The workbook and the woman who wrote her school back into view
1910–2002
Writer, journalist, speech teacher and local historian
A human biology workbook survives in the Timaru Girls’ High School archive. Its careful diagrams were made by Averille Lawrence when she was a pupil there in the 1920s.
It is a pleasing piece of historical symmetry. The girl recording what she saw in science class later became the woman who recorded the school itself.
Alice Averille Lawrence, usually known as Averille, was born in Christchurch. She attended Oamaru South School and Waitaki Girls’ High School before her family moved to Timaru. From 1923 to 1927, she studied at Timaru Girls’ High School. Her workbook gives us something that formal school histories often cannot: evidence of an ordinary pupil at work.
After completing commercial training, Averille joined the Timaru Herald, combining secretarial work with journalism. Then the economy collapsed. New Zealand’s export income fell sharply during the early 1930s as the international Depression reached into workplaces and households. Averille was among the newspaper staff retrenched. We know that her position disappeared. We do not yet know how the decision was made or whether gender influenced it.
She pieced together a working life from relieving office employment, freelance journalism and, from 1937, eight years as a shorthand typist in a shipping, grain and seed merchant’s office. She also gained an LTCL diploma in speech and began teaching.
That combination of office work, writing and performance became a thread through the rest of her life. Averille taught speech and assisted with drama at Timaru Girls’ High School from 1953 to 1958. She belonged to the South Canterbury Drama League, wrote articles and children’s stories, edited parish material and participated in music and church life. In 1956, she won a British Drama League competition for a one-act play written for an all-women cast.
Her longest-lasting work, however, was historical. She wrote Strangers and Pilgrims, a history of St Mary’s Anglican Church, and Curtain Call, which recorded the South Canterbury Drama League. In 1980, the centenary year of Timaru Girls’ High School, she published A Lively Retrospect: Timaru Girls’ High School 1880–1980. Library catalogues confirm that it was produced for the school centennial by the old girls’ association.
A school history is never the final word. It reflects the records available, the questions asked and the assumptions of its own time. Yet without Averille’s work, many names, memories and details might have disappeared altogether.
The workbook shows her learning how to observe. The history shows what she eventually did with that skill.
What changed because of her work: South Canterbury institutions gained written histories that later researchers, pupils and community members could examine, question and build upon.