Deborah Blancquart
Class of 1974

Deborah Blancquart has lived all her life in the southern Sydney suburb of Penshurst, which was a close knit community during her youth in the 1960s and 1970s. She has one lovely memory of growing up in Penshurst. Her grandfather lived across the road and used to wait on the street corner to see his granddaughters as they returned home from school.

Her parents, Kathleen and Bernard, ‘saw education as an important thing for their daughters’ and decided to send them to St Vincent’s College, Potts Point. Bernard was a shipwright by trade and Kathleen did office work. She was a ‘very smart woman’ who believed St Vincent’s, as the leading Sister of Charity school, would most likely adopt the new system of six years of high school and consequently give her children the best education.

Life at St Vincent’s

Deborah enrolled at St Vincent’s in 1969 and recalls her first impressions of the College:

Deborah: I was really pleased about going there, I was…and I found it quite a secure place, a very comfortable place. And in those days they had two streams of classes, they had blue and the white and I don't think they were at all graded when we first went in. Years later they used to, because in those days they used to have advanced and ordinary or credit subjects or something, they were sort of levels, and the blue stream used to mostly be more people doing advanced classes, and the white were not. So that didn’t cause, there wasn’t a cohesion between the groups sometimes, but that happens in any group. So the first year that, I remember we had Mother Marion, I’m not quite sure what for whether Religion or Maths or something, poor lady used to walk up this hall, I can still remember it, and being little 12-year-olds we used to draw all over the blackboard and she used to come in every time and just clean this blackboard which we had just covered in some sort of drawings with chalk, whatever I don’t know why we did it but anyway we did, just wasted her time. She never said a thing about it.

Nicole Cama: Was this Marion Corless?

Deborah: Yes Marion Corless. So obviously a lovely lady.

The highly respected Marion Corless comes up a lot in the memories of former students of the College. She first set foot in St Vincent’s as a primary school student in 1923 and continued her secondary education at the College before joining the Sisters of Charity in 1933. She was principal of the College from 1945 to 1948 and then from 1962 until 1969, Deborah’s first year at the school:

Well I was…I suppose a little girl and so she was…she might have I don’t know if she was head of the…like the principal then, she might’ve been, just that last year, because I think after that it might’ve been Sister Mildred [Carroll]. She was quite a big lady, she was, I don’t remember a lot about her, she probably up there compared to me, young girl, and you just respected her. I think she was a very good person from what I understand. I can’t even remember her being cross or anything, she had every right to be cross about these 12-year-olds drawing over the blackboard, she never was. She probably just had a presence, she would’ve always looked after people.

There was also Sister Francis Xavier who taught Music, one of Deborah’s favourite subjects, and who had a saying – ‘Never be sharp, never be flat, always be natural’. She also remembers Sister Annette Cunliffe, one of her Science teachers, who had cleverly modified the sleeves of her habit so she could conduct laboratory experiments. And there were many other teachers:

My class teacher in those days was a Mrs O’Rourke, very tall lady, she used to like anagrams and crosswords. And she was a very bright lady, very nice lady. I think she was from the country she used to talk, actually you just brought this back to me, she used to talk about how she could break the back of a snake. She was a country girl, so she was a very smart lady very…she taught English that’s right, Mrs O’Rourke. Then in year 8, I think the class teacher was Sister Margaret [Beirne] who I don’t know if they’d changed those names then or if she was known as Sister Antonius, She was always a very lovely lady, very good Maths teacher. There was another nun then, a Sister Adrian, who used to wear a sun hat over her habit. She was a very lovely lady. There was a Sister Baptist [Whyte], who everyone would remember, she was something to do with art, craft, that sort of thing. And I must say I was remembering this morning something about a sports uniform. She was around when they were trying, whether they had to design things themselves then, and she made some bloomers to go under a sports uniform, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this…they were so big (laughs).

The students were generally well behaved but once the whole class got detention for ‘insubordination, disobedience and rudeness’. Though some of her fellow students might have called the culture of the school strict, Deborah felt it was ‘what the times were’ and she always felt ‘very safe’ and ‘very happy there’.

During Deborah’s time at the school the entrance to Victoria Street was sealed off to students and the area around the top tennis court and the grotto, where the young nuns were, was also out of bounds. The Chapel had high-backed pews and was ‘a very quiet and restful place’ where ‘you would not dare talk’. Deborah was later married in the Chapel.

‘It’s a very special place’

Deborah graduated from St Vincent’s in 1974 with mixed feelings. Although she was sad to leave the College, she felt she’d been encouraged by her teachers to pursue further education and was excited about pursuing a career in dentistry. But she believes nothing quite prepared her for entering what was a very ‘male-dominated’ profession:

Deborah: Well it was very special I suppose and you just thought you’d go on and study something and you’d have a career and I suppose you’d hoped you have a family. That sort of thing. I went into dentistry, that’s a bit unusual for women in those days. I have seen, I know there’s a couple of girl…I call them girls, the ladies who did dentistry I’ve seen them around the faculty at different times from St Vincent’s, later on. So they were fairly unusual careers. There wasn’t the choice of things to do, they were sort of, you chose your standard, they were certainly areas that women didn’t go into in those days but…

Nicole: There were sort of set professions weren’t they?

Deborah: Set professions. Whereas these days I think someone would go to university and hope a job or something might evolve from it. And yes, that’s a good description, set professions. So you wouldn’t think that you could go into something and end up somewhere else.

All these years later, Deborah has kept her distinctive fawn-coloured Vinnie’s uniform. And almost 30 years after Deborah graduated from St Vincent’s her daughter, Stephanie, wore the uniform in an ‘old-fashioned dress up day’ at her primary school. Stephanie was later enrolled at St Vincent’s in 2008. Deborah explains why Vinnie’s was the right choice for her daughter:

Deborah: I was determined though that Stephanie wouldn’t, my daughter wouldn’t, just go to St Vincent’s because I had been there. And in fact when my husband and I had our daughter from very early on we went to some open days at schools and without my influencing it really he said to me, “I like St Vincent’s”. And that’s…you have to move with the times you have to be aware that you choose what’s right for the times, because nothing stays the same. And I wanted that, I wanted him to be happy and that was actually what I felt at the time too, it had the right feel about it, the right atmosphere to what we wanted for our daughter. And she’s a lovely young woman. So that’s what we wanted for her.

Nicole: So how would you describe it had the right atmosphere, how would you describe that atmosphere?

Deborah: Inclusive, welcoming, understanding…very special. It’s always had the same, and you can go to other places and I’ve never felt as welcome as I have at St Vincent’s. It’s a very special place.

Reflecting on how the school has changed over the years, she says one of the best things introduced in more recent years has been the ‘brilliant’ tutor group system, which includes classes focussed on pastoral care and administrative activities and features students of all age groups. She describes it as a ‘cohesive’ system that has ‘connected the entire College across all the years’ and hopes it will continue well into the future. When asked what advice she could offer students at St Vincent’s today, Deborah says, ‘enjoy your time there, enjoy your friendships and just make the most of the opportunities you’re given….It’s a very beautiful time’.