SCENE 2
An Introverted Schoolgirl

‘I’m terribly experienced at dreaming about the absent man. I’ve done it all my life.’

—Gretel Pinniger to Antonella Gambotto, 1993

Katherine Jenkins has clear memories of her young cousin. ‘Gretel was a blonde, shy child with a turned-up nose and full mouth—a pretty little girl.’ She wore pigtails and her dresses ‘always looked secondhand, always a bit too big. She looked like a bit of a waif, dreamy … She was soft. She was clever. She was compassionate. She was artistic.’ And she stammered when she spoke. Laurie Pinniger would later recall that Gretel was ‘a quiet, observant and amusing child, particularly when reprimanded for being naughty’.

Gretel was always drawing and doodling, particularly over her maths homework. From early childhood she wanted to be an artist. ‘In five minutes,’ George says, ‘she could knock up something brilliant.’ She regularly sent paintings to the Sun-Herald children’s pages, where they were often published.

Laurie worked hard and was soon seeing patients from early in the morning until nightfall. She would walk her two children to the nearby Burwood Public School before her first appointment of the day. But Gran McGarrity was ageing, and Laurie’s long hours left her little time to cook dinner. When George turned nine, Uncle Kelvin convinced his sister to enrol him as a boarder at his alma mater, the King’s School, Parramatta. Gretel too was dying to go to boarding school, convinced by the English novels she devoured that it would be ‘absolute heaven’. To Laurie, struggling to run her physiotherapy practice, the idea was tempting. The Methodist Ladies’ College, just a few blocks away, was her old school. It was dedicated to turning out polite and scholarly young ladies—a place where girls were reported for failing to wear hats and gloves. But when her mother applied for Gretel’s final primary school year, there were no boarding places available. So in 1957 the eleven-year-old was enrolled as a day girl.

Gretel’s private education, like many phases of her life, began dramatically. In her first term, a man broke into the school and raped a girl in the sick bay. Weeks later he returned, terrorising a dormitory full of girls before dragging one away to nearby Burwood. There he raped her and stabbed her to death. It was the first ugly real-world event Gretel can recall intruding into a life that for all its unhappiness had been quite sheltered. She and her schoolmates were now regularly cautioned not to speak to strangers, but Gretel was neither alarmed nor particularly spooked. For suddenly there was a spare bed in the dormitories. Now she had a chance to live out her dreams of English boarding-school life.

The reality would be very different. Gretel was one of the youngest in her boarding house, and her classmates zeroed in on her introverted nature and naïveté. Living with other girls for the first time, Gretel quickly felt alienated by her undeveloped body. ‘I didn’t understand anything … about periods … I didn’t have them for years after everyone else. It was always a terrific embarrassment. I thought I was never going to mature.’

Painfully modest and ashamed of her flat chest, Gretel would perform the most intricate contortions while changing from uniform to gym tunic to ensure that no one saw her naked body. She became the butt of jokes. Worse, she had since infancy rocked herself to sleep. In the twelve-bed dormitory her bed creaked interminably as she rolled from side to side, infuriating her dorm companions. Told to stop it, she would lie tense and unhappy for hours before trying again.

‘Almost from the moment I started there, I was unutterably miserable,’ she remembers. Too innocent to understand the jokes that circulated, Gretel found herself mocked. Strange objects were left in her bed. She held one up, asking who owned it—and was answered by peals of laughter at her failure to recognise a sanitary pad.

‘I was also terribly hung up because my mother thought it was the most incredible disgrace to be divorced.’ One of the stories Gretel read as a child was These Old Shades, about a girl who eventually discovers she is the illegitimate daughter of a duke. Gretel convinced herself that being the child of divorced parents was just as shameful. It needed to be concealed at all costs, ‘as it meant I was unfit to move in normal society’. But secrecy was impossible. Gretel’s schoolmates would shove her into corners to cross-examine her. ‘Where does your father live?’ ‘How many brothers do you have?’ Sometimes she would stammer ‘one’—other times ‘three’. Indeed, her father had now remarried and had two sons by his second wife. But to her fellow students, something was fishy. Challenged as a liar, Gretel would blush and stammer some more. Then she would clam up completely.

She soon found herself friendless. On Sunday afternoons, each boarder was allowed to spend a few shillings on sweets in the school tuck shop. Then they would take a blanket to a nearby park and lie down and eat them. ‘Who’s your friend, Gretel?’ one girl would tease. ‘Oh, I suppose it’s your grandmother,’ another would taunt.

