Frankston High School turned 100 this year. Sue Robinson, a former student and then a teacher at the school, volunteered to write a book celebrating the school’s history.
In a Q&A with Caroline Milburn, Ourschool’s CEO and Founder, Sue describes the fierce community campaign that led to the school’s establishment in 1924 and what motivated her to write the book.
Sue, you’ve called the book, ‘100 years, 100 voices’. It reveals a different person’s story for each year of Frankston High’s history. How did you track down the former students featured in the book?
The school suffered bad fires in the 1990s, when an ex-student tried to burn the place down. School records and memorabilia were lost in the fires.
So, a group of past students got together after the fires and said, ‘Let’s form an ex-students Association and try and get some of the school’s history back’.
Over the years, they put together a magazine that was published three or four times a year. The magazines contained lots of stories of past students. That’s where I went to find the people who were no longer with us.
To find alumni who were still alive I started off by asking the current school staff who they could nominate, and then the wheels got going.
I got emails from all sorts of people nominating others. Then it became a matter of how to whittle it down to 100 people because I could have easily written about 200.
Did you discover any common themes from your interviews?
A theme that emerged was how grateful people were for their time at Frankston High and how the school didn’t spoon feed them. It taught them that they had to believe in themselves.
People spoke about how the school had set them up for a good life, not just a good career, but a good life.
Apparently, residents in the 1920s campaigned to persuade the government that Frankston needed a high school. Mothers protested the government’s slow response to the local campaign by blockading the Nepean Highway with their prams, when the education minister, Sir Alexander Peacock, was returning from his holiday in Portsea.
Yes, that’s true, it was an amazing community campaign. In our school museum we have a beautiful little black and white badge that’s about the size of a dollar coin.
It’s got a picture of Oliver’s Hill with a picket fence going up the side. The badges were distributed as a fundraiser to raise money to get the school built.
The overriding impression I got from the history I read was that the government at that time was dragging its feet because it didn’t see a need for educating working class kids beyond year eight.
It’s unusual for a public high school to have a museum on campus. How did it start?
We opened the museum in 2014 for the school’s 90th anniversary. I was teaching there at the time. The school’s original building, the senior campus and the old science buildings were being rebuilt.
Stuff was getting thrown out, left, right and center.
One of the Assistant Principals said to me, ‘Look, this is sacrilege, we’ve got to start saving some of the things being thrown out’. So, I got on board with the idea of saving items at risk of being thrown away or, in the case of the old school magazines, would have been housed in cupboards in a room somewhere and wouldn’t have seen the light of day.
At the time I had a wonderful group of about half a dozen boys who were really interested in history. We used to run a history club that met one day each week at lunchtime.
I remember one day in the club one of the boys in year seven or eight, stood up and did an amazing PowerPoint presentation on Operation Market Garden, which is when the allies took back Western Europe in World War Two.
He was a kid who didn’t like attending school. But history was the thing that pushed his buttons.
That group of boys worked with me and the Assistant Principal to get the history museum off the ground.
What’s in the museum?
We’ve got old honour boards, school magazines, uniforms, sports cups and old photos.
Once the museum opened, word spread, and I started getting other items. I recently got an email from a woman in the UK who then sent a post pack containing some marvelous sporting pennants from the 1970s.
You run the museum voluntarily and it’s open to the school’s students and the public. What do you hope the museum achieves?
It’s important for the Frankston community but I think it’s probably even more important to have current students at the school going into the museum.
When I was still teaching, I would take kids into the museum on a regular basis, and I saw the impact it had on them.
I saw kids coming in, looking at beautiful old photographs of school sporting teams from the 1920s and saying, ‘Wow, this school goes back a long way’. It had a real impact on them.
I want kids at the school to feel proud that they went to Frankston High.
What advice do you have for other public high schools about valuing and displaying their history?
It’s important for kids to see that they’re part of something much bigger than the six years they’re at their school. To be proud of where they’ve come from. To feel that connection with role models who’ve gone through the school and succeeded.
We’ve been lucky because we’ve got a room at school that’s been set aside for a museum.
But if you’re at a school that doesn’t have an available room, you can still find a space somewhere in the school to display school photos and school history. In this digital age, it’s easy to put up some rolling displays on a screen somewhere.
It’s important for the kids who are attending that school now, because it’s one of the things that might make them feel more engaged with their school.
You can’t divorce celebrating a school’s history from the current students because there’s a connection between them.
It’s what private schools have been doing for a long time – making kids feel they’re part of a good institution, and that they feel proud about being part of it. That sense of belonging makes a difference in how they perform. It’s as basic as that.
