The Third Lilley Oration—Ms Elizabeth Jameson AM (Head Girl, 1982)
'Beware the Ides of March!'
Every good student of History, Drama, Literature—or life—knows well these five auspicious words. Styled by Shakespeare into a poetically pithy catchphrase in Julius Caesar (1) they are sourced back further to 1st century Greek Philosopher and Historian, Plutarch. In Parallel Lives Plutarch biographs the lives of great figures from Greek and Roman history, including Julius Caesar. He records in Chapter 63 that a seer (or soothsayer) had warned Julius Caesar to no avail of impending doom on the Ides (or 15th) of March. As history records, Julius Caesar was indeed murdered on the Ides of March by a cabal of Senators, in cold blood and in plain view, in the Roman Senate (2).
At Brisbane Girls Grammar School, the Ides of March has another significance entirely. It is the School’s Foundation Day. The Ides of March, as a millenia-old symbol of doom and downfall, seems an unfortunate date for celebration of the foundation of the school. Or is it? As we commence the school’s sesquicentenary year, I suggest the opposite. Monday 15 March 1875 was a strangely propitious, even if serendipitous, date for the opening of this school doors for the first time.
It is a great honour to be invited to deliver this Oration. I have made plenty of speeches in my life but an ‘oration’ is another matter entirely. Deriving from Latin (how apt!) definitions of ‘oration’ variously use words like ‘formal’, ‘serious’ and 'ceremonial’. My personal favourite definition is found in Merriam-Webster: an elaborate discourse delivered in a formal and dignified manner.
The first two Lilley Orations were matters of high-minded discourse delivered by eminent persons. The first was delivered on the school’s Foundation Day in March 1997 by then Chief Justice of Queensland, the Honourable JM Macrossan AC. The second, three years later, on Foundation Day in the year 2000, marked the school’s 125th birthday. It was delivered by Dr Cherrell Hirst AO, the chair of the board from 1996 to 2006, the first woman to do so more than 120 years after the school’s inception. Much as I do not instantly associate myself with the concept of ‘formal discourse’, I take very seriously the honour of following in those large sets of footsteps and will try to do justice to this Oration in my own way.
The Oration was named in honour of Sir Charles Lilley KCMG. He looms large in our history, that of Brisbane Grammar School and of early Queensland. But let me get one thing straight. Just because the Oration is named in honour of Sir Charles Lilley, it does not honour him. At least, not him alone.
Lilley’s story is many times more fascinating and colourful than the forbidding surviving images of him suggest. He immigrated in the late 1850s as a young lawyer to the Moreton Bay settlement in the British colony of New South Wales, which had, until just the prior decade, been a penal colony. Lilley quickly became a keen advocate for a separate Queensland colony and was elected to its first Parliament formed in 1860. He quickly became the first Government’s Attorney General and later Premier (1868-1870). Later still he served for almost 15 years as Queensland’s Chief Justice. Lilley is credited with being perhaps THE key founder of both Brisbane Grammar Schools (3).
Having served on the board of trustees of Brisbane Grammar School since its foundation in 1868, Lilley is credited by some accounts with having ‘cajoled’ his fellow trustees (a nicer way of saying ‘hectored’) into establishing a girls’ branch of the school in 1875. He then continued to advocate for its separation from BGS which finally occurred 7 years later in 1882, by which time Lilley was chair of the two boards of trustees. His name is used in our history in hushed and hallowed tones as is that of his successor board chair, Sir Samuel Walker Griffith.
But as we enter our sesquicentenary year, are we really expected to accept meekly that the school’s founders were all men? Of course not. Just that the visible ones were. Reflecting the same centuries-old gender inequity between the education of boys and of girls, obviated by the foundation of schools like BGGS, society of its time largely wrote women out of history. I am confident that Sir Charles Lilley—champion of equal education for boys and girls—would be the first to agree that such poppycock cannot be allowed to stand in the 21st century. Sir Charles would be pleased, I’m sure, to think that his name is used instead to honour the great many invisible women in our own story.