‘Even the girls with acne …were never so desperate that they were prepared to spend Saturday and Sunday afternoons with me,’ Gretel recalls. She would seek out a remote corner, often in the school laundry, where she would spend hours talking to the laundry staff. ‘At Christmas I gave them small presents, grateful for the warmth they had shown me.’ One of them had wept—in 25 years at the school, it was the first time a pupil had given her a present. When she told her mother she wished she had more friends, Laurie assured her that popular girls ‘were less interesting people’. Gretel believed her.

In the dormitory, Gretel would discover hairbrushes in her pillow, her pyjamas tied in knots or wet, her bed short-sheeted and toothpaste smeared over her sheets. ‘On the one occasion when I caught someone … squeezing toothpaste on the bed, I did it to them the next night and the girl reported me—something I would never have done,’ she says.

Gretel would spend hours standing in the hall outside a prefect’s room for some infraction. Often her tie-pin would be missing, and she would be forced to buy a new one out of her pocket money. When her birthday came up in October, her mother brought in an opulent ice-cream cake. Gretel invited her dorm mates to share it. The gesture did nothing to soften their antagonism. She could not even buy their friendship.

To escape, Gretel lost herself in books. ‘I was fed by my reading and by my fantasies—epics were my passion. I saw nothing but epic connections for myself … I was always being told that everything I did was one big act, that I lived in a dream world.’

She was always late to class, often because she could not find crucial items of her uniform or because she was so slow at making her bed. Miserable, she became more and more withdrawn, until she refused to answer questions even from her teachers, who regularly reprimanded her for her ‘passive resistance’. Her Saturday detentions mounted.

Despite Gretel’s shortcomings, her headmistress remained convinced that the Methodist Ladies’ College could ‘make something’ of this problem child, whose entrance tests had shown she was highly intelligent. To conquer her passive resistance Gretel was warned, ‘We’re going to break you, Gretel.’

But, ‘I couldn’t understand what they were talking about,’ Gretel recalls. ‘I couldn’t imagine a set of circumstances that could break my spirit.’

The school sought Laurie Pinniger’s permission to inflict its plan. Hit hard by the recent death of her mother and her brother’s failure to return to Australia for the funeral, and struggling to manage her practice alone, Laurie paid little heed. Besides, she knew she was a hopeless disciplinarian. The school could do whatever it thought best.

Every little treat was denied her daughter. Her pocket money was taken away. She was grounded every Sunday. Gretel did not see her mother for a whole term, except at her grandmother’s funeral. From her books, however, she had learned that the Greeks and Romans considered stoicism a great virtue. She dug in, refusing to break down under even the worst punishments her teachers could conceive. ‘I thought it an imitation of Christ, a perfect Christian virtue. This drove my tormentors to further acts against me because I was, in this respect, so unsatisfactory a target.’

Finally she was sent down from first form back to sixth class in the Junior school for the last three weeks of term. Far from being humiliated by the demotion, she shone. A class play was in rehearsal and Gretel’s paintings of her classmates were not only praised but exhibited.

When the new term commenced a new schedule was devised for her. Gretel was woken an hour before her dormitory mates and made to run ten laps of the basketball courts. Her principal, Reverend Robert Lew, would rise early to stand in his dressing gown checking his charge cut no corners. Gasping for breath and reduced to a quivering heap, Gretel wept, pleading for mercy. ‘He, with magnanimous Christian charity, would then excuse me from the remaining revolutions … I’d be a heaving mess, completely fucked, and I’d have to go to breakfast straight after. I’d just make it out of breakfast when I’d vomit—every day.’

During the two weeks of this cruelty, MLC at last produced the tears they sought. Gretel would attribute a nervous asthmatic condition and a chronic aversion to sports to this experience.

She did have one joy at MLC, however—her passion for seventeen-year-old Cynthia Gunn. Older than the other girls because she had taken a year off with rheumatic fever, Cynthia was frail and pale-faced. Gretel was wildly in love. It was not uncommon for a younger girl to become infatuated with a senior one. ‘Quite often, expensive presents would pass between two girls,’ Gretel recalls. ‘I used to fantasise about saving [her] life … She was on my mind the whole time. I chose her for what I considered her beauty, purity, pallor of skin, delicacy and strength of character … I thought she was just wonderful. I loved her taste in clothes … fluffy pastel cardigans, angora.’

