Scotch College

Can you date this photo?

The school archives have more than 10,000 photographs undated and lacking any indication of who is in them.

We are slowly working through them, and developing the guidelines that speed the task. If you would like to help, contact the co-archivist, Dr Jim Mitchell, on 9810 4293. There are no economies of scale. Every photograph has to be looked at separately, so we welcome volunteers.

Meanwhile, can you date the photo right? It is a handsome scene, yet the very twilight that adds to its artistic qualities renders the faces obscure. Still, we may yet find out who these boys are if we can date the photograph. We would draw on such hints as:

• the shape of the boat's bow;
• the cut of the boys' red Tshirts;
• the cut of the boys' hair;
• the relative size of cox and stroke (this will point to some crews and eliminate others);
• the very faint words running diagonally on the back of the print: HIS PAPER / MANUFACTURED / BY KODAK (photography buffs might know when this was the practice).

First Dux's prizes return to Scotch

Peter Bennie's name appears at the very start of the list of Duxes that hangs in the Memorial Hall.

The prizes he won back then in 1867 (multi-volume sets handsomely bound in leather, embossed with the Scotch crest of that time) have now been generously donated to the Scotch Archives by his granddaughter, Mrs Marjorie Bentley, who has also given us Bennie's own copies of the prize lists, and various material about him including a photograph.

Bennie was born in Scotland. After Scotch he gained Arts degrees at the University of Melbourne and became a teacher to support himself though medicine. He graduated MB BS in 1878 and MD in 1884.

A keen sportsman, he was an expert swimmer and high jumper, and for a time played with the Melbourne Football Club, but as he grew older chess and mathematics became his favourite diversions.

After 1882, he was on the staff of the Children's Hospital for 36 years. He held office in various medical societies and published a book and several papers.

Bennie is best known in connection with the conservative treatment of diseases of bones and joints, and especially hip disease. "Conservative" meant something less drastic than amputation. Bennie much preferred to immobilise joints totally, and helped develop the sophisticated splints that made this efficacious."For this he slaved, he suffered, and he sacrificed."So said Sir Colin McKenzie (1893) - he after whom Healesville Sanctuary is named - writing at the time of Bennie's death. He described Bennie as "one of the great forces which have placed Australia in the front ranks of medical thought"(Medical Journal of Australia, 1932, pp. 5856). "Although aged eighty at his death, he left us when still young", said McKenzie.

Another obituary writer, . R. M. Thomson (1868), concurred:"Bennie remained a student throughout his life". Thomson went on:"He became that somewhat rare personage whom no one has a word to say against, but who is yet able to keep his estimate of himself within bounds by the exercise of a true humility. He had no touch of selfdeprecation; he knew his own value and recognised it in a dignified way. He was generous almost to a fault. He never stood in the way of another's advancement but rather effaced himself for the other's advantage" (ibid.).

Bennie was a distinguished linguist and read the classics with ease. He was a profound mathematician, and looked on mathematics as the basis of all the sciences - and indeed as able to be applied to almost anything, even dancing.

"It was an astonishing sight to see this elderly, bearded man in a faded top hat holding out the flaps of his ancient frock coat while he gravely executed certain movements, which in their geometric resultants became transformed into the steps of the waltz. Not infrequently he would do this on the footpath outside the gate of the hospital, to the great glee of the urchins from the nearby school, and to the embarrassment of the immobilised resident medical officer."

This description is from Sir William Upjohn, who discerned in Bennie "a mixture of practical ability and unworldliness, of great intellectual attainment and childish simplicity, of noble countenance and actions bordering on the ridiculous". Bennie's unworldliness prevented him from being successful in private practice and he died a poor man in 1932.

The ceremony at which Bennie received his prize as Dux was unique in the School's history, n being presided over by a member of the Royal Family, or this was the year when Queen Victoria's son, HRH Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, visited the colonies.

Now, 137 years later, Peter Bennie's prizes have come home. Scotch does not really give prizes, it just lends them.

Dr Jim Mitchell
Co-Archivist