In our 21st century hearts and minds then, the Lilley Oration ought also honour his wife, formerly Sarah Jeays, whose name is attached to this school’s Lady Lilley Gold Medal, awarded annually to the school Dux. It must honour the five BGGS-educated daughters of Charles and Sarah—Annie, Ethel, Gertrude, Sybil and Grace. Andmost assuredly it honours Charles and Sarah’s granddaughter, Kathleen Mitford Lilley. ‘Bloss’ as she was affectionately known by generations of Grammar Girls, was a BGGS Old Girl and the school’s longest-serving Principal, serving 27 years from 1925 to 1952, the 11th in an unbroken line of 16 exceptional women Principals over 150 years.
At a personal level for me today, the Oration also honours Janet and Kathie Jeays. The Jeays sisters are great granddaughters of Lady Lilley’s brother, and both were recipients of the Lady Lilley Gold Medal for Dux of the School—Janet in 1978 and her younger sister, Kathie, in 1982 (my final year) following in the footsteps of their own mother, Anne Bardsley, who had received the Medal in 1948.
Understanding this context, Sir Charles Lilley—husband of Lady Sarah Lilley, grandfather of Kathleen Mitford Lilley and more—was, without question radical and progressive for his time in ways that are virtually lost on modern minds. In the first Lilley Oration, Chief Justice Macrossan described Lilley almost dismissively as ‘a reformer and innovator’ with ‘a strange lack of restraint and a deficiency in judgement which in the end brought him down’.
Lilley’s so-called ‘lack of restraint’ and ‘deficiency in judgment’ appears, although was not explained, to relate to his admittedly colourful character and the poignantly controversial end to his tenure as Chief Justice (4). But ironically the ‘reformer and innovator’ in him was arguably even more controversial at the time. It is perhaps unsurprising to see these two sides to one character residing together. It is difficult to imagine a ‘reformer and innovator’ who is unprepared to swim against the tide of norms and prejudices of the day with what some might indeed regard as a ‘lack of restraint and deficiency of judgment’. Arguably these might even be essential characteristics to the achievement of any revolutionary change.
Concepts of free universal primary education and equal secondary education for girls and boys do not seem so revolutionary to us here in our nice hermetically sealed Gehrmann Theatre at BGGS in 2025. They are privileges hardly warranting a second thought in today’s world. Not so in 1870s Brisbane. These ideas appeared outright dangerous to many of Lilley’s community and peers.
Surprising to some, Queensland was, in fact, the first of the Australian colonies to offer free universal primary education to its children. This arose from the recommendations of the Education Royal Commission in 1874. Its recommendations are credited by one historian resulting from the sometimes ‘headstrong, disputative demeanour’ (5) of the Commission’s chair, Sir Charles Lilley. Not even ‘cajoling’ and ‘hectoring’ are strong enough words apparently for Lilley’s efforts to secure support for the recommendations from his many fellow Commissioners with their vastly disparate views on the topic.
That girls should have access to equal educational opportunities with their brothers is a given today. It is almost glibly accepted by some as a universal human right, as if it really exists. One of my personal heroes is Mulala Yusufzai. She was born just three months after Chief Justice Macrossan delivered the first Lilley Oration in 1997. Almost thirty years later, the Malala Fund reminds us that this so-called universal right is still far from a reality with around 120 Million girls missing out on education. No doubt many of that number are scattered throughout our own Queensland communities.
This is not to underestimate the equally alarming concern for boys who miss out on education so much as it serves to remind us that Lilley’s dream is still a work in progress. As Living Treasure, Sir David Attenborough, asserted in his 2020 book, A Life on Our Planet, the number one solution to arresting the ecological decline and inhabitability of our planet is educating girls, in order to stabilise and contain our population on Earth (6).
Consider then the vastly less populous Queensland into which this school was born. The early history of Queensland, of my beloved hometown of Brisbane and of our school, is a stark and sometimes uncomfortable reminder that early Queensland was very much a British colonial outpost. Successive board members and chairs, including Lilley, were British imports. So too successive ‘Lady Principals’.
