Fourth-generation Pymble family

Sisters Alice and Sophie are the latest in a succession of Pymble girls descended from Forbes grazier John Francis Hammond and his wife Jennie, whose daughter Katie began the family’s Pymble journey in 1934.

Alice Beveridge (Year 8) is a Boarder in Marden House and will be joined by her sister Sophie when she begins Year 7 in 2022. Both girls follow in the footsteps of their mother Edwina (Walker, 1993) and grandmother Jean (Low, 1962), who were sporty country girls who loved their years at Pymble.

“We have a pig farm where all our pigs live in big sheds, and we also have sheep and cattle and crops,” says Alice, who has boarded at the College since 2020.

The Beveridges live just outside Young in the south-west slopes region of New South Wales, a four-hour drive from Sydney. Edwina graduated from Pymble in 1993 and studied as a Chartered Accountant before commencing her career in pork production and having a family. She is now Director of Blantyre Farms and Elected Producer Director of the Australian Pork Limited Board. Pork farms are measured by the number of sows onsite and with 2,000 sows, the Beveridges own a “medium to large” operation – 25,000 pigs in all.

“Each sow – they’re quite phenomenal – can produce two litters a year and they can average about 11 piglets that we wean,” Edwina says.

Blantyre is dedicated to sustainable farming. It was the first farm in Australia to have a registered project under the government’s Carbon Farming Initiative program – and Edwina believes theirs was the first carbon farm in Australia.

“All the pigs’ manure goes into a great big dam and we put a cover over the top of it – it looks a bit like a jumping castle. This catches the gas and we make electricity from the methane gas that the pig manure produces. So we’re actually running our farm on renewable energy produced from our pig poo,” she says.

“We feed them a lot of food waste. We use a huge amount of dairy product that’s gone past its use-by date. At the moment we’ve been getting a lot of pasta. Just today I had a pasta company ring me to say they had 40 tonnes of red lentil pasta that is past its use-by date, so that will come to us and we even deal with unpacking a lot of it. It either comes in a milk container or a pasta packet that you buy in the supermarket and we’ve made our own machines to open them or we have strong daughters to do it in the holidays!” Alice also keeps busy on the farm by helping with the harvest and baling, which she is paid for and uses as pocket money during the school term.

When she returned to Murringo in the Term 2 school holidays, a snap Sydney lockdown forced Alice to delay her return to Pymble and join her classmates in learning online. The Boarders, who are especially close – and refer to each other as ‘sisters’ – make sure to keep connected through using Microsoft Teams, meeting online in House groups and maintaining their daily routine as much as possible.

Alice has also turned her attention to a special personal project documenting her family’s long association with the College.

“She’s rung up some of her great aunts and asked them all sorts of questions and she’s got down all the names of who went to Pymble and in what year,” Edwina said. “There’s some lovely stories within that.” Alice’s great-grandmother, Katie, received her Intermediate Certificate in 1935 and was a member of the Debating Society and Captain of the C Tennis Team. Katie’s sister Jean received her Leaving Certificate in 1934 and the girls’ sister-in-law Peggy Buchanan was in the First XI Hockey team and Senior A Netball team.

The girls’ love for the school was noted in the Forbes Advocate in 1939, when Katie was married: “A most unusual event in the evening was the singing by the girls of the ‘war cry’ of Miss Hammond's old school the lads doing likewise for the bridegroom.”

Grandmother Jean graduated from Pymble in 1962 and enjoyed playing Tennis – a sportswoman like her mum and aunties before her. Alice has followed in her ancestors’ aptitude for sport and College spirit, receiving a Jacaranda Award in Semester 1 2021, as well as Compass Captain and participation in Rowing and Basketball.

“I loved it, I loved every second of it,” Edwina said of her own Pymble experience. “There was probably only about four minutes at Pymble when I was homesick and that was it in my six years. And I was so keen for my girls to go there.

“I just was hoping my husband would be happy with it – and then he came and had a look at the school and said ‘they’d be so lucky to come to this school’!”