Women In The Making

Julie Townsend Is More Than Just A Headmistress At Sydney’s St Catherine’s School. She’s Empowering Young Girls To Be The Powerful Women Of Tomorrow, One Lesson At A Time.

- Wendy Kay

Julie Townsend is the teacher you always wished you’d had. You know the type – bright, breezy and approachable. She also knows stuff, lots of interesting and quirky stuff, which she draws on randomly to emphasise a point. The Headmistress of St Catherine’s School has headed the Anglican girls’ school in Waverley, Sydney’s eastern suburbs, for 10 years. The decade before she was teaching and deputising at Pymble Ladies’ College in Sydney’s north. She’d arrived in Sydney from England with her husband in 1998, armed with an impressive resume boasting senior leadership roles. However, lacking any sort of network within the industry, she couldn’t get a teaching job.

Undaunted and determined to work, at least to pay for the child care, Julie sold shoes in a David Jones department store. Not a bad gig actually for someone who has a penchant for shoes. “I love shoes. Everybody loves shoes, don’t they? I got to work with people and look at shoes all day; it was great,” she laughs.

She finally secured a six-month maternity contract at independent Catholic girls’ school Loreto Normanhurst, which provided her with the network needed to pursue her passion for education. It’s an enthusiasm that clearly hasn’t dampened since she was a little girl, when she’d line up her young friends in mock classrooms to teach them. Much of her childhood was spent in Zambia, where her accountant father was contracted; she returned to England to take A levels, complete her degree and gain a PhD in Anglo-Saxon literature.