The second leitmotif was the consistent, above average success of all seventeen members of the cohort in at least one of their activities either in childhood or as a young adult. This success may have been scholastic, in sport or in dance. Support for scholastic endeavours came from one or both parents as did support for sporting prowess. With success came feelings of pride, happiness, a determination to do better, and recognition of the privileged position they held within the family, school or society. These are the feelings people report who are successful in at least one
endeavour but the members of the cohort were frequently successful in several endeavours at the same time.
Academic success
Helen was a gifted student and by the time she had completed her secondary schooling she had acquired:
Very good GCE A levels in arts subjects and science and a swatch of Ordinary Levels as well, I could do any subject I wanted to.
This success translated into ‘a Surrey major scholarship and a place at university’. However, she was deemed to be too young to go to university so the school instituted a special one-year program for Helen and several others who were of the same age ‘doing all sorts of interesting and fun things’.
Ellen was another academically gifted child:
When I was eleven I won a scholarship to a private grammar school.
Len was also academically gifted and undertook his primary and most of his
secondary education in the same country as Helen and Ellen and he proudly confided: ‘I was always top of my class’. This was until he reached O levels ‘when I started looking out of the window and lost interest; it wasn’t stimulating’.
Norm’s primary and some of his secondary education took place in an Asian country until ‘I got a scholarship to America when I was in high school’.
Paul considered his secondary schooling to have been a disaster because it failed to challenge him; his successes began in his late teens with his outdoor education training. This training was a useful basis for the training he undertook once he joined the Army and from that time he has taken pride in being a very competitive student.
So I completed basic training, once again topping all the courses.
Joe did not consider himself to have been a clever child at school but he still enjoyed the feelings of being successful at home because:
of the three of us, three children, I was the most clever, even when I was only getting fifties and sixties I was seen as the sort of intellectual giant.
Anne always felt that she was very intelligent, much more so than her two older brothers who made life difficult for her as a child because they perceived her to be a slow learner. This was because she had a poor start to her education as she has always had a problem with reading. She believed there were two reasons for this, one being an undiagnosed eye problem
I could remember when I was child I would read a page and I’d my eyes would be so sore I couldn’t read anymore.
The second reason she believed was:
I found it boring, it wasn’t stimulating enough for me…Yep, I was very intelligent and I’m a quick thinker, an extremely quick thinker and I have an eye for detail. All through the hospital I can tell you exactly the changes that may have happened in the last hour. Yep, a good memory.
Diane also had a photographic memory, astounding our lecturers with her ability to quote definitions of educational terms, with full bibliographic details from multiple sources, during the course-work component of the course. However, she was very disruptive in school and felt this was due to being bored:
What they found was I tend to have a photographic memory, unfortunately and it is unfortunate too because people say it’s really not that good when you’re that young because I could grab hold of something and others wouldn’t … then I’d get bored when I would have to sit there and have something explained six or seven times.
Oscar was another clever child who was not challenged sufficiently to keep out of trouble at school:
I was very naughty. I found my teacher, my school, not feeding me enough work. They not occupying my time. I finish work within five minutes then what do I do?
The members of the cohort remember being clever as school children or being regarded as clever children. They either achieved academic success or conversely were so frustrated because their interest was not maintained by the classroom activities that they became early school leavers.
Sporting success
During the interviews the members of the cohort proudly told me of other childhood successes as well as their academic successes. Helen was gifted in all areas of school life:
I swam for Kent and Surrey and I used to go ice-skating. I went quite a long way with ice-skating and I was involved in the sport’s teams at school in hockey and the cricket team. I used to play centre forward in the school netball team, um, and of course I was in the school swimming team and I was in the choir.
Queenie, an only child, was encouraged to take up a self-defence activity by her mother. Queenie takes pride in being the first woman brown belt Judo holder in the sport of Judo in Australia. She was unable to continue to predicted success at the black belt level because gradings were held interstate and her parents were unable to support her financially in this endeavour. Chloe was a ballet dancer and had reached such a degree of success and competence that she began to prepare for a career as a dance and drama teacher.
