Carolyn Rutherford, 1963 Bursary Recipient Gives Thanks to BPW
Letter from Carolyn Rutherford – 1963 Bursary Recipient
Dear Secretary,
My name is Carolyn Rutherford. I am 73 years old, retired, and living at GemLife on Bribie Island. I am writing, (very belatedly), to express my gratitude to the Queensland Business and Professional Women’s Association for a generous bursary given to me in early 1963, which enabled me to further my education at high school.
I attended a one-teacher school in central western Queensland, in a tiny railway town called Bogantungan, and was the eldest daughter and one of seven children, later to be nine. The school was closed when we arrived there in 1956, but two migrant families also arrived in 1957, boosting the number of pupils, and enabled the school to re-open. In the meantime, my elder brother was sent to boarding school in Rockhampton, and I, then aged six, did lessons through the Queensland Correspondence School.
When the school re-opened, I was assessed as being ahead of the second grade curriculum, and much to my older brother’s horror, I was put up a grade, and completed my primary school education in the same class as he, along with another girl who was also eighteen months older.
Grade 8 was completed at primary schools back then, and the Queensland Scholarship Examination was held to determine who could attend high school, which was not compulsory at that time. During that year, 1962, my parents separated, my mother leaving with the youngest children, and my father, a heavy drinker, went on a drinking binge that lasted weeks. If not for my grandparents and the current teacher at the school, my education would have finished at that point, six weeks out from the examination.
Despite the trauma, my brother and I did well in the exam, and he went to live with other relatives where he could attend high school, but my future was uncertain, as I was so young, and my mother said I could not join her in Rockhampton to go to high school, as any money, including what was in all the children’s bank accounts, would go to pay for the divorce. Just before my 13th birthday in January 1963, the letter arrived containing a cheque from BPW Queensland, which was enough to pay for all my books, uniforms, and even a second-hand bike to ride to high school.
I started grade nine two weeks later as the youngest student at Rockhampton High, and was so shy and scared of the huge number of people that I hid under the stairs with the janitor’s equipment while eating my lunch!
Needless to say, I survived and went on to work as a telephone operator for the Postmater General’s Department, later Telecom, and then Telstra. I married at 19, living in caravans for the first five years, as my husband worked on heavy industry construction in mining areas, and we have been married for 54 years now.
Later I went to TAFE full-time for a year, to get office and business skills after being made redundant. My husband and I had several partnerships, and later we bought rental properties as we had very little superannuation. I have always handled our finances, including buying properties, while my husband did the physical work. We retired early and supported ourselves without a part-pension until recently.
I credit a lot of our success to the fact that I was able to leave that small town, where there was no future, as it became a ghost town in the following years. Of course, we made sacrifices of comfort, and there was a lot of hard work, including renovations to the properties, but without those extra two years of education, my life would have been very different. It enabled me to achieve things I would never have considered and to help our children and grandchildren. I have also been a volunteer in many capacities, including teaching English to migrants and refugees.
This was never meant to be such a long story, but you may have guessed by now that the bursary was for the highest Scholarship English pass in a one-teacher school that year (98.5%.)
I hope this is of some interest to the current members of your organisation, and I wish you all well in your endeavours.
With kind regards,
Carolyn Rutherford
