City Girl, Country Girl

by Liz Harfull

  In a strange reversal of the expected ending to the weekend, the next day Sherryn found herself standing outside the pub and waving goodbye to Mark as he left town. ‘Mark ended up leaving before us because he had to go to a machinery sale,’ she says, pointing out that she should have taken notice of this as a sign of things to come. She had no idea that as he drove away Mark was feeling anxious that he might never see her again, even though they had swapped phone numbers. ‘Later, he told me that it was the worst moment of his life,’ Sherryn says.

  12

  LESSONS FOR THE TEACHER

  The first time Jean Simpson set eyes on Sherryn, she politely told the nurse that the baby couldn’t possibly be hers. With brown hair and a dark complexion, she looked nothing like her older sister, who came into the world with blonde hair, blue eyes and peachy white skin. But Sherryn was definitely her daughter, and the initial shock soon wore off.

  Sherryn was born at St Vincent’s Private Hospital in March 1977. Originally from Birmingham in England, her mother came to Australia as a child in the 1950s, as part of the assisted immigration program that became known as the Ten Pound Pom scheme. ‘The story goes that her family’s house caught fire, and my pop had always loved the ocean and the sun. It was either rebuild their lives there, or move to Australia and make a clean start, so they moved here,’ Sherryn explains. The family settled in the seaside Melbourne suburb of St Kilda.

  Meanwhile, her father, Geoff Simpson, was growing up in the outer eastern suburb of Canterbury, which was still very rural in the 1950s, with open farmland where he and his brothers went rabbit hunting. The family had roots in the area going back to the 1800s. His great-grandfather, James Britnell, owned extensive holdings at Box Hill but family stories have it that he gambled his fortune away. ‘We could have been rich!’ says Sherryn.

  As a young man in the 1960s, Geoff played in a band influenced by The Beatles. One of the band members, John, was dating Jean, and he started dating her sister, Paula. ‘They obviously figured out at some stage that they needed to swap,’ Sherryn says. John and Paula ended up marrying, too.

  Her parents’ engagement raised a few eyebrows. Geoff was from a staunchly Catholic family and Jean was Anglican, at a time when the difference mattered to many, including his mother who Sherryn suspects never really approved. They married in St Dominic’s Catholic Church at East Camberwell, after a series of compulsory meetings with the priest. ‘Mum always says she was really lucky because they had a priest ahead of his time, who was not interested in converting her or anything like that. It was more about making sure they had thought about the big questions before they decided love conquers all. So she was really grateful to him and more than happy for us all to be baptised and raised Catholic.’

  After their wedding, Sherryn’s parents settled in Blackburn, close to where Geoff had grown up. ‘Mum called it rural living, but it was really suburbia. We lived in a house in a little cul-de-sac and then when I was eleven we moved around the corner to a bigger house.’ By then they were a family of six and needed considerably more space.

  Three years after Sherryn was born, along came Kieran, and then two years after that Rachel. The oldest by two years was Danielle, who Sherryn describes as one of the most important people in her life. For a start, she credits her big sister with teaching her how to laugh. ‘To this day, as grumpy as I can get, she is still able to make me smile.’

  Although she does not have the classical features people associate with the condition, Danielle was born with Down syndrome. ‘She was pretty sick as a baby, so it was hard work for Mum and Dad, but Mum’s parents, Nan and Pop, spent a lot of time helping,’ Sherryn explains. She has very fond memories of both grandparents and it is clear that family is important to Sherryn, and that her parents have been an enormous influence. Both instilled a strong work ethic in their daughter. Geoff not only held down a full-time job in the information technology sector, he drove taxis at night to bring in extra money. Apart from a few years following the birth of her youngest two children, Jean worked full-time, too, as a primary school teacher, juggling home, family and school duties.

  ‘We were always raised with a working-class view of ourselves. We weren’t well off but we weren’t poor by any means because we had a terrific set of parents and family around us, and Mum and Dad worked hard to make sure we had everything they felt we needed,’ Sherryn says. ‘Mum might slice a chicken breast into four so we all had a schnitzel, but we always had home-cooked meals. Even though they were simple we all sat around the table together. You knew when dinner was getting close because Mum would call out, “Wash your hands,” and Dad would be sitting there yelling, “If you’re not here in five seconds, there will be no dinner for you.” So we would all rush in and sit down.’

  The first time Sherryn became conscious they might not have much money was in her first year at high school. After the winter holiday break, her new classmates came back with tans and exciting stories about going overseas, while the Simpsons had spent a few days visiting Pop on Mornington Peninsula.

  ‘Where did you go?’ her classmates asked her.

  ‘Oh, we went to Rosebud,’ Sherryn replied.

  ‘What country’s that in?’

  All four Simpson children started their education at St Thomas the Apostle, a small Catholic primary school just a few blocks from home. Danielle ended up moving to Wesley College, because they offered her better support, and in year five, Sherryn found herself travelling twelve kilometres west every day to attend Glenferrie Primary School, where her mother worked. ‘Mum had a run-in with one of my teachers,’ she explained. ‘Later on it came out that the teacher had said not to worry about spending too much money on my high school education because I probably wasn’t going to be more than a secretary.’ As both a teacher and a mother, Jean was outraged.

