by Marcus Priaulx
Award-winning actor and director Leah Purcell remembers the first day school finally made sense to her.
She had written a story for her Year 7 teacher at Murgon and it came back covered in red ink with a big “See Me” scrawled across the page.
Leah thought she was in trouble.
But when she fronted Mrs Rosemary Bishop at the end of the day she was asked to enter her work into a Murgon Lions Rotary Writing competition.
“I asked ‘why?” Leah said. “It was full of spelling and grammar mistakes. But Mrs Bishop said: ‘It’s a great story, I’ll help you with the other stuff. You’re a great storyteller.”
From that day on Leah went from being a child who walked through the front gate at school and over the back fence, to one who turned up at 8.30am eager to learn.
“I’d found something I was good at,” she said.
“At home I was surrounded by people who could tell a great yarn and deliver a punchline better than any famous comedian. It may have been done over a carton at times, but it came from centuries of oral tradition.
“Then there was Mrs Bishop and a couple of teachers at high school who encouraged me to put my head down and try hard.”
But Leah admits she was always a reluctant student.
“I was a hardhead; more destructive to myself, a ratbag,” she said.
“I put a ‘zero’ on my maths test in Year 8 and went for a walk.
“I wasn’t a terrible kid or a bully, I just played on the fact I was a card and would bulls*it my way out of class and take half an hour to get a drink of water.”
Today, Leah looks back wishing she had had a better attitude to her schooling when she was younger.
She is now part of a Cherbourg Aboriginal Shire Council campaign to have every parent in the country send their children to school every day, on time.
Leah still has family members who live in Cherbourg and Murgon and is quick to let students know how difficult it is for her today because of the schooling she missed.
Speaking during a recent visit home and to her former Murgon State High School, Leah admitted she can struggle at times because “I missed a lot of the basics to build on”.
“It’s made life a little harder,” she said.
“I’ve panicked and put unnecessary stress on myself at auditions because I’ve been asked to do a cold-read; read bits of scripts on the spot. I wouldn’t know how to pronounce a word or what it might mean. I’d go to the toilet and ring my mates back home to help me!”
Leah would usually take hours to look through her lines at home with a dictionary close to hand before fronting casting agents.
What would normally take somebody 10 minutes to read would sometimes take Leah an hour but she had to do it if she wanted to succeed and live a happy, productive life.
“I want to live a fulfilling life so I’ve had to put in the hard yards,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter how old you are, you can still learn. I’m learning every day.
“I now want all children and parents to realise the effort they put in now will pay them in bucket loads; not always tomorrow, but maybe the next day, or even years down the track.
“Every day does count to a happier future and I urge parents to send their children to school every day, on time so they can have a great life and be the best person that they can be.”