By the time our doors were opened in 1875, only 16 years had passed since the separation of Queensland from the British colony of New South Wales. The federated nation of Australia was still over 25 years into the future. Hence even the daughters and sons born into the colony were still British subjects and citizens. With an immigrant colonialist population estimated at around 170,000 (7) Queensland enjoyed an outlook that one modern historian has described as ‘glittering and safe’ (8).
All this in only 50 years since John Oxley sailed up the eastern coastline and into the watercourse still then known to its local Turrbal inhabitants as Maiwar, to the fertile and beautiful place called Meanjin, or ‘the place of the blue water lilies’. In the intervening 50 years, the indigenous population, estimated by Turrbal accounts today at over 3000 prior to Oxley’s arrival (9), had been all but annihilated in tragic massacres forming part of what are now known as the Australian Frontier Wars, with the survivors mostly relocated to the Barambah Reserve, later to be known as Cherbourg.
Against this backdrop, BGGS was established. This was 13 years before the Presbyterian Ladies College (PLC) in Sydney (1888), 17 years before Ipswich Girls Grammar School (1892) and 18 years before Melbourne Girls Grammar School (1893). Of girls’ schools only PLC in Melbourne claims equal heritage, established also in 1875. And we tip our hat to All Hallow’s in Brisbane, established in 1861, and a handful of other Church-owned girls’ schools in Australia, with even longer heritage.
The idea of the girls’ branch of the Grammar School was, however, quite radically different from even the handful of other girls’ schools of the time. Indeed, the idea was described in The Queenslander newspaper in 1874 as ‘novel’ (10). Its contemporary, Brisbane Courier newspaper (11), reveals only vehement support for, or opposition to, this grand or reprehensible (depending on your perspective) idea of offering a full, classical, liberal and non-denominational secondary education to girls. Some thought it would surely lead directly to the very collapse of the family unit and the decay of society. ‘Beware the Ides of March, Sir Charles Lilley!’ the naysayers might well have said, and probably did.
I smile to imagine the raised voices at the Lilley Family Sunday dinner table as five Lilley girls, their eight BGS-educated brothers and their parents discussed the views of the vehement opponents to the education of girls. Imagine too their joy as they read aloud the quote from Sir Samuel Walker Griffith in the 1881 Brisbane Courier declaring that the 'experiment' represented by the establishment of the girls’ branch of Brisbane Grammar School had been a great success.
Lilley was not technically the first chair of the Board of Trustees of BGGS, but in reality he was. Technically, the first chair was one whose name is rarely heard in accounts of the foundation of BGGS. Sir James Cockle was Chair of the Board when the school first opened its doors in its original George Street premises. So why is this not the Cockle Oration? Why no Cockle House? No Lady Cockle Medal?
As mentioned, BGGS in its first emanation in 1875 was a mere department or ‘branch’ of Brisbane Grammar School, of which Sir James Cockle was Chair. BGGS as ‘Adam’s Rib’ to BGS? As you can well imagine, that was never going to work. At least not for very long. As early as the first ‘Lady Principal’, as she was titled, Mrs Janet O’Connor simply—and quite publicly and vocally—would not tolerate the oversight of the ‘girls’ branch’ of the school by the BGS Headmaster, with BGS Masters 'supervising’ her accomplished Mistresses teaching the girls. O’Connor resigned—twice in fact—in high dudgeon and departed within 18 months of having arrived in Queensland and at BGGS. The next two Lady Principals, Sarah Cargill and Mary Mackinlay, were subjected to the same scrutiny by the BGS Headmaster, not even being invited to Board meetings to report on the progress of the girls branch of the school.
The first Lady Principal to answer directly to a discrete BGGS Board of Trustees, chaired by Sir Charles Lilley, after the separation of the schools in 1882 was none other than Sophia Beanland. In her excellent 2013 BGGS history, Educating Girls, Erica McWilliam says of Miss Beanland that:
Charles Lilley had been looking for a lady of high attainment and refinement, well grounded in Latin, with a knowledge of Euclid, algebra, French or German, with experience in tuition and not younger than 27 to fulfil the position of Lady Principal (12).