Copies of the book are available via Frankston High School’s website: https://www.fhs.vic.edu.au/centenary-celebrations/
Frankston High School turned 100 this year. Sue Robinson, a former student and then a teacher at the school, volunteered to write a book celebrating the school’s history.
In a Q&A with Caroline Milburn, Ourschool’s CEO and co-founder, Sue describes the fierce community campaign that led to the school’s establishment in 1924 and what motivated her to write the book.
Sue, you’ve called the book, ‘100 years, 100 voices’. It reveals a different person’s story for each year of Frankston High’s history. How did you track down the former students featured in the book?
The school suffered bad fires in the 1990s, when an ex-student tried to burn the place down. School records and memorabilia were lost in the fires.
So, a group of past students got together after the fires and said, ‘Let’s form an ex-students Association and try and get some of the school’s history back’.
Over the years, they put together a magazine that was published three or four times a year. The magazines contained lots of stories of past students. That’s where I went to find the people who were no longer with us.
To find alumni who were still alive I started off by asking the current school staff who they could nominate, and then the wheels got going.
I got emails from all sorts of people nominating others. Then it became a matter of how to whittle it down to 100 people because I could have easily written about 200.
Did you discover any common themes from your interviews?
A theme that emerged was how grateful people were for their time at Frankston High and how the school didn’t spoon feed them. It taught them that they had to believe in themselves.
People spoke about how the school had set them up for a good life, not just a good career, but a good life.
Apparently, residents in the 1920s campaigned to persuade the government that Frankston needed a high school. Mothers protested the government’s slow response to the local campaign by blockading the Nepean Highway with their prams, when the education minister, Sir Alexander Peacock, was returning from his holiday in Portsea.
Yes, that’s true, it was an amazing community campaign. In our school museum we have a beautiful little black and white badge that’s about the size of a dollar coin.
It’s got a picture of Oliver’s Hill with a picket fence going up the side. The badges were distributed as a fundraiser to raise money to get the school built.
The overriding impression I got from the history I read was that the government at that time was dragging its feet because it didn’t see a need for educating working class kids beyond year eight.
It’s unusual for a public high school to have a museum on campus. How did it start?
We opened the museum in 2014 for the school’s 90th anniversary. I was teaching there at the time. The school’s original building, the senior campus and the old science buildings were being rebuilt.
Stuff was getting thrown out, left, right and center.
One of the Assistant Principals said to me, ‘Look, this is sacrilege, we’ve got to start saving some of the things being thrown out’. So, I got on board with the idea of saving items at risk of being thrown away or, in the case of the old school magazines, would have been housed in cupboards in a room somewhere and wouldn’t have seen the light of day.
At the time I had a wonderful group of about half a dozen boys who were really interested in history. We used to run a history club that met one day each week at lunchtime.
I remember one day in the club one of the boys in year seven or eight, stood up and did an amazing PowerPoint presentation on Operation Market Garden, which is when the allies took back Western Europe in World War Two.
He was a kid who didn’t like attending school. But history was the thing that pushed his buttons.
That group of boys worked with me and the Assistant Principal to get the history museum off the ground.
What’s in the museum?
We’ve got old honour boards, school magazines, uniforms, sports cups and old photos.
Once the museum opened, word spread, and I started getting other items. I recently got an email from a woman in the UK who then sent a post pack containing some marvelous sporting pennants from the 1970s.
You run the museum voluntarily and it’s open to the school’s students and the public. What do you hope the museum achieves?
It’s important for the Frankston community but I think it’s probably even more important to have current students at the school going into the museum.
When I was still teaching, I would take kids into the museum on a regular basis, and I saw the impact it had on them.
I saw kids coming in, looking at beautiful old photographs of school sporting teams from the 1920s and saying, ‘Wow, this school goes back a long way’. It had a real impact on them.
I want kids at the school to feel proud that they went to Frankston High.
What advice do you have for other public high schools about valuing and displaying their history?
It’s important for kids to see that they’re part of something much bigger than the six years they’re at their school. To be proud of where they’ve come from. To feel that connection with role models who’ve gone through the school and succeeded.
We’ve been lucky because we’ve got a room at school that’s been set aside for a museum.
But if you’re at a school that doesn’t have an available room, you can still find a space somewhere in the school to display school photos and school history. In this digital age, it’s easy to put up some rolling displays on a screen somewhere.
It’s important for the kids who are attending that school now, because it’s one of the things that might make them feel more engaged with their school.
You can’t divorce celebrating a school’s history from the current students because there’s a connection between them.
It’s what private schools have been doing for a long time – making kids feel they’re part of a good institution, and that they feel proud about being part of it. That sense of belonging makes a difference in how they perform. It’s as basic as that.
Copies of the book are available via Frankston High School’s website: https://www.fhs.vic.edu.au/centenary-celebrations/