Lesley East

Lesley East was born in Nowra in 1940. She trained as a teacher at sixteen, taught for more than forty years, and built a life with her husband Vic in Jamberoo. They raised three children.

Her working life moved from migrant transition classrooms to special education, into running classes and tutoring at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre for young people, and on into her eighties teaching English to Ukrainian women whose families had reached safety here. She received an Order of Australia Medal for her contribution to the community.

This is the kind of life that is easy to underestimate while it is being lived. Lesley’s family knew her as mother, grandmother, teacher, friend. They knew the parts of the story they had been part of. They had not heard it as a whole.

Over a series of conversations across several months, Lesley and I sat down and talked.

We began with her mother’s family, a grandfather killed at Ypres in 1917, a brown paper parcel kept all her childhood, a journey Lesley made to Belgium in 1980 to stand at the grave on her mother’s behalf. We worked forward from there through Bermagui, the scholarship to Sydney at sixteen, fifty-four migrant children in her first class, meeting Vic at a church fellowship, the years at Lakelands, the move to Jamberoo, Triple Care Farm, the craft shop, the OAM, the last ten years that have tested her in ways she could not have imagined.

I asked the questions. Lesley talked. I recorded. I wrote. What we ended up with is a book of around eighty pages, in her own voice, covering the people, places, choices and quieter moments that have made her life.

Something else from those Lakelands years that I never really set out to do, though it grew into something much bigger than I expected, was bringing computers into the school. It began as a perfectly selfish idea. I was working with special education children who needed a great deal of repetitive practice and individual work, and I was only one person. So I bought a Commodore 64.

I taught myself to programme well enough to make little games the children could use on their own, which freed me up to sit with the others. That was the whole plan.

What I had not foreseen was what it would do socially. No one else in the school had a computer, so suddenly my special kids had something the other children wanted. They had often been hard to integrate in the playground. Now I could let them invite friends from other classes in at lunchtime to use the computer with them. Before long, my kids were the most popular children in the playground. They were not the children who needed help fitting in any more. They were the children other kids wanted to sit next to.

I have never claimed any of it was my idea. It just kind of grew.

“I have often felt guilty for not writing my story. It always felt too hard.

Lynne asked the questions, listened to the answers and recorded everything without asking me to write a word. Her genuine interest in my story meant a great deal, and her ability to bring it together leaves me in awe.”

– Lesley East