Maybe fate was responsible for timetabling a 12-year-old Michele Bullock to Kel Bastock’s year 7 mathematics class back in 1974 at Armidale High.
“There were others that got stuck in another class. And I thought they were quite good at maths, but they just weren’t inspired by it because they had a different teacher,” she said.
Bastock made maths fun for the six years he taught Bullock, including in year 12 where she was the only student in his four unit maths class. She remembers him telling her in that final year: “We are learning together.”
Michele Bullock says it was the teachers in the public education system who set her up for success.Credit: Kate Thomas
The first female governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia was reunited with her old teacher last week, 44 years after her graduation, when she visited her old school to speak to students as part of Public Education Week.
In 1980, 13,210 students across NSW sat the HSC economics exam. Last year, just 5570 completed the course.
“Talking today at Armidale High, there were two economics classes, 20 students in total, probably two which were girls,” Bullock said.
Bullock visited her old high school in Armidale last week. Credit: Kate Thomas
“In regional Australia, they don’t tend to teach economics, it is slipping off the radar.”
Bullock herself is one of the most high-profile products of the public education system. At school, she excelled academically, but that was not something she necessarily wanted to advertise to her school friends. “I used to try and play it down,” she said.
But then something changed in year 9. “I thought, you know what, there’s no need to play this down. I think at the time, I was going through some friendship group issues. And I just made a decision that, you know what, I’m going to just stand up for myself here.”
Bullock was not interested in cliques, got on with her schoolwork, played hockey, was in the choir and became school captain.
Reserve Bank of Australia governor Michele Bullock with her old mathematics teacher, Kel Bastock.Credit: Kate Thomas
“I think the reason I became school captain was because I connected with most people in the year,” she said.
When it came to choosing a university course after school, Bullock applied for the hardest one to gain entry to – medicine at UNSW. She was accepted. But she didn’t want to go.
“I’d lived in the country all my life, the thought of going to Sydney, the big smoke, not knowing anyone down there ... I just felt, you know what, I’m not ready. I can’t do that.”
Her father put her in touch with the head of economics at the University of New England to discuss an economics degree. However, it was her high school teacher who had laid the groundwork.
“I mean, my economics teacher was the one who obviously inspired me to do it,” Bullock said.
University economics allowed her to put her strong maths skills to good use.
She landed a graduate job at the RBA in the 1980s, where the only computer was a mainframe which ran code overnight. The work she was doing was remarkably similar to one of the essay questions she faced in her HSC economics exam on money supply. Reconsidering the question after decades of banking deregulation, her answer has changed a bit.
“And we don’t think of it in terms of money supply,” she added. “Now we think of it, obviously, in terms of the price. And that’s because we’ve deregulated what used to be the money supply.”
So, is it still possible to graduate from a public school and rise through the ranks to become governor of Australia’s central bank?
Statistically, it seems unlikely. In the HSC, economics is now mainly the domain of private boys’ schools. The RBA is trying to get more diversity into economics courses.
“And that’s got to start in schools because we can’t seem to get the pipeline into university when we can’t get it in the schools,” Bullock said.
More broadly, there is an exodus of parents from public schools to private ones. The Herald asked Bullock, as a public school graduate, what would be for her pitch to parents to stick with the government system.
“It’s an interesting question because my kids both went to private schools in Sydney. It was that I just felt that they would, they were the schools that would set them up well. And there wasn’t many public school options around me,” she said.
While the Armidale High school buildings have improved since the 1970s, Bullock said she can see the value of education lies in the teachers. Maths teacher Kel Bastock encouraged her talents and pushed her towards the direction which would ultimately lead to the job she has now.
“He made maths fun and interesting ... The teachers are what it’s all about,” she said.
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