Top award for school history
Winner: historian Lyn Skillern with her community history award honouring From Inkwell to Internet: a century of State Secondary Education in Leongatha.
THE history book written for this year’s centenary of Leongatha High School/Secondary College has won a prestigious honour.
When From Inkwell to Internet was announced last week as a winner at the Victorian Community History Awards, its author Lyn Skillern was lost for words.
She is the first to admit that in itself is a rare event.
“I was dumbfounded. I was shocked, I could hardly walk up the two steps to get the award!”
Noted historian Professor Weston Bate was less confounded.
A friend of South Gippsland historian John Murphy and former speaker at the Leongatha and District Historical Society, Lyn said Professor Bate was “bouncing around” in his seat when the win was announced.
She spent four years researching material for the volume, written in collaboration with Clive Lynn, Ian Snell and Gay Hutchinson. Joanne Marchese did the design and layout.
From Inkwell to Internet
won the Collaborative Community History Award. In a booklet about this year’s prizes, the book is described thus, “It is clearly written, based on solid research, well illustrated and comprehensive of the whole period. Its several authors and use of student memoirs make it a community collaborative project.
“This is a welcome addition to Victorian education history.”
The awards were presented by the Public Records Office and Royal Historical Society of Victoria during a glittering ceremony last Tuesday afternoon in the Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria.
There were five finalists in the collaborative category including a scientific legacy of the expedition of Burke and Wills.
Lyn, who was a geography and history teacher at Leongatha High School/Secondary College for 31 years, said the award recognised the efforts of those who helped write the book, including Charlie Edney and Tom Coulter whose school workbooks from many decades ago added so much insight and character.
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Posted by Simone Short on Oct 30 2012. Filed under Featured, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry
