Meander School graduates step out into the world

Sharon Webb

Dr Olivia Smibert and her Sydney actor sister Grace were disappointed when their former school closed, and perturbed at the dispute over the site’s future.

But the influence of Meander Primary School on their careers and attitude to life is undeniable, they told reporter

Olivia Smibert

DR OLIVIA Smibert that knows some people are surprised she could come from country Australia and be successful.

The 35 year-old who describes herself as ‘a grateful Meander Primary School student’ is now doing a PhD in the immune systems of people who have received transplants.

But in August last year, just back from a fellowship year at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University in Boston, Olivia was thrown into Australia’s COVID-19 experience which was nothing like she ever experienced before.

With her specialisation in infectious disease, Olivia suddenly found herself deputy director of the COVID unit at Melbourne’s Austin Hospital.

‘We banded together and stepped up to a level of seniority I’d never experienced before’, she said. ‘A lot of staff shied away from it. Everyone looked to people with infectious disease experience as if we’d been waiting our whole lives to do it.’

COVID patients were admitted to a unit where Olivia had developed the protocols for triaging and written treatment protocols.

In an extraordinary situation she describes how she used her US contacts to get treatment information ‘because the US was well ahead of Australia’ in the disease’s progress.

‘We shared information without waiting for treatment plans to go through the normal channels. It was just awesome.’

But some events at that time were shocking.

‘It was very challenging to see junior colleagues and nurses get infected’, Olivia said. ‘I found it quite traumatic but at the same time inspiring to see what people were capable of.’

Post COVID emergency, Olivia still works in the unit but has resumed her PhD under the proviso that she can come back at any moment.

Her Boston experience in the famous hospital’s medical science hub will contribute to her studies, the interest in infectious diseases piqued during her undergraduate years at UTAS.

The Alfred Hospital is a cystic fibrosis centre for Victoria where there are around 100 lung transplant patients a year.

‘It’s not a hands-on specialisation but an academic one’, Olivia said. ‘I collaborate with peers and patients to come up with individualised treatment for people with transplants’.

‘I love that aspect of it. In other areas there’s no room for discussion because things have already been done a thousand times before. I can tailor treatment to an individual transplant patient because so few have gone before.’

After her time at Meander Primary School, Olivia went to Deloraine High, Launceston College and UTAS.

‘I was offered a scholarship to Monash Uni, but I went to UTAS and it was the best thing I ever did, ‘Olivia said.

‘I’m a grateful Meander Primary student. I had a wonderfully happy time under the mountains out there. My parents gave me a great gift when they moved from Melbourne to Deloraine.

‘It’s been of enormous advantage to me because I grew up with a diverse range of people – and these days I work with a huge range of people.’

Grace Smibert

GRACE SMIBERT clearly remembers when the urge to become an actor hit her.

‘Our teacher at Meander Primary, Geraldine Pennicott, directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream and my part was to jump out of a huge oak tree in the school grounds onto a giant crash mat’, she said.

‘That’s what set me on my path.’

These days that path is as an actor in a small Sydney company, self founded in 2018.

Currently they are performing Shakespeare by Night, a new way of viewing Shakespeare entirely by candlelight. Think 0f a candlelit 400 year-old script, conspiracy scenes in Julius Caesar, and you’ll get the picture.

Grace’s avenue to life as an actor started, post her Tasmanian education and a Melbourne Uni degree majoring in cinema and literature, at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), one of Australia’s top drama schools that also caters for ballet dancers, opera singers and musicians.

‘In my third year I won the Sally Burton Award and worked with a director from the UK. He invited me to do the play, Love Girl and the Innocent, about the Russian writer and political prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in London’, she said.

Grace’s parents, Deloraine artists Tony Smibert and Carmel Burns, admit seeing the play about Solzhenitsyn’s life in

Gulag labour camp was challenging. But not only for the subject matter.

‘In the first scene I was naked in a delousing chamber’, Grace said. Tony’s comment? ‘It was serious, confrontational theatre. Powerful.’

In 2019 a 10-week master class at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre had a significant impact on Grace’s view of ensemble theatre.

‘They take 24 actors a year worldwide. The only nonAmericans in my group were two Canadians and me’, Grace said.

‘Steppenwolf was a power ensemble theatre company in the 1970s. John Malkovich was one of the originals.

‘The class wasn’t about me being the star. The amazing theatre is the connections between people. I learnt that my art form is dependent on connecting with other people, my fellow performers and the audience.’

‘I thought I should be trying to do work that makes my ensemble proud.’

Since that life-altering experience, Grace brought that philosophy to Tasmania in her recent Deloraine Christmas break.

She invited 35 local amateur actors to perform scenes from 12 Shakespeare plays in Deloraine’s Little Theatre, by candlelight.

Aged 11 to 75, they turned up to a week of workshops and a performance, including young people from Liena who stayed in Deloraine for the week’s experience.

‘It was challenging. Suddenly I had more people than I could deal with. Some people had never picked up Shakespeare before’, Grace said.

‘I’m an actor not a trained teacher but adults and young people learnt from each other.

‘I realised that I was teaching them but they were also enriching me.’

In Sydney, Grace takes other jobs to earn a living, waitressing, after-school care, selling Danish jewellery. She can’t take a permanent job because she wants to be available to take on a play.

She tells an anecdote that underlines her perception of the nurturing nature of a family/creative/country town environment as she grew up.

‘At uni, I lived in Ormond College where there was a real mix of students, international, metropolitan Melbourne, private school, public school.

‘When someone asked me what my dad does, I said, “My dad’s a watercolourist”.

‘The person said, “Yeah but what’s his job?”

‘That’s when I realised that the life I went out into the world with was really quite special.’