Illawarra tutor shaping minds with art

These days, the officially-retired Mayhew is in demand as a tutor to senior high school students in writing-based subjects including English, history and religion.

She is also a practising visual artist and lectures at a University of the Third Age program held at Dapto, aimed at the education and mental stimulation of retired people.

Mayhew, 70, was an influential teacher at St Mary Star of The Sea College during her long tenure at the school from 1980 to 2008.

She was head of the English department for 15 years, during which time she initiated and ran the school's film festival.

"It was a difficult decision to retire at 66," she says. "I go back there now and there are so many people who say to me: 'You shouldn't have retired. Look at what you've got to offer'."

Mayhew can barely keep up with the number of students who enlist her tutoring services but that is likely to change at the end of this year, with plans to cut the tutoring right back so that she and husband Keith can spend more time with grandchildren Gabriel, Julian and Hugo.

Teaching has been a stellar career for Mayhew, yet it nearly didn't happen.

Mayhew was a Wollongong High School student in the days when it was academically selective and she was in the top class. She was all set for a career as a primary school teacher and was banking on winning a teachers college scholarship.

Then something unexpected happened.

"When I was young - in year 7 - I had told the school doctor that I was having these strange feelings," she says.

"Then, when I went to get my teacher's scholarship, which I had earned through my academic results, they refused it, saying that I might be a risk because I was obviously - maybe, what would you say? - neurotic, or something.

"So that was a terrible shock. And, because of that decision, I couldn't become a teacher."

Mayhew had an ally in former Wollongong High headmaster Jack Lenehan, who could see the potential of the bright young student.

"I went in to see him and he said: 'Just a minute, I'll ring my friend Dolph Murray, who's a librarian', and he rang Mr Murray and said: 'I've got this wonderful girl here who can't get a teachers college scholarship. Would you employ her?'."

Mayhew started a library career and by the time she left to have a family she was in charge of children's services across the public library network in the Illawarra.

"I left when I was pregnant," she says.

"There was no way anyone ever came back after having a baby. It wasn't a rule, it was a social-cultural thing. So I had a baby in 1967 and then I dropped out of the workforce but my mum said to me: 'You're going to go crazy, girl, you need something.'

"So I went to art school one day a week while mum minded Rebecca and, later, Emma and Ben.

"I did quite well, winning a few prizes, and then Whitlam came into power and abolished the university fees."

That important education reform enabled many women like Mayhew to obtain a university degree.

"In 1972 I started my degree and I made many great friends at the University of Wollongong," she says.

"Many were women and we all went because the fees were abolished, and we became teachers. I couldn't do it quickly, with raising children, so it was 1979 when I got my DipEd."

In 1980 she did some casual teaching work and, by the end of that year, she had a job at St Mary's.

Mayhew is not a Catholic, yet she loved her time at St Mary's because she felt the school mirrored her own values on social justice, feminism and creating better access and opportunity for people marginalised in society.

"When I got to St Mary's, I had the most brilliant experience," she says.

"I was offered a job in the public system after a year.

"My name came up and the day before that I saw something at St Mary's that made me say: 'This is where I want to stay'.

"We had a school concert and a girl who was suffering terribly with a cancer got up in front of the whole school and played the guitar and the response of the student body made me realise that this was a school where people really cared about each other. I thought 'this is the school where I want to stay'.

"I felt I had found a spiritual home. At the beginning of the HIV/AIDs epidemic in the 1980s, there was a girl in Year 10 who organised a whole school assembly devoted to awareness of AIDS and compassion for AIDS sufferers. That's the sort of thing that happens there."

Mayhew, whose siblings are former Greenacres chief executive Neil Preston and Western Suburbs Child Care Centre director Ruth Leo, says her life has been enriched by the arts and culture.

"When we were growing up, we were very working class poor but not culturally poor," she says.

"Our parents read to us, talked politics to us, and we were enriched but we had no money.

"Mum made all our blazers, tunics and trousers. She was a wonderful manager and she would have had a great career if she had ever gone to work.

"The arts are important because it's another kind of truth. You can learn so much by looking at paintings, watching a film, listening to music, reading, and even though it's an imaginary world, it has similar truths to the real world which can make you look at your own life in a different way.

"It puts you into perspective in the universe and you're not so self obsessed."