Gretel would write passionate letters, only a fraction of which she would present to Cynthia. ‘She had a most mature and responsible attitude to my passion for her. She didn’t encourage it … but accepted without any comment the letters I thrust upon her … When she discovered the impossibility of dissuading me, she showed some pity … and was not cruel.’

Daydreaming about rescuing Cynthia from burning buildings or rampaging tribesmen, Gretel would set down her thoughts in scrolls doodled on her blotter. Inevitably, a teacher caught her with ‘Cynthia’ inked across the back of her hand. Weeks later, in a maths class, Gretel’s mind was far from bisecting lines with the neat arcs of her compass. Instead she toyed with its steel point, dreaming of Cynthia. Suddenly she stabbed deep into the back of her hand, twisting the instrument to gouge a painful C into her skin. Carefully she retraced the bloody C in ink, intent on making a permanent tattoo.

When her teacher saw Gretel’s mutilated hand, she was marched straight to the infirmary. The sister soon reduced her wound to a raw red mass, scrubbing out the ink with a wire brush. Gretel was sent to the principal’s wife, who insisted on knowing whose name started with C. Gretel clammed up. Others hammered her to tell them. The entire boarding population was questioned until Cynthia disclosed her identity.

Gretel wrote her a letter to apologise for having so defiled her name. She promised she would henceforth confine sweet tattooed Cs to her legs, far from the sharp eyes of her teachers. Gretel left the letter in her desk, too shy to deliver it.

A few nights later she was shaken awake by three looming figures. A hiss came out of the darkness. ‘Get up. Put on your dressing gown and follow us.’ As she trailed after jerky torch beams along the corridor, Gretel became aware that she was following the school matron and two house mistresses. Corralled in the sick bay—the very place the rapist had first broken into a year earlier—she was instructed to stand on a table and pull up the legs of her pyjamas. The women shone their torches on her pale skin.

‘Well, I can’t see anything. Can you?’ said one.

‘No, it looks all right to me.’

‘What’s this?’

Gretel felt the cold metal of a torch jab her thigh. She fought off rising panic.

‘No, it’s not.’ She was close to fainting.

‘Take off your pyjamas, girl!’ a voice snapped out of the darkness.

As hands and torches clawed at her naked body, Gretel fell dumb. Mortified by her lack of breasts, she willed herself to feel nothing. But her inquisitors found no self-inflicted tattoos. As if to justify their assault, they now produced the letter she had left in her desk.

The school rang Laurie Pinniger, recommending that she take her daughter to a psychiatrist. Laurie was worried, but when a friend, one of the school councillors, warned her that the principal was more in need of help, she let the issue slide. Laurie had been distracted by her work and her mother’s death; now she began to recognise how desperately unhappy her daughter was. Gretel begged her mother to move her to another school.

At the end of her second year at MLC, on Speech Night, the final-year girls sobbed and hugged each other. Not Gretel. Euphoric, she told everyone how thrilled she was to be leaving. Soon after, she and her dormitory mates exchanged Christmas presents. One of her worst tormentors gave her a necklace of blue enamelled love birds. Gretel adored it. A few days later it was stolen as she slept.

Gretel’s Uncle Kelvin convinced her mother to sell the Strathfield homes she’d inherited from Gran and move to a neat cottage in outer-suburban Merrylands. Here she found few clients but it was closer to George’s school at Parramatta. Gretel was enrolled at Tara Anglican School for Girls, which had just moved its senior forms to a new campus. Laurie insisted that her daughter take Latin, and paid for a tutor over the Christmas holidays so Gretel could catch up with her new classmates.

When Gretel started there in 1959, the new Tara sat on a hilltop above a long blackberry-covered slope. At its foot lay a five-acre farm that grew the school’s vegetables. Though the view was somewhat pastoral, the school building—a long, red-brick structure of two single-storey wings that had been a hospital for children with rheumatic fever—was plain ugly. As at any Church-run girls’ school the emphasis was on discipline, regulation, conformity and the acquisition of lady-like habits. At the start of term, each girl was made to unpack her suitcase onto a rug in the assembly hall. A mistress would check all garments against a prescribed clothing list before the girl could proceed to her dormitory.

Gretel’s first memory of Tara would be of another new arrival—the headmistress Miss Claridge. As she strode towards the girl and her mother, Gretel noted her sallow skin and straight brown, rather greasy hair. She had on brown sandals and a floral cotton housecoat. ‘I thought she was the cleaner.’

