Читать книгу Fractured Silence - Emma Curtin - Страница 8

As a starting point, we’re pretty sure that Norma was born on 31 July 1900 (although, if you remember, some reports said 1901). And of course we’re certain she died on 9 September 1929. Getting to ‘know’ her beyond that, however, proved a more difficult task. As I said, newspapers provided some details of her life, and many opinions and assumptions, but the image created was only part of the story. I wanted to go beyond a two-dimensional impression of Norma ‘the victim’. I needed to dig deeper. So, armed with the power of the internet (with sites like Ancestry and Trove), and delving back into the Public Records Office archives, I took up the challenge of finding Norma beyond the newsprint.

Without doubt, one of the main attractions of the ‘Norma McLeod case’ for the press and the scandal-hungry public stemmed from the caricature of her as a well-bred, well-educated, wealthy, party-going socialite. Norma was touted as a “well-known society girl”, living and dying tragically in one of Melbourne’s wealthiest suburbs. The story was a journalist’s dream and a reader’s delight. A voyeuristic fascination with ‘how the other half live’ seems to be part of our human make-up. This certainly still holds true today, with our insatiable appetite for gossip about the rich and famous continually fed by the ever-intrusive media.

With regard to Norma, when it came to the term ‘society girl’, I immediately conjured up images of drunken dances, flirtatious encounters and a frivolous life that few but the ‘best’ could experience. But was Norma really a ‘socialite’? A search through the social pages of Melbourne’s newspapers, a marker of status among the city’s ‘beautiful people’, provided few references to Norma – one relating to a trip to Ballarat with her mother, another an appearance at a “delightful dance” in 1926, and a third to a 1928 trip to Lorne for a few weeks with a Miss Mary Reilly, a school friend and fellow teacher. This hardly equates to evidence of a social whirl. And, according to her neighbour, Mrs Guthrie, Norma “did not go about a great deal”.

No life should be summed up with one word –‘socialite’– especially if it didn’t ring true. And no life should be overshadowed or dismissed because tales of their death are more ‘exciting’. I wanted to know Norma the woman, not the stereotype, not the victim. Over time, I certainly developed a greater connection with this elusive woman. I would even discover that Norma had her secrets … but all this took time and a great deal of digging.

Despite the socialite label, some snippets in the newspapers did hint that Norma was considerably more earnest and deep-thinking than a frivolous party-goer. Neighbours had told the press that she was “highly intellectual – a girl with a very sane outlook on life”. She was also said to be “a quiet girl, almost reserved”. She’d attended the privately-run Nareeb Ladies’ College in Hawksburn (in Malvern Road, between Hobson Street and Williams Road). Here she’d apparently been a first-class student. In December 1912, newspaper accounts recorded that she won the Form IV prize for Nature Study, and in 1916 the Nareeb Old Collegians’ essay prize.

Nareeb had been established in 1885 and taught from kindergarten and primary through to senior levels. Kindergarten was confined mainly to middle-class independent schools until free kindergartens began to develop in the 1910s (the first Victorian state funded kindergarten was opened in 1907).

While there is a slim folder of information about Nareeb in the Public Records Office, I couldn’t find any student records, but assumed that Norma had begun studying there from the age of five (in 1905). Registration records from the following year indicate that there were 86 students in the whole school. At this point the McLeods were living in Carlisle Street, St Kilda, a 25-minute tram ride from the school. When they moved to Mandeville Crescent, Norma could easily have walked to school in 15 minutes.

Nareeb was run by sisters Jessie Landells, a widow and Mary Urie. It closed in 1918 when the sisters retired, aged 63 and 62 respectively. Jessie died in 1920 and Mary in 1926, so both were spared the knowledge of their former student’s death.

Norma graduated from Nareeb with an Intermediate Certificate, equivalent to Year 10 in today’s terms. This means she is likely to have left Nareeb in 1916. According to school registration records, Norma was probably taught maths, geography, history, psychology, English language and literature, French, Latin, needlework, dressmaking, drawing, painting, music, dancing, gymnastics and elocution, all subjects considered appropriate for the education of a young woman of Norma’s status.

Having gained the benefits of a kindergarten education herself, Norma enrolled at the Kindergarten Training College at Mooroolbeek in Madden Grove, Kew in 1923. The College’s two-year course provided a good “grounding … in child development and psychology”. Norma was then aged 23. What she’d been doing between graduating from school and joining the training college is unknown. Entries in the electoral rolls at that time simply list her occupation as ‘home duties’. Of course, this wasn’t unusual in the 1920s, when many young women stayed at home, helping their mothers until they had a household and family of their own to run.

But the more I learnt about Norma, the more I began to think she wanted to ‘do’ something with her life beyond domestic chores.

It’s important to provide some context here as, for me, Norma’s decision to enrol as a kindergarten teacher trainee says something about her personality and principles. According to the Encyclopedia of women and leadership in twentieth-century Australia, kindergarten teaching was introduced by enlightened educationists, and “supported by community leaders, notably first-wave feminists”. Although kindergarten teaching “remained marginal to mainstream educational discourse and administration”, many of the earlier kindergarten leaders “appeared to prefer the independence this gave them”. Perhaps Norma too was attracted by the spirit of independence and innovation that kindergarten teaching offered.

