A Clear Vision: Mrs Janet O’Connor and the Duporth School for Young Women, Oxley, Queensland
Elisabeth Wheeler
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Educated, cultured and daughter of a Royal Navy Surgeon from Cornwall, her view of education was the cultivation of the mind and character. The liberal curriculum emphasised the study of literature, languages, art and music. Her students would emerge as intelligent, capable young women who could take their place in society and
contribute.
Girls came from across Brisbane, Queensland and Northern New South Wales to attend Duporth, and the school community held loyal friends, among them Nellie Melba, the Australian opera diva.
Author Elisabeth Wheeler presents Janet O’Connor’s story in A Clear Vision. Meticulously researched, illustrated and indexed, it contains lists of enrolments of girls and biographies on selected students and staff, providing insight into the role of women in the nascent years of a ‘European’ Australia, through to post First World War.
A Clear Vision is social history, educational history, biography, and more. It is a reconstruction and an anatomy of a school – a window into the world of early Queensland and Australia, its people, emergent classes, values and aspirations through the lens of a visionary educator, Mrs Janet O’Connor, and Duporth.
Customer Reviews
The research data included in the final pages of this book are both reliable and comprehensive. I have already recommended the book for inclusion in the Esk Shire Council library where there are books about the men from the families whose sisters and daughters were enrolled at Deporth school but are seldom included in local history except as an adjunct to the men's pioneering of the Brisbane River Valley. The early text chapters are well and carefully written.
A wonderful account of the Education of the young women of the early Settlers of Queensland by Duporths Janet O'Connor and how that ,open, education influenced the development and history of Queensland.