From the Archive

Hilda’s Brisbane graduation photo. Left: Tadema Newton Studio photo of Hilda L’Estrange (Auckland, NZ).

‘Their deeds do follow them’

One of the pleasures of working in the School Archive is learning about the often extraordinary lives led by our Old Girls.

On 17 February Dennis and Margaret Donovan came all the way from Brisbane to visit the Archive. Margaret’s mother Hilda L’Estrange (Sharp) attended Diocesan from 1918 to 1920 after a year at St Cuthbert’s and four years in state schools. Hilda’s father was a self-educated mercantile manager who led his family from Sri Lanka, where Hilda was born, to Australia, Canada, the Western United States, Tonga, Auckland, Virginia and back to Australia. Letters show that both Hilda’s parents were intelligent supportive parents who encouraged her to engage with her education to her best advantage. In one letter back to her father, Hilda went so far as to say that her school of the moment was no good and asked her parents to relocate her!

Diocesan must have been a good fit. Hilda boarded in Cowie House while her father was working in Tonga and her mother living across the harbour in Calliope Road, Devonport. Not much is reported in the Chronicles, but in 1918 Cowie House Notes mentions that the House was hoping to present a play written by Hilda in the last term.

Margaret found a copy of this play in her late mother’s papers. Essentially it is a retelling of the story of Greek hero Ulysses coming home to his wife Penelope after his years of wandering. Doubtless inspired by the School’s

presentation of Euripides’ Trojan Women just a few years earlier, the play is a remarkable work for an 11-year-old, and clearly one of a number of prized photographs and mementos of her time at Diocesan.

In 1924 Hilda was enrolled in Brisbane Girls’ Grammar, where she completed her schooling and where she served as Head Girl in 1926. From Girls’ Grammar, Hilda went on to earn a BA degree from the University of Queensland – Margaret tells us she would have preferred a BSc but sadly not all universities allowed women to undertake this degree back in the 1920s and ’30s. Instead, having settled in Australia, Hilda trained at the Queensland College of Pharmacy and Chemistry, graduating as a pharmacist around 1933, a profession in which she worked to support herself and her family when widowed relatively young with six children. She lived into her eighties and is remembered with great affection.

Curiously, Margaret knew very little of her mother’s wandering childhood, but clues have been found amongst the long-kept letters and documents Hilda left behind her. In visiting the School, Margaret and Dennis were delighted to retrace some of Hilda’s steps in School House, the Hall and St Barnabas’ Chapel – buildings her mother would have known and would still recognise were she here with us today. The Donovans will continue putting the story of Hilda’s childhood together and we look forward to sharing more of this adventure with them.

News of another extraordinary Old Girl came to us last year in an obituary published in The Times in September last year. Elizabeth Austen Burchfield (Knight) was enrolled at Diocesan from 1941 until the end of 1945. In 1950 Elizabeth graduated from the University of Auckland with a BA degree and then headed for Great Britain as so many other graduate New Zealanders before her and after.

In England Elizabeth connected with her distant cousins at Chawton in Hampshire – all descendants of Edward Austen-Knight, brother of writer Jane Austen. Like her famous ancestress, Elizabeth went on to make a career for herself in the literary world, securing a job as a publicist with the Oxford University Press. In 1976 she surprised everyone when she married fellow New Zealander Robert Burchfield, an accomplished lexicographer and chief editor of the Oxford Dictionary. The two continued to live and work in literary circles, amassing a significant collection of New Zealand literature, and entertaining luminaries like poet Philip Larkin who regarded Elizabeth as both friend and mentor.

A devoted stepmother and stepgrandmother, she encouraged her grandchildren with gifts of books – usually accompanied by notes as to the particular merits of each volume while taking great care to see that no-one received the same book twice!

Elizabeth retired in 1986 having become head publicist for the Oxford University Press’ academic division. However, she continued voluntarily to edit the Friends magazine of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. In retirement Elizabeth and Edward lived in a converted barn in the Oxfordshire village of Sutton Courtenay – a fitting dwelling for Elizabeth – a wise old bird and great admirer of the local barnowls. Edward passed away in 2004 and Elizabeth lived out her last few years in care, but despite loss of shortterm memory, would often return to the poems and verses learnt here at Diocesan in her school days.

Hilda L’Estrange and Elizabeth Burchfield are just two of our Old Girls whose lives of devotion, high professional achievement and service have only become known to us in passing. ‘How many more stories are we yet to discover?’ is a question that keeps life in the School Archive full of interest. And we look forward to discovering more of our unsung heroines as we journey on into the new decade.

Above and right: Elizabeth Burchfield This obituary originally appeared in The Times on 21 September 2019 and information from it is printed courtesy of The Times (Readers’ Lives).