Swifty by Campion Edmund;

Author:Campion, Edmund;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New South Wales Press
Published: 2016-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

As Principal, Yvonne tried to set standards for the girls. Slacks and jeans were not to be worn outside College. A student whose brother was coming to pick her up on his motorbike asked for a dispensation from this rule. ‘Sancta girls don’t go on motorbikes’, she was told. She wanted Sancta students to think highly of academic excellence, suggesting to brainy girls that they improve their image with more fashionable hairstyles and to take care what they wore. Because they were intellectuals she did not want them to invite sneers by looking daggy. Still, she was not alone in her leadership of the college. Soon after arriving she recruited graduate students in order to give a mature leavening to the undergraduates. They acted as role models; in time they became a sort of High Table. She began to invite people to dine with them on Sunday evenings to broaden their perspectives, and this soon became a privilege they hated to miss. She progressed into a new collegiate experience with caution, writing to parents to enquire whether they would object if graduate students were offered sherry before formal dinners. Graduate students, for their part, enlarged her pastoral options. History tutor Margaret Payten, for instance, had noticed that some young ex-students were shy about returning to college, so she arranged a buffet tea for them and their husbands; and 40 ex-students turned up. These became regular functions. There were also weekend retreats for alumnae. Another innovation was a Sunday discussion group for alumnae and husbands with luncheon in the Octagon. Yvonne had a strong pastoral sense of caring for anyone, present-day or alumna, connected with Sancta. It ranged from her fashion hints, to quiet suggestions that a medical student would profit from occasional visits to Paddington art galleries, to helping a girl with her wedding arrangements and even finding a priest for her. She also met their boyfriends and more than half a century later, literary critic Don Anderson remembered, ‘I was overwhelmed by her otherworldly beauty.’ By today’s standards some of her advice may sound odd: when a student said she was thinking of doing Philosophy, the Principal snapped, ‘Sancta girls don’t do Philosophy.’ During Lent one year the mother of a country student visited her daughter bringing a box of chocolates. ‘We’ll have to keep them until Easter,’ said Swifty. No chocolates in Lent, then.

There is no doubt that many Sancta girls responded to her pastoral care with something near to devotion. Twenty of them broke their midwinter vacation to attend a weekend seminar she ran on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. When her mother died the funeral was held at Sancta – Gelineau psalms, McAuley–Connolly hymns, Dies Irae in English, call-and-response by a priest and a student. ‘Although there were lectures as usual, a great many of the students managed to be present and formed a guard of honour down the drive as the hearse drove out’ (House Journal). One of Yvonne’s devotees became an international news item. Sheila

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