Another GGS treasure from the School Archives
Clyde School girls in the 1930s received tuition in art from a teacher who drove up from Melbourne on a weekly basis. In 1938, they produced a book of imaginative, Art Deco-inspired lino cuts with the title ‘Sea Folk’ which depicted various seascapes and creatures entwined with the girls’ initials. The initials LE referred to Lieselotte Eggink, aged 16.
Lieselotte’s arrival in Australia in June 1938 was reported in the newspapers. For Australians who rarely travelled, the arrival of a young girl who could speak six languages fluently and travelled unaccompanied was something remarkable. Liselotte had been born in the Dutch East Indies to a German father and Italian/Hungarian/Austrian mother and had spent the previous three years attending what she described as ‘the strictest convent in Europe’, housed in an old castle in Munich. To complete her education, she was allowed to choose between schools in Switzerland, England and Australia and thus arrived at Clyde School, Woodend where she remained until 1940. During the war, she worked as a translator for the Dutch army.