As explored in Pauline Harvey-Short’s excellent 2011 historical account To Become Fine Sportswomen, Miss Beanland believed keenly in ‘giving equal attention to the education of both body and mind’ for the young women at BGGS (13) as academic and ‘domestic’ studies (yes, they took needlework!) were supplemented with all manner of physical exercise. In her seven year tenure, Sophia Beanland oversaw the move of the school from the pokey Wickham Terrace rooms they then occupied to the Gregory Terrace site it occupies today, and the opening of the Richard Gailey-designed Main building.
Sophia Beanland initially secured the use of the boys’ gymnasium and then, with little support—and at times outright obstruction—from some of her own trustees (14) she raised funds to build the school’s first gymnasium in 1888. She also developed the school’s first reference library and hence the collection still bears her name to this day. It is hard to believe that Sophia Beanland only remained for seven years in the school, her mark on it was so significant. Clearly, the reverse was true also. She retired home to England but bequeathed her entire personal estate to the school after her death 25 years later. BGGS clearly has a way of getting under your skin, into your blood, your breath and your bones.
What emerged in colonial Queensland was a form of Grammar School that was, and still is today, both uniquely Queensland and yet also ubiquitously associated with former British colonies around the globe. So-called ‘grammar schools’ have their roots in medieval England. They were established to teach Latin grammar—hence grammar schools—to those seeking education as priests and monks, requiring a full understanding of Latin. In England and Europe over time, grammar schools were typically established by churches and church-associated charitable endowments (15).
In Queensland, however, the ‘grammar school’ took on a truly unique persona. Here the schools are more closely associated with Government than anywhere else in Australia, and possibly the world. Unlike any other Australian State, Queensland’s ten Grammar Schools (of which eight survive today) were formed by and under a dedicated Act of Parliament. In fact, the Grammar Schools Act was just the 7th Bill of the very first Queensland Parliament in 1860 (16). The Act opened with a Preamble that recited its purpose being to 'establish public Grammar Schools in the Colony of Queensland' (emphasis added) it being 'expedient for the encouragement of learning'.
Cherrell Hirst in the Second Lilley Oration also noted that it was Sir Charles Lilley who introduced a private members’ Bill in 1871, for the provision of State scholarships which could be used for students to attend the 'public Grammar Schools' or certain Catholic Schools. The public character of the Queensland Grammar Schools at their roots is surprising to many today when, for all intents and purposes, they are now operated, regarded and funded like all other non-state schools.
Erica McWilliam in Educating Girls puts the historical closeness to Government down to the socio-economic demographics of early Queensland. Unlike Sydney, Melbourne, or indeed ‘Mother England’, McWilliam notes a dearth of wealthy individual benefactors in the early Queensland colony willing and able to underwrite the establishment of grammar schools. Under the 1860 Act, if a local community could raise the sum of 1000 pounds, the Government would contribute up to twice the amount of the starting fund. Not uncontroversially, as Hansard and newspapers of the day reveal, the State also effectively provided Crown land for each grammar school at virtually no cost. Little wonder that the 1860 Act provided for the Government to appoint at least four of the members of the Board of Trustees. Today, 165 years later, the requirement persists.
From its earliest days, this school was therefore a matter of great public interest given the Government’s literal investment in what Sir Samuel Walker Griffith described as the radical 'experiment' of educating girls. Copious public commentary is found in early Queensland newspapers about all aspects of the school’s life. Especially interesting to the public were the recurring ‘stoushes’ between Lady Principals, BGS Headmaster and/or the Board.
Two decades after Mrs Janet O’Connor’s very public departure from the school, the local papers were full of the matter of Miss Eliza Fewings. Miss Fewings’ continuing dispute with a senior member of her staff and then her Board was publicly aired in local newspapers until she was unceremoniously removed from office. In a fascinating sidenote to a fascinating history, Miss Fewings quickly established a competing school for girls in 1899, known as the Brisbane High School for Girls, started with 26 former students of BGGS. Miss Fewings’ school went on to be known as Somerville House.
