Dorothy May Hornibrook

Dorothy May Hornibrook was born in Sydney, the daughter of Albert Worthing Thrussell, a Redfern plumber. Her parents later became publicans as licensees of The Criterion, Murrumburrah in country NSW. 

She was an old girl of Sydney High School, completing her Leaving Certificate with honours in English in 1928. While at school, she was also a pupil at Lawrence Campbell’s school of elocution. 

After attaining a Bachelor of Arts at Sydney University, she turned to teaching in country NSW, first at Griffith and then her parents’ town of Murrumburrah, until 1934, when her position was abruptly terminated under the Married Women (Lecturers and Teachers) Act 1932 after she married Thomas Edward Hornibrook of Vaucluse. Thomas, also a teacher, was an ardent member of the Teachers’ Federation and became Classics Master at Sydney Boys High in 1945-1949. Together they had three sons, Michael Timothy and Jon.

Times changed and Hornibrook was able to re-enter the teaching profession on 1 October 1957. She came to Sydney Boys’ High, from Tamworth High School, as teacher-librarian in 1959.

In 1959, the school library occupied the two rooms in the north-west corner of the top floor of the old main building (in later years, it came to be the English-History staff room). All quite inadequate to a modern school, but Hornibrook persevered. 

She led the relocation to the new library premises on the top floor of the Killip Wing in late 1962, early 1963.

Nicholas Whitlam (1962) recalled of Hornibrook: 

[Other teachers] simply had a quirk of personality or an enthusiasm for the subject that connected with us. Dot Hornibrook did it all.

She was very demanding and quite bossy, but we loved her. She imparted a love of books and writing, and she taught us how to use a library. Years after I left the school I met her son, a Sydney lawyer. I put it to him that Sydney High had been a politically conservative place and that I felt I had found some ideological support with Dot.

“Was she a member of the Party?” I asked.

“Well I don’t know about the Labor Party,” said he, “but my parents were always members of the Party.” He meant the Communist Party.

Neil Whitfield (1959) recalled:

Under the formidable Dot Hornibrook the Library could be quite exciting. I distinctly recall her saying quite loudly one day: “I do not see how possession of a penis makes you more intelligent!”

She was in the habit of hitting misbehaving boys on the back with a volume of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary. 

Hornibrook left High at the end of 1969 and, in 1970, transferred to Killara High School, where her husband was Principal. He, however, died in 1971. In the 1980s she would stop by, on her way to the Girls’ School speech day, to visit her old colleague Pamela Noller in the school library she helped establish.