  As it turned out, the move opened the door to a critical breakthrough in Sherryn’s education. She wasn’t particularly fond of school, occasionally tricking her nan into letting her stay home by faking a terrible cough. But in year six at Glenferrie she encountered a teacher who captured her interest in learning, and continues to inspire her. ‘He was able to make connections for me,’ she explains.

  Sherryn was a talented swimmer. She trained eight times a week and dreamt of one day swimming butterfly for Australia. She loved the excitement of race meets, the way her body felt as she was powering through the water, and the quiet solace of swimming laps or diving under the surface where she felt totally free. One day in class, she was asked to calculate fifty times four as part of a lesson in multiplication. ‘I wasn’t that interested and I was battling to figure it out,’ she says.

  ‘But you’re a swimmer. How big’s your pool?’ the teacher asked her.

  ‘Fifty metres.’

  ‘And if you swam four laps, how far have you swum?’

  ‘Two hundred metres.’

  ‘And there’s how you figure it out.’

  Sherryn was ecstatic. ‘Oh, my gosh. I can do maths!’

  After primary school, Sherryn went back into the Catholic education system for two years, waiting for the right time to apply for entry to the highly regarded MacRobertson Girls’ High School. Linked to the first Victorian state secondary school, it is named after Melbourne ‘Chocolate King’ Sir MacPherson Robertson, who donated £40,000 to build a new school, as part of a gift he made to the state in 1934 to celebrate its centenary. Students are selected to make sure there is a broad socio-economic and cultural mix, and it’s not easy to get in, but Jean went there, and she was keen for her daughters to share the experience.

  From the time she started at the school in year ten, Sherryn absolutely loved it. ‘I never looked back,’ she says. ‘There were none of the social barriers I experienced at the other high school, and I was always going to do better at a girls’ school. I found boys quite intimidating when I was growing up, although I didn’t mind taking them on in a race in a pool.’

  At MacRobertson, enjoying learnin
g wasn’t considered ‘nerdy’. The school not only challenged her academically, but she became fast friends with a small group of girls who remain close to this day. The school was situated in the city centre, near Albert Park Lake. To get there Sherryn had to catch a train and then a tram, travelling for about forty-five minutes each way. ‘We were all on the same train line, and we would all catch the 7.15 a.m. train from Blackburn. The third carriage from the front, back door. That was our spot.’

  They got to know other regular passengers, too, despite never finding out their proper names. ‘We had the man who worked for Telstra, known as the Telstra Man, and then the man who supported Collingwood, the Collingwood Man. We had all these commuters who, for the four years I was at MacRob, were there for our whole journey,’ she says. ‘One of my friends loved a good argument, and in our idealistic world we were quite politically driven so we would have these whole-carriage debates. It was awesome, and we met people because they would listen to our conversations and they would be laughing with us, or at us. At the end of year twelve, we had a little party with everyone on our last trip.’

  Keen on science, Sherryn set herself the goal of becoming a veterinary surgeon. Her final exam results proved good enough and she was accepted into a Sydney University, then MacRobertson encouraged her to apply for an exchange program. It involved working as a matron for a year at an exclusive boarding school in England. Sherryn thought it would be an exciting opportunity to travel, meet new people and experience different cultures. When she and her best friend were both accepted, they delayed university studies and set off.

  Only seventeen, Sherryn was matron of the school’s largest boarding house, with sixty girls ranging in age from just six to twelve. She found the work interesting but sometimes heartbreaking, especially when dealing with her youngest charges. After the initial excitement of starting school wore off, some of them came to her at night, crying and wanting to go home. ‘Sometimes I just wanted to go home, too!’ she admits.

  Set between London and Oxford, the school attracted children from the English aristocracy and even royal family connections. For most, going to boarding school at such a young age was a family tradition and they accepted it. ‘I don’t think they found it as confronting as an Australian child might,’ Sherryn says.

  During term time, Sherryn’s job involved supervising the girls outside their studies, including making sure they did their homework and keeping an eye on them at night. She had her own bedroom, and access to a communal staff room. Her door was always open, even when she wasn’t officially on duty, and girls would often come knocking. At weekends, she might take them for a walk into town, or out to play games if they were becoming bored or restless. And then in between terms, she and her best friend would travel around Europe, first on an organised tour and then, as their confidence grew, backpacking independently.

  A bit older and wiser, a little more worldly and definitely more confident, Sherryn returned home in 1996 and found that her priorities had changed. She didn’t want to go to Sydney, she wanted to stay in Melbourne with her family, so she settled on a science degree at Melbourne University, majoring in psychology and zoology. Four years later, degree in hand, Sherryn still didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life. In the short-term, more travel appealed so she signed up with Camp America, a program that recruits Australians to work at summer camps in the United States. She ended up in St Louis, Missouri, working as a general counsellor in a program for inner-city youth deemed to be at risk.