Helen Winifred Claridge, aged forty, was an intelligent, sensitive woman, not without a sense of humour. Resilient, vigorous and enthusiastic, she embraced challenges. Elizabeth Hake, the wife of the King’s School headmaster, sat on the Tara Council and had been impressed by this woman’s penchant for adventure. During her years teaching in England, Miss Claridge and her partner had regularly taken off on their motor scooters to explore Great Britain and Europe.

Maude Hawks had been with Miss Claridge for some fifteen years, so she also moved into a cottage near the boarding house with their arthritic and smelly red setter. The two women shared meals with their fourteen charges in the small dining room; Vegemite ‘worms’ oozing from Vita-Weet biscuits and lumpy custard were staple items on the menu. ‘It was all quite jolly and informal,’ Gretel remembers. As for Miss Claridge, she was ‘quite a wonderful woman’. Gretel’s dormitory was upstairs. Miss Claridge would pad silently up the linoleum-covered stairs and down the tallowwood corridors to check on the girls. As bathroom space was limited, Gretel and her fellow boarders were forced to cross to the main school building to shower. Miss Claridge’s rules dictated one hair wash and two hours of radio per week.

Miss Hawks made herself useful teaching music and Gretel’s Latin class. Incompetent at both, eventually she would limit herself to playing the piano at morning assembly, performing secretarial duties and supervising the girls’ homework sessions. With her long, thin hair bundled up into two French rolls and secured with emerald bobby pins, thin-lipped Miss Hawks seemed to have walked off the pages of St Trinian’s. Her big, pale-blue eyes were magnified by glasses perched on a long thin nose. She always wore tweed suits over long pink bloomers that showed when she bent over, thick stockings and Oxford shoes with suede flaps. A figure of fun, she was also strict.

Each girl was permitted to play a transistor radio from 2 p.m. every Saturday afternoon. They would carry their rugs and writing cases to the boarders’ lawn and spend two hours of bliss listening to the latest rock and roll hits. Compared to the day girls, who could watch shows like Bandstand and Maverick on their families’ black-and-white television sets, Tara’s boarders were somewhat cocooned from the latest trends. On Sunday nights they would gather to listen to Miss Hawks play her recordings of Handel’s Messiah, after which Miss Claridge would recite evening prayers. At times the girls would attend The King’s School’s own classical musical evenings in the hope of engaging in conversation with a member of the opposite sex. Some managed it but for Gretel, social contact with boys she admired would remain a distant dream.

Miss Claridge’s detailed knowledge of Anglican ceremony would instil in Gretel a love of the church and its rituals. Gretel was confirmed and grew increasingly interested in religious observance, taking special pleasure in the changing colours of clerical vestments as the liturgical year unfolded.

Determined not to repeat her MLC miseries, Gretel now resolved to make over her personality: ‘I put upon myself the mantle of school joker … I let my humour come out.’ She became the centre of a tight circle of friends, and led her fellow boarders in mad pranks. They would hoist their tunics so their suspenders showed, unleash the school goat on the rose garden and terrorise the boarding-house staff.

When Gretel was ordered to Miss Claridge’s office as the main player in some minor outrage, the headmistress could be relied on to undertake an intensive psychological examination of her charge, bringing up her parents’ divorce, her difficult experiences at MLC and Gretel’s subconscious motivations. All the while Miss Claridge would be holding the telephone receiver, her fingers poised to ring Gretel’s mother to break the news of her expulsion. Gretel would ‘go through this ritual of begging her to relent’, insisting that she could explain. One such session lasted hours and reduced her to gibbering sobs.

‘I want you to pack all your things,’ Miss Claridge finally intoned. ‘Get your tennis racquet from the sports room. Don’t forget your sandshoes. Get your serviette from the dining room and your dirty washing from the laundry.’

‘She cut right through my stoical defences, and I became emotionally bound to her,’ Gretel recalls. Just when she expected a taxi to be called to dispatch her home in disgrace, Miss Claridge announced her punishment. ‘I was escorted by the school handyman to a yet unopened wing of the school and locked in a self-contained flat for four days.’

Miss Hawks would silently enter the flat each day, deposit a lukewarm meal on a tray, and exit without a word. Gretel in fact enjoyed the special attention: ‘It was a hoot. Like a Ronald Searle cartoon.’

Her headmistress ‘was interested in me in a very strange way—in a way that she wasn’t interested in anyone else … She put an incredible amount of time into me’.

