Maxine Muir and her little brother Barry about 1949. After spending her first years at Burrinjuck southwest of Yass she completed her education in Wollongong and in Sydney before becoming a maths teacher. Photo: Elder family collection.
When Maxine Muir was little more than a baby her father Hugh would bundle her in the basket of his bicycle and ride two miles to visit her nana, Clara.
They lived at Burrinjuck, near the headwaters of the Murrumbidgee River, 34 miles southwest of Yass. A public works-trained electrical engineer, Hugh worked on the turbines of the dam’s hydroelectricity equipment.
His wife Annie had grown up in the area. The family lived near the enormous dam wall, and regularly walked along the top of it, as did almost everyone in town.
Clara Fraser lived in a tiny cottage. She was 72 when Maxine was born, and although she had struggled most of her life, was celebrated as the ‘The Grand Old Lady of Burrinjuck’ on her 80th birthday, as Maxine recorded in a family history biography that won this year’s Croker Prize for biography at the Society of Australian Genealogists.
The Muirs returned to Wollongong and Hugh continued as a troubleshooter and problem solver on power stations throughout NSW. Maxine’s problem-solving skills were still developing in the classrooms at Fairy Meadow Primary School, where an inkling started that she wanted to become a schoolteacher.
Starting at Wollongong High School, she later encountered an unlikely role model. A fiery little teacher who terrified the bigger boys in the school, Bruce Shaw, made such a lasting impact ex-students many years after leaving school shuddered at the sound of his name.
“If you didn’t remember every formula you had been taught you were straight to the back of the room until you remembered it,” Maxine said.
But methods clicked with her.
“He just made every fact something that had to be learned before you could build on it, which meant that you had all the tools, all the time,” she said. Now, reflecting 17 years after retiring from her working life teaching, she says this is how she operated as well.
Although well prepared academically for Sydney University her first year triggered homesickness. “All of my friends and social life were in Wollongong and I think the problem was, I would go home most weekends by train and that meant I wasn’t studying as much,” she said.
Over time, settling into living in Sydney and then enjoying Stanmore Presbyterian Fellowship’s socialising and bible studies turned things in her favour, and led to her meeting her future husband Don Elder, another fellowship member.
She obtained her arts degree, majoring in maths, which she followed with a year at Sydney Teachers College for her diploma of education.
Don and Maxine Elder’s wedding day after she had graduated as a schoolteacher. Photo: Elder family collection.
Meanwhile, Don joined a Goulburn solicitors firm, Baker and Kennedy and the couple married at the end of her studies.
“You were allowed to apply for areas, but told you would get them if you were lucky. So I applied and also saw my supervisor at teachers college and said to him I was getting married.
“He said just put down Goulburn, Goulburn, Goulburn. Someone on the maths staff (in Goulburn) had wanted the Central Coast for some time, so he got his move and I got Goulburn High.
“There were some great people there like Ron Butterworth, Jack Plews, Dorothy Allen who was the girls’ supervisor when I first went there,” she said. “People like that were really good to new, incoming teachers.”
Two years later Maxine and Don’s first baby Margot arrived in 1965, followed later by sons Stuart and later James.
In desperate need of a senior maths teacher, St Joseph’s College, enlisted her in 1972, earlier than she had intended, for a Year 12 class.
Once there Maxine worked through the first of two high school amalgamations, the first when St Joseph’s and Our Lady of Mercy College merged to form Marian College in 1977, the second when Marian merged with St Patrick’s College in 2000 to create Trinity Catholic College.
“By then Marian College was somewhere we (the staff) felt that had made its name in Goulburn and we didn’t really want another change,” Maxine said.
Maxine Elder with her dog Rainer, while reflecting on her years as a maths teacher in Goulburn’s public and Catholic schools. Photo: John Thistleton.
A non-religious principal, Joe Steyns, who had experience at both schools, was a good choice, she said.
“What made it work was having kids who started at Trinity and went right through (to Year 12),” Maxine said.
Through the upheavals the subject of maths continued to be the most enjoyable aspect of her work. “I just loved the subject, and just liked working with young people, encouraging them to like the subject too,” she said. “I’m very ‘left brain’, it is just that it all clicks. It works.”
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