September lecture: Choice or plan B?

Join QWHA member and author Sharyn Merkley as she discusses stories about Brisbane's early female teachers uncovered in the QWHA Archives.  Expected to marry well and settle down to home and family life, these women took a different path. Highly educated, many of them were also accomplished musicians, singers and dancers. Teaching and running their own schools and academies gave them independence and respect. Some were widows and others spinsters.  Among the many stories hidden on scraps of paper, long treasured programs and reminiscences, are those of three remarkable women who, through unexpected circumstances, chose a different path.

Date: 17 September 2023 

Time: 1.40 pm for 2 pm start 

Cost: $10 members and $15 non-members (includes afternoon tea)

About the lecturer:

Sharyn Merkley, a Brisbane resident from birth, is a family historian with a life-long passion for history. As well as being involved in the archives at Miegunyah, Sharyn has done extensive research for the Genealogical Society of Queensland, including undertaking specialist research projects focused on early Queensland settlers.

She has worked on the Annie Wheeler Project looking at the lives of over 2500 World War I soldiers and is currently working on an index of Battle of Waterloo veterans who settled in Australia after the conflict. Her book, Brisbane Burns: How the Great Fires of 1864 Shaped a City and its People (2017) traced the impact of the devastating fires on both the ordinary and well-known citizens of the early settlement city.

Sharyn volunteers at Miegunyah in the archives and is one of the team who runs Archive Discovery Day, where members can find out more about the archive’s hidden stories. She also regularly volunteers as a library research assistant and is currently completing further studies on family history through the University of Tasmania.

Image courtesy of the State Library of Queensland: Staff from the private school at Moray Street, New Farm, Brisbane, having a tea break, 1900–1910