Sister Genevieve Bradford and Sister Clare Gaynor watch a sports carnival in 1964. Photo: Supplied.
Today, the Mt Erin Heritage Centre’s Sue Bradley takes us on a journey through the history of Wagga’s most iconic school.
Wagga’s Catholic schools have been educating the children of the Riverina for more than 140 years and this weekend the girls who were among the first to tackle the Higher School Certificate will return for a special 60th anniversary reunion.
In 1964, it was not an uncommon experience for Mt Erin students to walk over the hill to Sacred Heart Primary School to watch a sports carnival or join in a picnic day.
Pictured above are Sister Genevieve Bradford and Sister Clare Gaynor seated with two other sisters and possibly some parents watching the children participate in their sports day.
Note the two very lonely-looking houses on the hill behind the playground.
Janis Baxter and Mary McMahon in boarders’ uniform in the Sacred Heart playground. Photo: Supplied.
The Presentation Sisters arrived in Wagga Wagga in May 1874 and it took them two years to build the iconic convent building that was known as the Sacred Heart Presentation Convent.
They began teaching in two rooms on the western end of the convent at the beginning of 1877, St Mary’s school on the ground floor and St Brigid’s school on the first floor.
Over time as enrolments increased, other school buildings were erected, including the boarding house in 1889.
In 1890 the first group of young lady boarders came to reside at Mount Erin Boarding School and attend St Brigid’s Select School on the first floor of the west wing.
The boarding school soon filled to its capacity of 25 students.
Many hundreds of young women stayed at Mount Erin Boarding School in the first quarter of the 20th century.
Their school days came before the dark days of the Great Depression.
The shadow of World War I cast its gloom on students and teachers, as did the scourge of the pneumonic flu in post-war days, but all learned to live with the austerities of wartime and its aftermath.
Boarders who came to Mt Erin in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s lived in a brave new world, undreamt of by their counterparts of earlier days.
In this period, the world experienced cultural changes on a cosmic scale.
For Catholics in the early ’60s, the historic reforms known as Vatican II saw the nuns shed yards of black serge and emerge from enclosure.
Educationally, the old exam system of Intermediate and Leaving Certificate were replaced by a six-year course and young women still at school at the age of 18 were able to vote.
An early image of Sacred Heart School. Photo: Supplied.
The group of students who began their high school education in 1962 was the first to progress through to the Higher School Certificate in 1967.
Coincidentally, that same group of students (many of them boarders) will celebrate their 60th reunion this weekend.
They will gather to reminisce and renew friendships that have endured for 60 years.
The age of innocence was growing up as this pioneering lot listened to Penny Lane by the Beatles and Georgy Girl by The Seekers, dreaming of bright futures and “going to San Francisco with flowers in their hair”.
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