Jo WHITEMAN (1979)

On my first day at SCEGGS as a new Year 7 girl in the 1970s, some of my classmates were assigned the task of taking new students on a tour of the school. I listened as the teacher told them where they should take the new girls on the tour:

“First, go down the Chapel stairs and through Peanut Alley to the Yellow Building, then around to the Assembly Hall and the Tuckshop, and up past the Terraces to Bondi. Be back at Siberia in fifteen minutes, please.”

I was somewhat alarmed – did this mean that I had to run all the way to Bondi Beach and back? Surely not! All in 15 minutes!

The places around SCEGGS soon became very familiar to me – I learnt that Siberia was at the top of the Chapel building, where boarders in bygone days had slept on cold wintry nights. I found out that Bondi was not the famous beach, but rather the patch of grass above the swimming pool outside the boarding house, where girls could sit in the sun and dream. The Terraces were not old buildings, but rather tiered seats where students could sit under the shade of the fig trees, overlooking the pool.

These places became a second home and grew dearer to me as the years went on. My friends and I spent many lunchtimes on the terraces, when we weren’t practising tennis on the hitting-up court. We moved all around the school for our lessons, from the top of the Chapel Building, to the bottom Art Room, down to the Science block and the Library, and over to the Yellow Building. We jumped over the horse and walked along the balance beam and tried to keep our foothold when climbing the walls in the Gym. We loved it all and took away very fond memories of our schooldays.