In those first years on the new campus, team sports were rare. Instead, in the autumn Gretel and her friends gathered blackberries and mushrooms from the surrounding fields. Gretel joined the bird-watching club and took up cross-country running. She continued to get into trouble for ‘some fairly serious breaches’ of school rules, including truancy, but her artistic talent also began to bud. She relished art classes and seized on any opportunity to paint. Showing a talent for fashion, she modified her full skirt, blouse and cardigan, adding swinging roped petticoats, which made the skirt twirl beautifully.

Without the support of a father, Gretel’s home life remained modest compared to her peers. ‘Other children would be picked up for winter holidays in long cars with ski racks … whereas we’d just be going to spend the holidays in our pyjamas reading library books while my mother saw patients all day.’ To pass the time Gretel would listen to radio serials, but eventually they started to bore her.

In the classroom, Gretel had always struggled with logic-based subjects such as mathematics. Her great passions were art and English, and in these she now blossomed. At the end of the 1961 year, when Gretel was sixteen, her school report came with a note. Because she had failed maths, she would not be allowed to take English honours—something she’d set her heart on. Laurie had not spent a fortune on her children’s education to have their talents neglected. With her daughter away at a summer art school in Armidale, she phoned Tara.

The headmistress was on holidays. So Laurie Pinniger discussed Gretel’s predicament with one of her clients—a Catholic nun from Our Lady of Mercy convent. ‘Well, it looks to me as if they’re trying to save money on her education. By the sounds of it, she’s of a particularly intellectual bent. I would suggest the Dominicans,’ the nun said.

The convent school she recommended—Santa Sabina—was back in Strathfield, from where the Pinnigers had moved a few years earlier. Founded in 1894, the four-storey Dutch Renaissance rose-brick edifice, complete with terracotta mouldings, was a grand monument of Australian Catholicism.

When Laurie raised the possibility of changing schools once again, Gretel says, ‘Something totally stirred in me. I could hardly wait! I was absolutely over the moon.’ Her mother’s description reminded her of an image from her Melbourne childhood. As her grandfather Pinniger smoked a pipe in the rocking chair of their South Yarra mansion, her Catholic grandmother would croak, ‘Come on, little lamb,’ and drape her rosary beads over the young girl, quietly praying that she would one day join the Church. When Gretel rang her estranged grandmother to tell her the news, she was shocked to learn she had died a year earlier. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she challenged her father. Gretel was shocked further by his reply. ‘I didn’t think you’d be interested.’

Gretel claims that when Miss Claridge heard she was leaving Tara, she burst into tears and begged her to stay. Both English honours and a scholarship were offered to keep her. When this failed, the headmistress appealed to Gretel’s loyalty to both her and Tara. Excited about going to a convent, however, Gretel had already made up her mind.

Gretel’s new home was Santa Sabina’s nineteenth-century Holyrood mansion. A nun was ensconced in a cell at the end of each dormitory, and woke the girls with a bell each morning. With an Italianate carved-sandstone façade, Art Nouveau styled rooms, lead-light windows, elaborate friezes and large stone gates with filigreed metalwork, the boarding house seemed a place where miracles could occur.

One Santa Sabina contemporary recalls Gretel as plump, with big lips and ‘not overly attractive. Kids are pretty mean. If you don’t fit the mould and you come into a school late, it’s hard to assimilate, and I don’t know if she ever wanted to … She wasn’t “one of the girls”, [she was] very much a loner.’ School rules forbade the girls to converse with boys—even their brothers’ friends—while in school uniform, but most flouted this rule. Not Gretel. She had no interest in socialising.

Gretel’s contemporary says she found Gretel ‘very strange’, not least because she was friendly with the nuns. Most students found them superior and dictatorial. Rumours circulated that not only was Gretel’s family Anglican, her father was a Protestant minister. However, despite her outsider status, Gretel threw herself into the Catholic rituals, immersing herself in three or four hours a day in some form of prayer or religious observance. ‘I enjoyed every minute of it. I just adored it.’ In black lace veil and gloves, she would attend Mass in the school chapel before school. Then there were Christian doctrine lessons, prayers after school and in the evenings, and Benediction services on feast days. From the school chapel would float the beautiful rhythms and harmonies of nuns singing. Gretel and some of her fellow students delighted in the heavenly atmosphere created as the sisters chanted the Office, wailed at morning Mass, prayed at meals and recited the Rosary as they circled the grotto at sunset.

