the end of this year. Born in Kent, educated in Nottinghamshire, Miss Parker was an outstanding classical dance student until her body grew too big for ballet. She enrolled at Bedford's Physical Training College, taught in Britain, then, when, her mother died suddenly of cancer, her father told her: "'There's no way you have to look after an old man', which I thought was the most terrible thing I ever heard. But how right he was." ......................... She saw an ad in The Times Educational Supplement, and, in a move which she thought of almost as "going to the moon", she applied for a teaching job at Frensham. After five years in the job, Miss Parker returned to Britain in the mid-60s. But, when Miss Phillis Bryant retired in 1965 after 28 years as head, Miss Parker was invited back as acting head. ......................... On her retirement on the eve of her 60th birthday, she too, like many of her fellow teachers, will join the little community of former staff members who live in a colony called Petticoat Lane at Mount Gibraltar, known to the students as the Gib. ......................... Cynthia Parker is only the fourth head of Frensham in 80 years, in effect the third, if you discount the brief, unhappy two years in the mid-1960s between Miss Bryant and Mrs Catherine Sandberg, whom one glimpses in the autobiography of journalist ......................... Elisabeth Wynhausen, Manly Girls. ......................... Wynhausen, a Frensham teacher in the 1960s, recalls "a fashionable if decrepit private school" and Miss Sandberg as "a rangy woman with cropped hair and an ill-fitting, intimate manner. On her bad days, there were rare, dangerous silences and people tippy-toed past her lair, opposite the staffroom, where the teachers sat frozen in readiness for her entrance". ......................... Wynhausen was put in charge of West, "the school's most ancient pile of perforated brick where 52 girls slept in a dormitory half sheltered from the elements by canvas blinds". ......................... Thirty years on, the dormitories are cosier but the architecture of the newer sleeping blocks is no more inspiring. They resemble a clump of brick country motels rating one star in the NRMA guide. Frensham's real showpiece now is the new $1.2 million sports centre with special flooring, exercise bikes, dance studio, aerobics classes and floor space big enough for any sport or gym event. ......................... The centre, named after Cynthia Parker, was built with money raised through a building appeal chaired by Frensham governor Dr Tim Pascoe, former chairman of the Australia Council. It's a strangely odd contrast to the the original school building, the residence of Mr A.W. Tooth of Tooth and Co, and to the school cloisters and pretty garden, all photographed by Harold Cazneaux for a romantic photographic portfolio of the school in 1934. ......................... As the 1988 school history points out, the photographs don't show a school but rather, "under Cazneaux's gaze, it becomes a complex idyll, a blending of English sensibilities, classical forms and pagan fantasies thrust into the rough and tumble pallor of the Australian countryside". ......................... Wynhausen saw it all as "a school founded by a pair of lively eccentrics who had progressive ideas about educating the second sex in an invigorating, indeed freezing, environment, comparable to an English public school ... Frensham's reputation still lured a few blue bloods whose pedigrees conjured up images of thousands of acres and millions of sheep ..." ......................... Prizes, she noted were coloured girdles, "green for hockey, yellow for choir, purple once in a blue moon and, as if all that were not precious enough, irises were occasionally given out to signify a still higher plane of encouragement." ......................... That tradition continues, as does the girls' embrace of (now fashionable)grunge - patched uniforms, belts fastened with safety pins, dirty shoes with untied laces, old woolly jumpers and desert boots. ......................... Hidden behind a protective outer shell, Miss Parker allows only glimpses of the real person behind the headmistress. There's a slight trace of whimsy and hint of a Nottinghamshire accent as she describes the difficulties of her job ......................... Families expect that old traditions will never change - "my goodness, the girls now have hot water" - and the parents' insistence on strict discipline. Unless it is their girl being disciplined. ......................... "We want children to see that truth and honesty are still good qualities. Yet parents will actually tell you a lie to get their own way. What chance have you got to say to a child that lying is not the right thing to do, if a parent will lie for a child? ......................... "Yet they still scream for blood if they believe someone's doing something they shouldn't do. 'Why don't you stop all the smoking in the school?' And yet they'll give the child cigarettes. If a child is caught doing something, they'll scream she should be expelled, but not if its their daughter." ......................... Asked whether she encouraged the notion of the first head, Miss Winifred West, that competition with others was something almost evil, Miss Parker said: "Competition has the potential for evil if all you want to do is beat someone else. It would be better to say I want to achieve the best I can do. We ask children to compete against themselves." Yes, but what about the real world out there, where women have to compete with men and each other? ......................... "I don't think women are still competing in many ways. I think there are some areas more suited to a female person and some to a male person. I don't think there are a lot of women who want to dig holes in the ground but, by nature, they might excel in the caring professions." ......................... We moved on to religion, a safer subject, and Miss Parker became more animated. ......................... Frensham, a non-denominational Christian school, named after the home town in Surrey, England of Miss West, starts each day with prayers. Said Miss Parker: "The head of Chevalier (the nearby Catholic school) came here once and he said 'Good God, you pray more than we do |'" ......................... (The school motto is from St Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, "In love serve one another".) ......................... Frensham began through a friendship Miss Winifred West made at a hockey club at Rushcutters Bay, Sydney. There she met Miss Phyllis Clubbe, the daughter of distinguished Sydney surgeon, Dr Charles Clubbe. Together they opened Frensham in Mittagong in 1913; the prospectus promised that its aim would be to help every girl become a "useful and gracious woman". ......................... At the age of 57, after 25 years as head, Miss West stood aside for Miss Phillis Bryant, now 89, who, like the present head, Miss Parker, attended England's Bedford Physical Training College and came to Australia as the manager of a visiting English women's hockey team. ......................... However, Miss West did not go far. She lived on in the school grounds, and received visitors in her old study. ......................... Rosemary Foot, who left the school in 1953, remembers being coached by Miss West personally - "a great woman by anyone's standards". Cathy Williams, a bereavement counsellor, who left the school in 1969, remembers Miss West"turning the soil, growing her irises". ......................... Only five of the 65 girls in her class went on to uni, the rest to the caring professions. In Ms Williams' daughter's year 12 class only five are considering not going to uni. ......................... With that in mind, some parents were surprised that the governors are replacing one head whose highest qualification is a diploma of physical education, with another whose highest qualification is a BA with a diploma in education from Macquarie University. But Miss Schavemaker, despite her name of Dutch origin, has one attribute unique to her future position. She will be the school's first Australian-born principal. *