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Labour of love

The biography of a pedagogical innovator
by
September 2021, no. 435

The Vetting of Wisdom: Joan Montgomery and the fight for PLC by Kim Rubenstein

Franklin Street Press, $39.95 pb, 399 pp

Labour of love

The biography of a pedagogical innovator
by
September 2021, no. 435

Kim Rubenstein’s biography of Joan Montgomery, the venerable former principal of Melbourne’s Presbyterian Ladies’ College (PLC), has been thirty years in the making and is the definition of a labour of love. It involves Rubenstein, a distinguished and worldly legal scholar and human rights campaigner, revisiting scenes from her own life. She was a pupil at Montgomery’s PLC. As a first-year law student, she addressed the remarkable public meeting in April 1984 that opposed Montgomery’s defenestration by Presbyterian reactionaries, who were avenging the formation of the Uniting Church seven years earlier by asserting control over the school. Rubenstein’s subsequent career has been that of a distinguished old girl following the tenets of a liberal education.

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