For another contemporary of Gretel’s interviewed in a book about the school’s history, the Virgin Mary was ever-present: ‘We sang her praises, celebrated her life with numerous feast days, walked in processions behind her decorated statue. Yet all the time she represented a confusing and impossible ideal of virginity, motherhood and sexlessness, so that for us, wholeness and holiness were in conflict.’

The nuns were very strict about bodily vanity. Mirrors were provided so each student could clean her teeth and groom her hair, but the girls were expected to spend only minimal time contemplating their reflections. Santa Sabina encouraged a system of self-discipline whereby boarders examined their consciences every week and accorded themselves black marks and subsequent punishment. Twice a year, the college ran a three-day retreat at which all pupils had to keep vows of silence.

At Easter, the nuns would lecture Gretel and her fellow pupils on every detail of Christ’s agony, including the precise physical consequences of the nails piercing the nerves of His feet. Gretel wanted to experience the same suffering and ecstasy. As she would admit thirty years later, ‘I suppose I got some kind of erotic satisfaction from it.’

After lights out, she read accounts of miracles by torchlight or sneaked out to the head of the stairs and read by the bright light above the statue of St Dominic. She devoured the devotional reading lists, particularly the Lives of the Saints. Her favourite was St Catherine, who practised fasting and self-abnegation. Gretel recalls that she ‘had the gift of the stigmata, which roused all the other nuns of her Dominican order to great jealousy’. Gretel also read all she could on evil and depravity.

Of Santa Sabina’s twenty nuns, Sister Carmel Leavey was particularly fond of Gretel. Intelligent and witty, she became the girl’s first mentor, encouraging her art and her imagination—inspiring in the girl a lifelong love of learning. ‘She was not interested in the pedestrian mind,’ reflects Gretel. Such was Sister Carmel’s impact that Gretel considered devoting herself to a religious calling. Intent on staying ahead of her Christian doctrine lessons, she allowed herself only a few hours’ sleep a night.

Around this time, Gretel attended a musical event in the crypt of Sydney’s St Mary’s Cathedral—a thirteenth-century work performed with period musical instruments and based on Gregorian chant. Totally overwhelmed, she went back six times. On the last occasion she learned of the group’s performance schedule. For a while she became a groupie. ‘When everyone else was running after rock stars, I was following the Guild of St Pius, where Catholic University graduates and musicians performed lesser-known church works around Sydney.’

Uninterested in dating boys, Gretel did not even bother talking to them. Instead, ‘when I was unobserved’, she would write, ‘I threw a towel around my hair to see how I looked as a nun’. She would posture in imitation of Fra Filippo Lippi’s portrait of the Virgin, which hung in her dormitory. Unsatisfied with the likeness, she picked up a razor and shaved her hair back an inch above her forehead.

Historian Sue Emilsen, in researching her history of Santa Sabina, asked students of the 1960s what the school taught them. Three key themes emerged: the equality of the sexes (women could achieve anything so long as they worked hard), the importance of living a moral life, and the sacredness of marriage.

Gretel saw for herself a future of contemplative prayer. She dreamed of peering out at her family once a year from behind a thick grille, spending her nights on a hard bed in a cell and her days on her knees painting icons, interspersed by the occasional self-flagellation.

When she told her mother she wanted to be a nun, Laurie ‘freaked out’ and begged her daughter to ‘please go to university first’. Otherwise, Laurie said, she would forever regret that she’d sent Gretel to a Catholic school. ‘Surely I didn’t want to be someone who did that, at the price of a mother’s grief?’

Gretel’s results in the Leaving Certificate exams for 1962 were a disappointment. She was persuaded to repeat her final year with the hope of securing a place at Melbourne University. ‘Plus I was very inexperienced … and I believed I would still have [Sister Carmel Leavey], who I was madly in love with … All I could ever dream about was saving her life.’ However, Sister Leavey was moved to Maitland.

The extra year at Santa Sabina paid off. For the first time, Art was offered as a matriculation subject. Gretel enrolled and this time gained second-class honours in English and an A in Art. She was offered a scholarship to Sydney Teachers’ College. Helen Claridge had sparked in Gretel an interest in studying Fine Arts, which at the time was offered at Melbourne University, not Sydney. When Gretel heard she had been accepted into the Melbourne course, she was excited. She was eager to leave home, and hoped that proximity to her prodigal father might lure him into strengthening their bond.