Lessons from across the Pacific

Kadee Supina (OGC 1982)

What happens when two American teens are dropped into an Australian school in the 1980s? Kadee Supina (OGC 1982) reflects on how an unexpected detour through TGC shaped a lifetime.

In 1977 our family was living a sheltered American life in Detroit when my father (James Supina) became the chief engineer for Ford Australia. He told us we would be moving to ‘Geelong’ but we didn’t find out until we arrived that we were pronouncing it wrong.

Australia may be an English-speaking, first-world country, but to our parochial preteen selves it was like moving to the moon:

School uniforms that changed with the seasons? What the heck is a biro? An icey pole? Magpies will cut you down where you stand and also - learn the metric system right now.

We went through most of our Australian initiation at a local Catholic school but transferred to The Geelong College in 1980 (I vaguely remember a knee-quaking interview with Principal, Peter Gebhardt).

College was where our true cultural assimilation began. We got to row and play cricket. We coveted RM Williams boots. We read, “For the Term of his Natural Life” and knew who Gough Whitlam was. We wore trakky dax and parked our bikes in the bike shed. We knew to call a clay tennis court ‘en tout cas’. College absorbed us and we temporarily forgot we were American.

But early in 1982 when Jennie (OGC 1983) was in Year 11 and I was starting my HSC, Dad was recalled to the US. Jennie was transferred to an all-girl Catholic high school back home. I was allowed to stay on as a boarder to finish Year 12, but I was put on a plane to Detroit ten days after my final exam.

Our mid-puberty, proto-Australian selves struggled with these transitions. Jennie wrote to me during that time to explain, with justified horror, that her classmates brought hair dryers to school so they could style their hair after PE.

After I returned, I floundered for eight months with an eating disorder until my university term began.

In our rearview mirrors, College loomed large and idyllic, all the more because we had to abandon it so abruptly.

I don’t mean to say we were crippled by nostalgia, though.

Jennie went on to graduate from Michigan Technological University as a metallurgical engineer and worked for 33 years in manufacturing companies like Medtronic and Whirlpool.

She “retired” in 2002 to work on special projects and training for EJ Inc., an international iron foundry that specialises in infrastructure castings (look for the distinctive ‘ej’ logo on street castings and manhole covers around the globe).

Also, she can light a fire anywhere, with one match and in the pouring rain.

I studied Art History at the University of Michigan and St. Andrews University and did my MA at St. John’s College and the University of Minnesota.

I worked for the National Building Museum and the American Institute of Architects and then ran my own flooring contracting firm for 25 years. And played roller derby.

We’ve matured enough to acknowledge we idealised and romanticised our time at College, but also that it had long-lasting effects, well beyond just the memories of the three years we spent there.

This past March, Jennie and I made it back to the College for a long tour, as part of an extended visit back to Australia.

That tour rocked me. I saw lines that originated in the time I spent at College connect straight to the person I’ve become. I’m talking about essential human experiences and a sense of connectedness that runs far deeper than just how much money I earned in my career.

Sometimes outsiders can see aspects of a time or place that are invisible to those who live there. Here is an impertinent, alternative look at how the College has, and hopefully continues, to influence the students who attend it.