The subject for this week is Education.

There are many schoolteachers in my extended family but one was a real trailblazer – my Great Aunt Fanny Elizabeth Hunt 1863-1941. In 1888 Fanny became the University of Sydney’s first woman Science graduate and only the second in Australia. (Fanny was a perfectly acceptable name in those days, despite what Bradley Walsh thinks!)

She taught at a number of girls’ schools in Sydney for some years then became the inaugural headmistress of Ipswich Girls Grammar School just outside Brisbane, Queensland in 1891. Later she founded another school, Girton College in Toowoomba Queensland, in 1903.

I was to follow in her footsteps many years later, proudly wearing Fanny’s academic hood at my own graduation.