There were so many other strong, colourful, fierce and fiercely intelligent women to celebrate who have occupied the office—both the physical office and the title—occupied today by Ms Euler Welsh. I honour them all. Personally, I have always had a soft spot for the eccentricities of Milisent Wilkinson. Miss Wilkinson was my Grandmother’s Principal in the 1910s. ‘Wilky’ as my grandmother called her, is remembered by some for appearing at assembly with a colourful parrot on her shoulder and, in the account of one boarder for receiving a lunch tray each day with a 'small bottle of champagne' and, when there was a winter salad on the tray, it being topped with a grated beetroot ‘M’ for Milicent (17).
Kathleen Lilley stands on her own pedestal with her extraordinary 27-year tenure. Sophia Beanland for her equally exceptional seven year tenure. For the almost 50-year period between 1977 and 2025, the school has had three exceptional leaders who hold a special place in my heart—Dr Judith Hancock (my own school Principal), Dr Amanda Bell (who was Principal when I became Board Chair) and Ms Jacinda Euler Welsh (alongside whom it was my privilege to serve for several years before I concluded my term of office). All three have, in their own very different ways, continued the ethos of the radical grammar school for girls founded all those 150 years ago. (For those new to the school, I strenuously deny all rumours that Ms Euler Welsh takes her lunch on a tray with a ‘small bottle of champagne’ and a ‘grated beetroot’ J on top of her winter salad!).
With all these marvellous people and achievements to celebrate surely, then, it is not a case of ‘Beware the Ides of March’ but ‘Behold: The Ides of March’—the school’s Foundation Day! Perhaps. But like most history, much depends on your vantage point.
The male-dominated naysayers of the British colony of Queensland portending that a Girls Grammar School would spell the end of the family unit and the decay of society as they knew it, were largely right…thankfully. Well might they have warned Sir Charles Lilley to ‘Beware the Ides of March!’ But I just can’t help but wonder if the auspicious date of 15 March was quite deliberately chosen for our opening by a wickedly-humoured (and classically grammar school educated) 19th century bureaucrat!
Julius Caesar, ignoring the soothsayer’s warnings, is often taken as a lesson about the hubris and arrogance of a despotic dictator unwilling to accept the limits of his own power, his vulnerability, and his mortality. I do not, of course, cast Sir Charles Lilley as Caesar in our little play set by the banks of Maiwar. Rather he might perhaps be one of the Roman Senators who knew full well that Caesar’s time had come despite all the soothsayers—and the naysayers. Might Lilley, in fact, be cast as Casca who, according to Plutarch, held the knife and struck the first blow into Caesar’s neck?! (18).
I like this idea. The deliberate choice of the Ides of March for our foundation to symbolise the end of the old order of things. If you will indulge me a moment, at this juncture I would like to share my family Grammar story as just one of many thousands that bear testament to Lilley’s actions, even more so than to his vision, demonstrating the end to the old order of things.
My Grandmother attended the school, then Laura Brünnich, in the early 1910s. She adored school and many of her teachers. She told me as much. Often. She lived every day of my journey through BGGS in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I, of course, totally failed to appreciate the privilege of being her granddaughter, raised in a family that took for granted equal education for me and my brothers.
Of course, I now realise that my grandmother, and her two sisters, were but three of a tiny handful of girls to get an education to senior in early 20th century Brisbane. Or the world. After all, the school population rose from only around 100 to only around 130 during the Milicent Wilkinson period from 1900 to 1912. My great-grandparents were exceptional to send all three of their girls to Girls Grammar, just across the fence from their two sons at Boys Grammar. My Great Grandfather was an agricultural scientist who had immigrated to Queensland from Switzerland in the 1880s, meeting his English wife, we believe, on the ship. He worked in the fledgling Queensland sugar industry and later became Queensland’s Chief Agricultural Chemist and founding Director of Agriculture at the new Gatton College.
