Year on year Old Girls from across Australia and abroad continue to send their daughters, nieces and granddaughters back to Glennie. For fourth generation Glennie Old Girl Amanda Button (nee Seccombe) (2002), a recent journey back to the Glennie Chapel is just the beginning for the next generation.
Today marks two significant milestones, for the first time after the Covid-19 hibernation, The Glennie School, and its Chapel welcomed back families to celebrate not one, but four baptisms.
With the sounds of laughter and conversation between family and friends, including ten Glennie Old Girls wafting through the Chapel doors, Amanda sits amongst the very same pews she spent many a service on when she was a student at Glennie.
‘I was really emotional walking in, I remember we spent a lot of time in this Chapel. We spent every Sunday here and one day during the week as well. The smell is still so familiar, that smell of the timber is exactly the same’.
The connection to this small timber building is very sentimental to both Amanda and her extended family. ‘My mother and father were married here, and my grandmother, Nina Glasson who was quite a matriarch of the Glennie Old Girls was married here as well. So, there’s quite a lot of generational sentiment in this little building’.
For Amanda’s four children Charlie, Albert, Anna and Reginald and husband Hugh today’s ceremony will be their very first memory of Glennie, a memory of family, friendship, and community. The conversations with loved ones in the Chapel aisle, or those gathering on the Chapel lawn will leave a lasting impression that will be forever cherished.
That first memory is something that remains as fresh as yesterday for Amanda. ‘There’s a photo of my first day at Glennie with my best friend from home who was going to another school in Toowoomba. In the photo she was red faced, tears streaming from her eyes, and there I was standing next to her with a huge smile’.
It is the multigenerational connection that has made Glennie always feel like a second home. Coming from the North West Queensland town of XXXX, and commencing as a boarder in 1997, the prospect of being away from family was never an upsetting scenario.
‘I couldn’t wait to come here! I was one of four siblings, with three brothers, and so I was just yearning for female company and to have more sisters around me.
Because my mother and her two sisters had been here, my grandmother is an Old Girl, along with her mother before her, Glennie was already so very familiar. It was never a cold, clinical, unfamiliar place, It was very warm, very welcoming, and when you first arrived it was just a hive of activity.
Boarding was pivotal in really solidifying deep connections between friends. And it was just great fun. I remember the last day of each term, we used to all swap beds or sleep on top of the cupboards and just do silly, fun things like that. I loved every second of boarding school life’.
As the midday Autumn sun spills through the Chapel windows and bounces off the wooden panelled walls, Amanda looks out through to the gardens. A place which continues to leave its mark on her today.
‘It’s funny walking around the gardens, they certainly are imprinted in my mind, especially now that they have inspired me to create my own garden at home.
Now I want to have a Jacaranda tree with the beautiful purple flowers and rows of Agapanthus. I still remember walking back from my tennis squad lessons and whacking all the flowers with my tennis racket and thinking it was quite fun. Now that I know how hard it is to garden, I think, oh my gosh, those poor gardeners, I really feel for the groundsman, the aggies really copped a caning from all of us.
Memories of the gardens span across the generations, with Amanda’s mother and grandmother before her picking flowers from across the road at Clifford Gardens, ‘My Grandmother told me about Clifford Gardens, and that it was the vegetable patch for the girls. She would tell me stories about her riding her horse around amongst the vegetable patches. My mother-in-law, who was also a Glennie girl, was in charge of collecting fresh flowers from the gardens to put in the Chapel and Dining Room’.
Now that I know how hard it is to garden, I think, oh my gosh, those poor gardeners, I really feel for the groundsman, the aggies really copped a caning from all of us.
Apart from memories of the Glennie grounds, one thing that continues to this day are the friendships that Amanda formed during her years at school. ‘The privilege of being a boarder in a smaller city like Toowoomba, is that your networking potential is massive. You meet and form friendships with girls from Goondiwindi, far North Queensland, from the coast and Brisbane, as well as your international girls as well. Out of my Year 12 group, there’s probably eight of us who are still really close, and catch up together throughout the year’.
Being able to take charge and manage her own time was one of the highlights of boarding for many of the girls in Amanda’s year. Whether it be ensuring homework was completed in the afternoon, attending evening dinners, and breakfast and lunches during the day, as well juggling the sports outside of school hours including her much loved tennis squad training, the independence gained at Glennie was greatly appreciated yet respected.
‘There was a huge emphasis on independence, and with our independence came a lot of freedom. We could go as a group down to the shops in town or walk across to Clifford Gardens, even just being able to spend time with family when they were in town. We were so lucky that there wasn’t a set number of occasions or times that we could spend with family.
I had friends who went to other boarding schools, and they had a set number of weekends each term where they were allowed out with family. That wasn’t the case at Glennie’.
‘I think it’s important to continue to teach humility and compassion as well as independence. It’s equally important for all women to see themselves as an equal part of a marriage, to oversee their finances and careers.
Being back within the same four walls that had seen her through six years of education, the marriage of her parents, grandparents, and great grandparents, and now the baptism of three of her four children, Amanda reflects on what she would want out of a Glennie education for her own daughters.
‘I think it’s important to continue to teach humility and compassion as well as independence. It’s equally important for all women to see themselves as an equal part of a marriage, to oversee their finances and careers.
The Glennie ethos is ‘All She Can Be’, and that is so true for Glennie girls. The school really encourages the students to be anything they want. I just want that for our own children, that same encouragement, and for them to know that the world is their oyster and the sky’s the limit.