Diane, bored in school, transferred her interest and commitment to training for competitive swimming and cycling, for which her father acted as coach:
Actually, as a swimmer, I won the Queensland championship eight years in a row. Then I was a high diver, I was a competitive high diver and competitive velodrome cyclist.
Max remembered with pride his progress from a school team to a professional soccer career as a secondary schoolboy in Australia:
Well, I was a professional soccer player, like, here. Actually the game, I started in the school team, the following year I was in one of the State leagues, junior league, called George Cross. At that time that was the(Max’s
emphasis) league. The following year I was in the reserves and I was training with the seniors and I actually, even though soccer at that time, this is going back to 1978/9, wasn’t that popular, even though the State league was the highest league. And not too many people in that league that were, there were
not too many people given professional payment and one of the Turkish clubs actually wanted me to transfer to them. I had my licence with George Cross. They had to pay transfer fees even though we were professional.
As children and young adults the members of the cohort enjoyed either academic or sporting success, or both. They also enjoyed the accolades and positive feelings that accompany such success, and the admiration of family and friends.
Learned discipline
Embedded within the leitmotif of being a clever child is the disciplined behaviour that the cohort experienced as young children. Some of this discipline was instilled or enforced by their parents. Bob attributed part of his successful management of a large department in the TAFE system to the values his parents instilled into him as a child:
I come from a background where I think, um, historically we were probably white, Anglo Saxon, middle class, Protestants and that was my upbringing and my early years. I actually believe very much in the Protestant work ethic.
Anne came from a similar background:
I had a very conservative background. My parents are Lutheran, strict Lutheran, don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t swear, go to church every Sunday.
In this family, as well as attending church, playing sport on a regular basis was mandatory:
Our family was very sport oriented. Mum and Dad had their own tennis court and it was expected of all the kids to participate in a sport and we did.
As well they were expected to help on the farm:
We had to help all the time, after school, everyday, and on the weekends.
Fran was another whose parents expected their children to contribute to the labour force on the farm. Fran and her many siblings were expected to be involved in much time-consuming manual work, her parents also having a strong work ethic:
We would have to do the work around the farm. In the spring we had to plant the crops, the potatoes, carrots and whatever. We did theweeding so we were
all involved as a family. My father would call us at 8 o’clock and we all had to jump out and get to work and the same in the summer time; hay and harvesting the potatoes.
Helen came from a family that had an army background, consequently:
Everything was run like clockwork, there were ETDs and that sort of thing.
Her successful combination of sport training and academic success at school were achieved through a strict self-instilled routine:
That was my choice. I was up at five o’clock swimming five miles every day from when I was about ten, and Saturday afternoons were swimming training, and Saturday mornings I used to go ice skating.
Joe’s sporting activities were dutifully carried out more because of the expectation of the community in which he lived than because he was a sports oriented person. He was aware that his physique was not an ideal one with which to make an outstanding contribution to the local football team
I was raised in the country. There was a very big emphasis on sport. There was football every Saturday and we were expected to play football every Saturday and golf every Sunday…but really! Like I mean, do I look like a footballer?
However he did not escape contributing to the sporting life of his sports happy town; he joked, tongue in cheek:
It was par for the course in a population of 300, everybody played golf on Sunday.
Joe had formed the opinion that the constraints involved in taking part in constant community activities as well as schooling and helping in the family enabled him to become a very disciplined person.
Queenie, Chloe and Max became used to the discipline of daily training and practice for their areas of expertise. Chloe commented on the positive effects this learned discipline has on her study habits now:
I had a twelve-year history of dance and that also has some sort of the degree of discipline required to complete these studies. I was never one to stay up
overnight even as an undergraduate. I think that one’s related to the discipline of the dance training and having to prepare and work, things like that.
It is recognised that ‘the lifelong learning skill of self-reliance and student-centred learning begin early in life’ (Throssell, 2001:8). Each of the members of the cohort learned the discipline of undertaking and successfully completing tasks through participating in family activities as young children or youths, or by their own volition.