Gillian Johnson (Class of 1951) Making IB Connections
Posted on June 12, 2024
Year 12 students Isabel Ascui, Anika Jolley and Charlotte Cox have handwritten 10 letters to alumni around Australia as part of their International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma.
“It’s been a strange few years with the pandemic and we wanted to connect with older alumni,” explains Isabel, who designed and created the lino prints that accompanied the letters. “We hoped to hear their stories and tell them about the changes on campus but also to share that Friends’ has the same values as the Friends’ they knew,” says Anika who, with Charlotte, handmade the writing paper from water and her parents’ shredded notes.
The students always knew they wanted to work together on their CAS project. The CAS Program (standing for creativity, activity and service) is a core component of the IB diploma that “dovetails perfectly with our Purpose and Concerns as a Quaker school”, says IBDP Coordinator Sarah Walker.
The first reply came from Gillian Johnson (nee Hickman, 1951) who described growing up on the grounds of Friends’ in the 1930s and ’40s as the child of a housemaster.
“We’re considering starting a letter-writing club,” says Anika. “People became quite interested because that first letter back was full of insightful stories.”
Gillian’s letter, lightly edited and reprinted with her permission below, describes her first 12 years, when she lived in the main building and played with boarders every afternoon:
I lived in The Friends’ School from the time I was born, in 1935, because my father, Stuart Hickman, was a teacher and a housemaster responsible for the boy boarders.
Gillian Johnson
My father, mother Clara and my brother Brian and I had rooms in the main old building of the school. We had two living rooms and, upstairs from our bedroom windows, we could look down over the city and out to the River Derwent.
Sometimes we ate in the main dining room with all the boarders; I recall them having to stand behind their chairs while our family walked the length of the room to our table. There were probably 50 boys and 50 girls. It was not a very comfortable walk!
I enjoyed being right on the spot to go to school when I was old enough. Some children came to board quite young so I had friends to play with every afternoon after school. We had much freedom in the garden, making cubby houses in the base of huge pine trees north of the main school gate.
I know my mother enjoyed the company of the women teachers who cared for the girls who boarded. She often popped into their living room to chat and laugh with them. She was also busy helping the main housekeeper. There was a shortage of domestic and household staff during World War II and the housekeeper had a demanding job feeding the boarders and dealing with laundry and other chores.
In 1944 the headmaster Ernest Unwin died suddenly of a heart attack and my father was appointed to be acting headmaster until William Oats, a Quaker from Adelaide, came to be the new headmaster. Our family had moved to our own house in Carr Street but soon after, in 1947, my father was appointed headmaster of a school in Melbourne. We moved when I was 12.
I maintained contact with some friends from Friends’ including two who studied with me at the Kindergarten Training College in Kew. I taught, married, had two daughters, lived overseas and settled in Melbourne where I did a master’s degree in clinical psychology and worked supporting families dealing with problems in the early development of their children. After I retired, I spent time on the board of an organisation that supported preschool teachers working with children mostly from non-English-speaking backgrounds. Now my husband and I enjoy our retirement: travelling, reading, attending theatre and classical music concerts, and spending time with our grandchildren and good friends.