A chip off that old block, my grandmother loved her botany class with Miss Carson above all others. She knew the name of every conceivable flower or plant, to my amazement as a child. She told me many times that she had wanted to go on to study and become a qualified horticulturalist. Her otherwise progressive father, however, apparently drew the line at this idea. And his word was LAW. A girls’ education was important to make her a well-rounded citizen (and no doubt wife and mother) but she ought not use it, heaven forbid, for work. The die had however been cast. Grandma had both received a Grammar education and met Harold Horn, a scholarship boy from ‘across the fence’. They played in a Grammar School's tennis club—perhaps a later version of the one first started by Miss Beanland in the 1880s. I have thought it might well be my grandmother in the photo from that time, playing on the court established in Miss Wilkinson’s tenure on the western side of the Main Building.
My grandfather was the 10th of 13 children of a boilermaker. He would not have had a secondary schooling education but for winning a State scholarship to study at Brisbane Grammar School. One of those established by the 1871 private members’ Bill introduced by Charles Lilley. He was the first in his family to finish high school, let alone to enter University where he attained a medical degree. After WWI, Laura and Harold married. They had two girls, my mother, Marie, and her sister, Valerie. For reasons that do not advance our story, Mum was sent by her parents NOT to BGGS but to THAT OTHER school across the river. The one established by Miss Eliza Fewings! Suffice to say, she did not choose to send me, her only daughter, to THAT school. But that is another story altogether.
My mother, the daughter of an early 20th-century Grammar boy and Grammar girl, was bright and inquisitive and grew up with a burning determination to become a doctor, like her own father. Times had changed somewhat since her own grandfather forbade her mother to study horticulture. So whilst Mum’s father didn’t support or even like the idea of a girl studying medicine, he knew better than to stand in her way when my mother earned two scholarships to university. She went on to become a paediatrician, specialising in children with intellectual disabilities, and was greatly loved by her patients and their families right until the end of her days at 96, just over two years ago.
I tell this otherwise personal story because I know there are so many others like it. Within two generations of the first Grammar Girl in our family—my Grandmother—it was not an option in my family but for my two brothers and myself to have a full equal education through, if we wanted it, to university degrees and careers. I sometimes wish that my Grandmother had lived long enough for me to tell her that it had not only been possible, but a reality, that her granddaughter could become Chair of the Board of the school—let alone deliver a Lilley Oration!
The gift and the responsibility of Lilley’s vision is that just as we benefit from it we must ‘pay it forward’. I still today feel the debt of gratitude to BGGS for how it shaped my life. Second only to my family of origin, this school (chosen for me by my family of origin) was seminal in my own life and my life choices. I therefore have an enduring responsibility to ‘pay it forward’ however I can. ‘Beware the Ides of March’—the responsibility to pay it forward endures once accepted.
I am grateful that my great grandfather was willing to educate his daughters, even if it inevitably led to that which made him uncomfortable—daughters and granddaughters who could have the same opportunities in the world that sons and grandsons might have. Beware the Ides of March, Great Grandpa? Or … ‘Behold’ it!
We should be grateful to all the great grandfathers and grandmothers who had the courage to break with the norms of that time. Beware the Ides of March, or behold it. Perhaps therein lies the key to the Lilley legacy. Having the courage to be at the forefront of inevitable change even when it frightens us. What might the Lilley Orator at the bicentennial anniversary of this school in 50 years’ time have to say about how proactively we have responded to a world that is today rapidly dissolving gender demarcation at the source rather than only in demanding equal access to educational, career and other opportunities?
As we reflect on the world in which Charles and Sarah Lilley raised their daughters and sons, a world facing immense social upheaval, maybe we ought not think of the Ides of March as signifying doom and downfall at all. Perhaps the date was deliberately chosen for us by that long-forgotten classically grammar-educated bureaucrat, but not because of a wicked sense of humour, but rather a very earnest commitment to the education of girls. After all, long before the assassination of Julius Caesar, the Ides of March marked the Feast Day of Anna Perenna, Roman Goddess of cycles of renewal and connections to the past. The Feast was a cause for great celebration in March, the beginning of the Roman year. Anna Perenna symbolised renewal and longevity of life (19). Her name resounds in familiar modern day words like annual, perennial and per annum.
I like this explanation for the choice of the Ides of March as our Foundation Day even better. The school was founded on the Feast Day of a greatly loved, now largely forgotten Roman Goddess who stands for renewal, long life and connection to the past.
