Reflections
Will you remember me?
Mrs Jenny Davis
Research Officer (Sesquicentenary)
History is everywhere at Brisbane Girls Grammar School, with its heritage buildings, unique sculptures and artworks, significant gardens, picket fence and even a century-old fig tree creating a kaleidoscope of traditions and a unique sense of place. If buildings could speak, the Main Building would have plenty of stories to tell of the lives of long-gone pupils and staff whose secrets it has been guarding for over 140 years (note: the Main Building opened in 1884).
Where better to unearth those secrets and stories than in the School’s Archive—the place where Girls Grammar’s collective memory and history is stored? Over time our memories will fade, our recollections of individual and shared events will not be as sharp, and our feelings of pride in shared past events will undoubtedly dwindle, but an Archive can protect us from this collective memory loss because it contains the evidence of what went before, evidence of us and our community.
In 1924, Canadian Archivist, Arthur Doughty, described archives as ‘the gift of one generation to another’ (Brothman, 2010). While no archival collection is ever ‘complete’, we are fortunate at Girls Grammar to have a wealth of fascinating recollections, reports, correspondence and objects to inform today’s Grammar community what the School—with its changing Board of Trustees, 16 Principals, hundreds of staff and thousands of pupils—has been like over the past 149 years.
It is wonderful to think that what is housed in the Archive will become gifts to future generations, and the very same objects that have surprised me will delight, inform and enrich the stories of future generations.
Archivists are historians and record keepers, but they are also educators, and a school is the perfect place to stimulate a spirit of enquiry amongst students.
The Australian Society of Archivists (2024) asks archivists to ‘encourage and support the social, cultural and historical value of archives within the School’s curriculum by providing access to primary source material, in line with the best conservation practices', and the Australian Curriculum requires an increased integration of primary resources into the classroom.
As such, BGGS Staff have previously developed lesson plans for students using material from the Archives. Some have used the historical Mothers Group material to examine popular culture and women in sport, while senior History students have traced the war experiences of students whose names are written on the Old Girls Honour Boards.
Today, Year 7 students’ first Humanities Unit, ‘Investigating our Past at Brisbane Girls Grammar School’ allows students access to the Archive and its many primary sources, providing them with a familiar focus for the start of their historical inquiries. Delving into boxes of badges, prize books, uniforms and student publications allows them to get outside the classroom, away from the idea that history is boring, irrelevant and distant, as they use the archive collection and its material culture to acquaint themselves with the different concepts of inquiry-based learning and document-based questions. The School’s precious primary resources can be explored and unwrapped and, at the same time, become tangible teaching aids to students.
During their ‘archive session’, students are given an overview of the collection along with the materials pre-selected by the staff and Archivist. Students learn what an archive is and does, the types of objects and information found in archives, and about archival etiquette, such as wearing gloves when handling precious documents and books.
Examples of objects students may engage with include:
- a 1950s sports bandana, which opens a discussion of the history of women in sport
- a photograph of a tunnel ball team from 1923, which presents an opportunity to talk about which sports girls were allowed to play, and the evolution and popularity of different sports
- the Old Girls Association Honour Board located in the Annie Mackay Room. Familiarity with an object students might walk past every day enables them to contemplate the impact war years might have had on the School community
- a postcard dated 1906 sent from a pupil at the school to her friend ‘Edie’ in England describing ‘the Brains and Beauty of Brisbane’ and decorated with a drawing of her school badge. This makes history more meaningful to a 12-year-old student today
- an early Prize book from the Kennedy Cairncroft Collection of Prize Books. These books are of enormous value to the School, and what they represent is unique. Many students love the books as objects of beauty—taking time to investigate the leather covers, the print and the marbling on the end pages—while others are more interested in the name of the student, what the prize was awarded for, and the Head Mistress and Chair of the Board at the time. Examples of prize books include a leather writing compendium won in 1905 by the Junior Tennis champion, and a book called The Sea-shore, awarded in 1906 for Practical Botany, which still has pressed plants in it.
These objects come alive and have stories to tell.
Where objects are too fragile to handle, a digital resource can be created to replace the physical item. As an example, girls may look at the digital images of individual items, which have been ‘placed’ in a school port, to identify and evaluate them in a way that would be difficult to replicate in real life.
The teaching program is important for various reasons—it teaches students about their new school, but also helps them to understand the role and importance of Archives in a school. It is clear from the questions asked and the interest shown by these young students that they are fascinated by the existence of a student life and community long before them. Knowing that their own experiences and contributions matter and are important to future generations adds to their emotional connectedness to Girls Grammar.
As Kathleen Lyons, Acting Head Mistress, noted in her 1924 Annual Report, ‘The first six months of a child’s life in a big school such as ours are of primary importance…She must learn to be a living and active part of a great organisation’.
Certainly, by immersing students into our history, Year 7 girls have been given the baton to take on the Grammar story.
References
Australian Society of Archivists. (2024). School Archivist Role Description. Retrieved from https://www.archivists.org.au/documents/item/269
BGGS Magazine, June 1921, p. 4, Editorial.
Brothman, B. ‘Perfect past, perfect gift’. Archival Science 2010, 10: 141-189.
Corbett, K. (1991). From File Folder to the Classroom: Recent Primary Source Curriculum Projects. American Archivist 54: 296–300.
Tate, WE. The use of archives in education. The Journal of the British Records Association 1949. Retrieved from https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:256188827
Australian Society of Archivists. (2024). School Archivist Role Description. Retrieved from https://www.archivists.org.au/documents/item/269