  What was meant to be a three-month job turned into three years. Every October she came home for four months, and then she would return, avoiding winter in both places. She became part of the management team, running different areas of the camp and supervising activities to help develop the participants’ leadership skills. By the time she finished, Sherryn knew that she wanted to work with children, but she still wasn’t entirely sure how.

  Part of her dilemma was that Jean did not want her to be a teacher. She was adamant that her children should strive to do something else because teachers worked long hours for too little money. Considering her options, Sherryn decided to join the Victorian police force and become a community officer. That particular section of the force involved going into schools and working with youth who had been identified at risk, to try and help them turn their lives around before it was too late. ‘It was pretty similar to what I had been doing in the States, but in a uniform.’

  Her plans came undone when it was discovered she was too short-sighted to meet police requirements. Not to be deterred, Sherryn had laser surgery to correct her vision. Her grandmother had set aside money for each of her grandchildren that became available when they turned twenty-one, and Sherryn could not think of a better use. The surgery went well, but she had to wait another twelve months for her eyes to adjust before she was allowed to continue the application process. In the meantime, a job came up at her mother’s school, Burwood Heights, working in the after-school care program and as a teacher’s aide.

  After six months had passed, the idea of joining the police force no longer appealed. It meant a year of training and then two years of probationary service in the general police force before she could get back to working with young people. Meanwhile, she was already doing what she loved. Then one day the principal called Sherryn into her office. ‘Have you ever thought about teaching?’ she asked. Sherryn explained it had always been off the table, because of her mother’s opposition. ‘It’s something you really should think about,’ the principal reiterated, recognising her potential.

  While she was pondering her future, she met Mark, and their relationship became serious. Sherryn realised that joining the police force might cause dilemmas in the future, because there was no guarantee where she would be assigned. Mark was a farmer, working on the family property with his parents. Relocation was not an option for him. If they ended up together, she would be moving to Harrow. ‘That was a huge deciding factor, too, and I don’t regret it,’ she says.

  Mind made up, she enrolled for a post-graduate degree in teaching. It took two years, because she wanted to broaden her qualifications so she could teach from primary school to year twelve. It would give her more career options in a rural area because she would have the choice of working in both primary and secondary schools. In the meantime, she continued to work part-time at Burwood Heights. If she needed any convincing she had made the right choice, by the time she graduated in 2005 the community officer program had been cancelled.

  Now a fully qualified teacher, Sherryn decided to spend her first year working at the school that had supported her through her studies. Mark was disappointed because it meant living apart for another year, but she felt obliged because the school had been so accommodating.

  Sherryn soon discovered that she loved being a teacher. Even though Burwood Heights was classified in the lowest socio-economic ranking in Victoria, it had a good reputation and a solid group of dedicated staff. The students included a large number of migrants and refugees from diverse cultural backgrounds, and Sherryn found plenty of scope to use some of the non-conventional approaches to teaching that she had picked up while working in the United States. Outside the classroom, she and another young teacher started the school’s first netball club. They took responsibility for everything from administration and applying for grants to buy team uniforms, to coaching. After two years, there were seven teams and the school had claimed two premierships.

  In an extraordinary bonus and a very rare twist, Jean and Sherryn ended up sharing a double classroom. Separated by fold-back doors that were hardly ever shut, they each taught combined classes of years one and two. ‘She was Mrs Simpson down one end . . . and I was Miss Simpson up the other. It was awesome!’ says Sherryn.

  The new graduate loved that she could turn to her mother for professional advice and mentoring. Jean had the ability to quickly assess the progress of each child and then work out the best next step. ‘She was very pedantic about keeping t
he classroom tidy, and she wasn’t afraid to raise her voice if she had to, but you knew she was a good teacher because of the number of kids who would come back to see her years later,’ Sherryn says.

  ‘I always thought the benefit was mine because I could go to Mum when I was stuck. I felt I was always asking her questions. But she reckons for her it was awesome, too, because it was rejuvenating. As much as I would look up to her end of the classroom to see what she was doing, she would look at my end to see what spin I was taking.’

  13

  CONNEWIRRICOO

  It is Monday lunchtime and the door leading into Mark and Sherryn’s farmhouse kitchen is coping with a fair bit of traffic. A couple of neighbours have dropped in, and so has a bloke from Sydney who organised a cross-country motorbike event that has seen Harrow packed with visitors over the weekend. The Harrow Vinduro is only in its seventh year, but it’s already recognised as the biggest event of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, and is attracting interest from overseas. Another example of Harrow not doing anything by halves.

  Mark is busy making extra ham, cheese and tomato toasted sandwiches for the unexpected guests, completely unfazed by the growing numbers around the wooden kitchen table. Sherryn is trying to settle their sixteen-month-old daughter, Rhianna. Grizzly from lack of sleep, she is temporarily diverted by all the people in the room, and the challenge of picking bits out of her own sandwich. Sitting opposite is Mark’s father, Malcolm, eating a lunch prepared by his wife, Susan, before she headed overseas on a farm tour of China. She organised his meals for every day she was away and put them in the deep-freeze.