I love the perennial cycles of annual renewal of this school. The mottos of successive years of Year 12 groups, invariably celebrating Grammar ‘sisterhood’ and ‘all things blue’ in as many different formulations as you can imagine. I have my own personal motto for Brisbane Girls Grammar School these days—Changing the World One Amazing Young Woman at a Time.
Most apt of all, as mottos go, is the ethos or ‘intent’ writ large on the wall of the Cherrell Hirst Creative Learning Centre perennially exhorting our young women to ‘contribute to their world with Wisdom, Imagination and Integrity’. The spirit of Lilley resonates in these words. And it has a more … constructive ring to it than ‘Beware the Ides of March’. If we could find and dig up the school’s Foundation Stone, which we so far have not, we would probably find a vial of potion alongside it comprising equal parts Wisdom, Imagination and Integrity—with a label saying ‘drink me’ and on the flipside… ‘and Beware the Ides of March’.
Which brings me to you, today’s custodians of Brisbane Girls’ Grammar School. You, who hold the daunting task of encouraging our young women to drink responsibly of that potion. You hold the grand and, at times overwhelming legacy, of 150 years in your hands. I know that for decades to come so many who pass through these gates will remember so many of you with gratitude and fondness. Just as those before you influenced and shaped the lives of so many other thousands of young women who have passed through these gates. Year after year. Decade after decade. Century after century. The cycles of perpetual renewal, in the spirit of Anna Perenna, infuse this school and its staff every year with the energy, enthusiasm and attention to excellence that have enabled generations of young women to flourish since 15 March 1875. May they do so for (sesqui) centuries to come.
Perhaps Plutarch, I thought, ought to have the last word on the point. After all the paragraph in the biography of Julius Caesar that explains the seer’s warning against the Ides of March begins with these often overlooked but perhaps even more important words:
But destiny, it would seem, is not so much unexpected as it is unavoidable …
Accepting this destiny behold, indeed, the Ides of March, dear Brisbane Girls Grammar School.
Thank you.
(1) Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 2.
(2) See Plutarch, Parallel Lives, Julius Caesar, Chapter 63. For a translation see Perseus Digital Library at https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/.
(3) JM Bennett, Sir Charles Lilley, Premier and Chief Justice of Queensland, 2014 Federation Press p293-4
(4) JM Bennett in his 2014 biography of Lilley at p245 says: ‘At the height of his powers as barrister and politician, Lilley was described as “handsome and popular. He was known as a gay dog with a dilettante interest in culture.”’
(6) See https://www.thecovaproject.com/cova-conversations/davidattenborough
(7) See Australia’s 5th Census, 1876, https://hccda.ada.edu.au/Collated_Census_Tables/QLD-1876-census_02.html
(8) See Sarah McKibbin, Sir Charles Lilley and the Grimley Affair, referring at Footnote 25 to DB Waterson, Pastoral Capitalism and the Politician Thomas McIlwraith and the Two Land Companies, 1877-1900, (1986) 12(6) ‘The Royal Historical Society of Queensland Journal 401 at 402.
(9) See https://www.turrbal.com.au/our-story.
(10) E McWilliam, Educating Girls, 2013 University of Queensland Press p31.
(11) Sir Charles Lilley, before elected to the first Queensland Parliament in 1860, had also been editor of the Moreton Bay Courier which became the Brisbane Courier in 1864.
(13) See P Prideaux, Brisbane Girls’ Grammar School: The First Sixty Years 1875-1935, 1985, Boolarong Publications, at p84.
(14) P Harvey-Short, To Become Fine Sportswomen, 2011 Brisbane Girls Grammar School p18-19
(15) See McWilliam, Erica, Educating Girls, p25
(16) The Grammar Schools Act 1860 and other original bills of the first Parliament are available in scanned Bill form at https://www.archivessearch.qld.gov.au/items/ITM611069
(17) See McWilliam Educating Girls, Chapter 6 (Being Eccentric)
(18) See Plutarch, Parallel Lives, Julius Caesar, Chapter 66. For a translation see Perseus Digital Library at https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/.