The Kindergarten Training College had been established in 1917 by the Free Kindergarten Union of Victoria as a fee-paying entity (kindergarten training colleges would, essentially, not be state funded until the 1970s). Fees in 1927, for example, were seven guineas per term (with two terms a year, that’s equivalent to about $1,100 a year). Its aim was to teach the students to “regard the child not as a mere storehouse of memory to be filled with facts for the benefit of the examiner, but as a spiritual being to be developed along sane and healthy lines in morality and physique as well as intelligence”.

When Norma began her training course, the principal of the College was Miss Mary Gutteridge. In 1986, former students captured their memories of the College in a booklet called Bringing their tales. In it, one former student of the early 1920s wrote: “These two years at College were two of the happiest of my very happy life. I absolutely adored it. Looking back it was rather like finishing school. We had a matron and a sub-matron, and discipline was strict”. It would be wonderful to know what Norma’s memories might have been, but for me, one impression emerges – learning seemed to have more appeal for Norma than partying, although she was known to sometimes combine the two. In her first year of College, she was listed in a newspaper account of a ball among many friends, wearing a “saxe blue taffeta” dress.

Norma seems to have made a success of teacher training, as well as friendships. She was described by the training college as a student whose, “bright personality made her win many warm friends”. She was later a valued member of the College’s Past Students’ Association Committee. The altruistic aim of this association was “to bring together graduates for the purpose of fellowship, to maintain links with, and to contribute to, the College and to explore ways of establishing a home where deprived children enrolled in the Free Kindergartens could spend a holiday and have their health restored”.

Graduating from the Kindergarten Training College in 1925, Norma registered as a teacher under state regulations on 25 August of that year. I couldn’t find any record of Norma teaching before joining Caulfield Grammar in 1929. Newspaper articles indicated that girls training at the Kindergarten Training College would be “provided with posts in free kindergartens, secondary schools or private families”. Maybe Norma was provided with such an opportunity, but we’ll probably never know. What I do know is that in April 1926 she joined a magazine committee for the Kindergarten Training College Past Students’ Association, a role she continued in until at least September 1928.

At the time of her death, Norma was Secretary of the Armadale Branch of the League of Mission Helpers, connected with the work of the Church of England Mission of St James and St John. According to a newspaper account, the deputy organiser, Reverend James Leslie Watt, stated that Norma had joined the Mission several months before her death, saying that she wanted “an opportunity to perform social service, such as is rendered by the League, in visiting and working for maternity homes, homes for neglected children, and the children of unmarried mothers”. The Reverend added that she was “full of energy, and took a real joy in her work … [and had] developed into a splendid mission worker”.

Established in October 1919, the Mission had become “the logical extension of the Anglican Church’s traditional work with the poor and unfortunate”. By the early twentieth century, reformers were focusing more on the environment than ‘moral character’. Instead of taking children away from their parents, slum areas were now provided with baby clinics, kindergartens and playgrounds. This was an interest close to Norma’s heart. By 1928, the Mission had also opened seven homes for “children, delinquent boys and fallen women”, some of which Norma obviously visited.

The League of Mission Helpers had been established in 1926, designed as parish women’s auxiliary groups to support the Mission through fundraising. The first group was established in Caulfield and the Armadale branch soon followed. By 1934 there would be over 100 leagues involving at least 5,000 women who were integral to the Mission’s continued success. These auxiliary groups held fetes, luncheons and shows to raise money. They also knitted, sewed and donated their time and labour in the Mission homes. As Secretary of the Armadale Branch, Norma could embrace the opportunities that leadership in charitable activities might bring, building her confidence and setting herself on a path that might have seen her community profile and prestige grow.

Leadership in charitable and social reform movements often sprang from the higher ranks of society, so it would be no surprise to see a woman in Toorak involved in this kind of work. But for Norma, this reflected a continuation of the work she’d been doing with the Kindergarten Training College Past Students’ Association. It was also something of a family tradition, although much of the reform among Norma’s elder generation related to attacking the socially demoralising impact of alcohol. Her mother’s oldest sister, Elizabeth McLeod (nee Rees – Elizabeth and Edith had married McLeod brothers) was very prominent in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Traveller’s Aid and several girls’ welfare organisations. As teenagers, Norma’s mother Edith and Edith's sister Annie had sung to help raise funds for the Blue Ribbon Temperance Society, with such catchy jingles as “Don’t go near the bar-room”, and on at least one recorded occasion in 1921, Edith attended her sister Elizabeth’s temperance meeting in Kew. Anti-alcohol sentiments were strong in the family.

And all the Rees sisters seemed to have some involvement in helping the 1914-18 war effort, knitting socks and “packing billies to send off to the front, full of all sorts of goodies and letters”. Even after the war, the Williams sisters (Norma's cousins) continued to send parcels of clothes and toys to the French family who had billeted their brother Jock and whose house had been “flattened to ground level”.

It was clear that Norma, like her aunts, had the energy and passion to help her community.