Vale Grace Coelho

On St Patrick’s Day 2015, family, friends and colleagues gathered to acknowledge the contribution of Mrs Grace Coelho to the Kilbreda College community. The occasion was to mark Grace’s resignation from the Past Pupils’ Network Committee after being involved since its inception. Grace was a past pupil herself, arriving as a boarder in 1946, at the age of 15. Grace completed her schooling here in 1949, having become accustomed to the regimented life of a boarding school. The boarders woke at 6:30am, then washed and dressed in time for Mass at 7:00, after which they returned to the dormitories, where Rooms 1 to 4 are now situated, made their beds and tidied up, before coming back down to the Dining Room for breakfast at 7:30am. They would wait on the Colonnade in pairs in silence until all the girls were there and then enter the dining room in silence, which was maintained for the first 5 minutes of breakfast time, when they were finally allowed to talk!

Grace returned at the beginning of the year over the years to tell the Year 12 students about Kilbreda life in days gone by. On one occasion she told the girls how she came here as her father had died and her mother had to go back to work. Apart from a connection to a Brigidine aunt Mother Benedict Rourke, Grace knew no-one. “I was extremely anxious about leaving home and going to live with many people, none of whom I knew. For the first three days, I cried and cried and cried”. At the end of this sentence, the softly-spoken Grace had the Year 12 cohort in the palm of her hand and there they remained to the end.

Grace left Kilbreda and went to Teachers’ College, working in various schools in the district, before returning to her old school to teach in 1970. Her daughter Jane also began her education at Kilbreda alongside her mother in the 1970s. Grace taught my wife Kerrin, Maree Clark, Carolyn Callaghan and Camille Riordan. A well loved and respected teacher, mostly at Year 7 level, Grace taught English, Religious Education and Social Studies in its many guises here for more than twenty years, retiring from teaching at the end of the 1992 school year. Not long after, in the mid 90s, the Kilbreda Stewardship Council was formed to oversee the guidance of Kilbreda into the new century. Grace was a founding member of this group from 1997 and later joined the Past Pupils’ committee as part of her role.  Grace was a loyal supporter of the Committee and was ever present, working quietly behind the scenes at the various reunions and events, over the years. She is pictured with her 1975 Grade 5 class including Carolyn Callaghan (second from the left second row) and with Past Pupils’ Committee members at the 110 year celebrations in 2014. Grace lived for many years in East Bentleigh and moved to Bendigo in recent years to be closer to her daughter. It was there that she died quietly aged 90 on Tuesday night.

Damian Smith
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