↓ SECTION 02 — SCHOOL
EVE RECEIVES MEDAL FOR SERVICE Human rights lawyer and refugee advocate, Dr Eve Lester (Fr’81), was awarded the second Geelong Grammar School Medal for Service to Society on Wednesday 24 August.
It was her Lindon warden, Dick Johnson, who planted the seed that she could study law, but it was those Cambodian refugees that showed Eve what her degree could do.
Eve Lester’s life changed on a cold winter’s night in 1991. It was the end of August, and in a pre-dawn operation, officials from the Department of Immigration were moving from room to room of the Enterprise Migrant Hostel in Springvale on Melbourne’s south-eastern fringe, knocking on doors, waking the 119 Cambodian “boat people” who had spent the past 16 months languishing in detention there, awaiting the outcome of their application for asylum in Australia. It was a disturbing scene of silent fear. People got up quietly; tired, confused and fearing that they were being returned to their war-ravaged country. But behind the officials was their caseworker, a young law graduate by the name of Eve Lester. Eve had been called in at the last minute. Her task was to quell nerves and reassure the Cambodian refugees that they were not being deported. She would accompany them on the next leg of their journey, to the Villawood Detention Centre in Sydney’s west, and beyond, all the way to the High Court of Australia.
Back then Eve was barely scraping together a living, working part-time with the Refugee Advice and Casework Service (RACS). Only a handful of people were working in refugee advocacy at the time and it hardly seemed a likely, much less secure, career path for a bright young lawyer. In fact, in October of that year eyebrows were raised in the corridors of Canberra the day Eve Lester politely declined a position with the Department of Immigration.
Eve’s journey began on Biddlecombe Avenue, Corio; as a little girl riding on the back of her father’s wheelchair. Bill Lester (P’43) contracted polio while reading History at Oxford University. He taught the subject at Corio for more than 30 years, pioneered the introduction of Asian languages and coached rowing. There was an intangible but potent impact on his only daughter to see her father admired and accepted by the Geelong Grammar School community for who he was and what he could do, rather than what he could not. These were formative lessons. And perhaps too it was as a goalkeeper on the last line of defence on a windswept hockey field overlooking Limeburners’ Lagoon that Eve first encountered the imperative that, if it was not she that dived for the ball, no one else would.
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LIGHT BLUE - GEELONG GRAMMAR SCHOOL