OGG IN FOCUS
OGG in focus PHOEBE WYNN-POPE (née FRASER) Co-education came to GGS in the early 1970s, at first gradually but with quick acceleration. Five years before Phoebe Wynn-Pope (Fraser, Cl'83) entered the School in 1981, girls already formed nearly 40 per cent of its population at secondary level. In September 1961 the liberal James Darling (Headmaster 1930-61) was succeeded by the even more liberal Thomas Garnett (1961-73), who for nine years had been head of Marlborough College in England where in 1968 under his successor, John Dancy, girls began to be accepted in the senior form. At GGS Tommy Garnett achieved a step radical at the time – for which at Marlborough he had helped pave the way: the beginnings of co-education. The first step at Corio was tentative. In 1970 and 1971 senior girls studying at The Hermitage subjects for which better provision was made at GGS went by day for all their classes to Corio, but remained members of their own school. In 1972 The Hermitage pulled out of the experiment, but GGS, heartened by an initial experience of girls at this level (Glamorgan had long had little girls in the Kindergarten), began admitting girls as full members of the School at senior Secondary levels as well as extending co-education from small beginnings in the Primary years. In 1974, under a new Head, Charles Fisher (1974-78), it was decided to close the gap and have girls throughout the School. Invitations were issued in 1975 to The Hermitage and Clyde (the other girls’ school with which GGS had strong family connections) to amalgamate with Geelong Grammar School. In 1976 – swollen on our four sites from 1,000 to 1,600 pupils – the post-amalgamation GGS (strictly GCEGS until 1988) embarked with little fuss on working out the implications of being not only fully co-educational but also a much larger school. The nurturing of individual talents, interests, and personality remained paramount despite the much greater population.
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Phoebe thus, in her three years at Corio, where she was in Clyde House, experienced a School that was settling into the sixth year and beyond of its new pattern (in Senior School terms the end of a second and beginning of a third generation) and a House that cherished its continuity with the 66 years of Clyde School before 1976. Indeed, she had strong family links herself not only with Clyde but also with The Hermitage and Geelong Grammar School. While her father, the Right Honourable Malcolm Fraser AC, CH, was for a time at Glamorgan before its incorporation into GGS in 1947, he later attended Melbourne Grammar School. Her mother, Tamara Fraser AO (Beggs, He’53), is a Hermitage Old Girl. Her maternal aunts – Eda Ritchie AM (Cl’59) and Christina Hindhaugh (Cl’61) – are Clyde Old Girls, both of whom married Old Geelong Grammarians, Robin Ritchie (Cu’54; Chairman of Council 1973-78; Chief Executive 1979-80) and Christopher Hindhaugh (Cu’59). Her maternal grandfather was Sandford Beggs (P’24) and maternal uncle Hugh Beggs AM (M’55). Phoebe became vice-captain of Clyde House, vice-captain also of the School’s first netball and girls’ athletics teams, and a member of the girls’ first tennis team. She showed versatility – as chorister, debater, sub-editor of The Corian, athlete (setting new records as a hurdler), and scholar, matriculating with distinction and going on to a successful Arts course at the University of Melbourne. Her father was Prime Minister of Australia through most of Phoebe’s school years, but already she was her own person. Known and respected at Corio for herself, she was – as she remains – somebody of independent views, strength of character, courage, high intelligence, modesty, and altruism. Her subsequent relief work for CARE Australia in troubled areas of the world did not surprise those who knew her in her schooldays. It is the sort of work that many Geelong Grammarians have undertaken, and the School can be counted an influence. But so can family tradition. Phoebe’s heredity is as mixed in its national elements, and as charged with energy, as almost anybody’s. Her paternal grandfather, Neville Fraser, was a son of one of Australia’s first Senators, Sir Simon Fraser, of ScottishCanadian background, and Bertha Collins, member of an Irish family of pastoral pioneers in Queensland and the Northern Territory (my own maternal ancestors).
Her paternal grandmother, Una, was a daughter of a Perth accountant, Louis Arnold Woolf, of Jewish ancestry, and Amy Booth, whose sister married the Sydney merchant and philanthropist Samuel Hordern. Her paternal aunt, Lorri, widow of Bertram Whiting (P’41), is a distinguished abstract artist long resident in Italy. Sandford Beggs was a Victorian grazier with Anglo-Irish antecedents (both professional and gentry), while his wife, Helen Karen Seeck, Phoebe’s other grandmother, came from an Adelaide family of Russian ancestry. Hugh Beggs is a merino stud breeder who has been chairman of both the Australian Wool Corporation and the International Wool Secretariat. His three sisters have long made notable contributions to the national life: Tamie as Prime Minister’s wife, President of the Australian Open Garden Scheme, and much else; Eda as president of the Victorian Branch of the Liberal Party and of the Port Fairy Music Festival, and in other ways; Christina in combining a busy life on the land with highly entertaining authorship, not least of a biography of Tamie. Phoebe grew up among talented and creative people – and became one herself.
If some elements predominate in this knot of roots, they are the land – with the down-toearth practicality it breeds – and a sense of responsibility for others. Having joined CARE Australia independently of each other, Malcolm Fraser – long its chairman – and Phoebe both found in it a way of helping the suffering and the deprived. CARE took Phoebe to Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iran, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Somalia (where she set up an important food-distribution programme), and Rwanda (where she directed relief work after terrible massacres). By 1994 emergency response director for CARE Australia, late that year she married Rhodri Wynn-Pope, of CARE International. They have two sons, Harry (CuYr10) and Hamish. The School is especially proud of OGGs who – often in almost hidden ways – have devoted much of their lives to the care and service of others. Phoebe’s own generous and purposeful dedication to such service has been exemplary and inspiring. Michael Collins Persse