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Remembrances
Ewen Fraser Gellie
Former staff
31/08/1941 – 01/09/2022
David Graham was a highly significant teaching presence at the St Kilda Road Campus from 1975 to 2009, and the thousands of individual people he touched during this time would doubtless be thankful for their encounters with him, both inside and, for many athletes and soccer players, outside the classroom. He was ‘blooded’ at the then Glen Waverley Junior School in 1973, dabbled for a year with law at Monash, then promptly returned to his principal passion - teaching, at Prahran campus in 1975, never to have such wayward thoughts again. This spirited and highly energised man of Scottish descent was a gift to education, as so many are who recognise there can be no greater calling than preparing young people for the rigorous challenges of life. And he accomplished this objective in the most engaging and dedicated fashion.
David literally whistled his way around the campus from classroom to classroom, forever buoyed by what awaited him inside of each, whether Year 7 or Year 12 English (and early on, a touch of geography thrown in). Present beneath a more orthodox and scholarly exterior was an accomplished performer (witnessed by his many friends late at night at his Prahran home), and you can only imagine that his students were frequently entertained in a like manner, without ever losing sight of what would have been his principal objective: to help young people grasp the wonder of life through the civilising gifts of language and literature. There is a line by the sixteenth century metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell that he loved to quote: "What wondrous life is this I lead…"
The private individual and the committed teacher were seamless aspects of the same persona, and his exuberant responses to life’s ebbs and flows were present in both his teaching behaviours, as well as in his creative and constructive connections with his English teaching colleagues. His teaching practices were simple but not simplistic – he understood intuitively the strategies needed to engage kids from Middle School to the final year of Senior School, and he gave all his students, wherever they sat in the line of progression through school, the full weight of his personality. He always showed them nothing less than his authentic conviction that what he taught them mattered.
David was likewise an influential and engaged member of an English staff which remained remarkably stable over several decades. He was respectful of, and respected by, his colleagues. He was always an enthusiastic contributor to the many impassioned verbal exchanges about life, literature and whatever else needed some mental dissection. He understood intuitively that this is how all of us grow, and he wanted to add his voice to the process. Like all good teachers, he never stopped growing. And he also deeply believed how education extends beyond the formality of the classroom and his leadership, especially in our evolving soccer culture, as well as in our College athletics team for a number of years, demonstrates the scale of his impact on the school overall. David was so very often at the heart of things.
David was held in high esteem by all his colleagues, and not just those in the English Faculty. This was principally because he never took a step back on matters which he recognised as affecting the well-being and emotional good health of the wider staff, both academic and administrative. He articulated unambiguously his convictions about a fair go, that perennial Australian theme, and he was often outspoken, but never angrily, when he thought the College’s administrators had mis-stepped. He was not fearful of pointing this out to them, and many of us from those times can recall how just a hint of trepidation overcame us as he rose formidably from his chair in staff meetings to address the crowd on perceived wrong doings. He was not always right, but his sense of justice, and of the need for debating issues properly, were lessons for us all. Not unexpectedly, he was an avid supporter and coach of various College debating teams.
He is now a precious and enduring memory for the many students and staff who were fortunate to spend time with him in any of the various activities he so selflessly engaged in for a school he loved unreservedly. But ‘without reservation’ never meant, for him, beyond reasonable criticism, or continual and rigorous self-inspection.