Serving up some student support

A family’s proud heritage, a beloved sister and a town called Pilliga are honoured by two new scholarships for UNE students from northern NSW.

The son of hard-working Greek migrants, Jim Poulos KC carved out a successful legal career after growing up in the Namoi Café his parents ran for about 30 years in Pilliga. Looking back, the 82-year-old appreciates what they sacrificed for their family’s future. And he would now like to help others.

“My parents worked from 7am-9pm seven days a week. It was backbreaking and very physical work,” Jim recalls. “They couldn’t afford boarding school for us. I was fortunate to get into Sydney Boys’ High, one of the few selective schools at the time, but it meant my mother moving to Sydney to live with me while my father ran the café.”

At the University of Sydney, where he subsequently studied law, Jim was a co-founder of its resurrected rugby league club (in 1963) and a star debater, who was selected to represent the university in parliamentary debating against Great Britain. He went on to work as an articled clerk, solicitor, barrister and then Queen’s (now King’s) Counsel until his retirement in 2018, serving as a member of the Bar Council for 11 years.

Oddly enough, for someone who grew up so far from the sea, Jim became president of Australia’s largest surf lifesaving club – North Bondi – from 1974-79 and remains its proud patron.

However, misadventure and circumstance prevented his older sister Mary from pursuing tertiary study in her youth.

“Mary was a tremendously focussed student and had an amazing work ethic,” Jim said. “But at age 15 (in 1947) she broke her neck diving into the artesian bore at Pilliga and spent almost 12 months in hospital. She returned to school at Sydney Girls’ High and got six ‘A’s in the leaving certificate, before going back to Pilliga to work in the café for five years.”

It would be another 30 years before Mary could complete an undergraduate degree, at UNE. By that time, she had forged her own pioneering path – in a livestock export business in Sydney and working with the US Airforce in Germany and Spain.

“In naming one of the UNE scholarships for Mary (now Field), I wanted to recognise my sister for overcoming adversity and for all the things she has done in her lifetime,” Jim said. “When she returned to Pilliga in 1954, Mary helped to run the tennis club, taught Sunday school and served as a correspondent to The Coonabarabran Times. She later came up against the glass ceiling professionally in Sydney, but her UNE degree took her career in a completely different direction.”

Mary, now 93, said the cost of university fees and boarding in Sydney, on top of the hospital charges they had incurred during her recovery, would have been too much for her parents at that time. “One of my schoolteachers tried to persuade my mother to let me go on to university, but in those days, girls weren’t educated. There were few opportunities for women beyond being a teacher, secretary or nurse. You were expected to get married and that was the end of it, so I left school in fifth year.”

But Mary did not give up on her academic ambitions.

“The great opportunity for me came in the early 1980s, when I was able to do an Arts degree at UNE for free,” said Mary, who by then had been married, had two daughters, and divorced. “I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to study otherwise. I had the children to look after, and I could do the study by distance at home. It was ideal and I enjoyed it. The only thing I regret is that my parents died without knowing what I had achieved.”

For completing that first qualification inspired Mary to also study law at the University of Sydney. “I was 52 when I started my law degree and 56 when I started working as a lawyer. I worked in law until I was 79, so it all worked out well in the end.”

It’s only now, mid-way through writing his memoir, that Jim realises how influential their upbringing in the Namoi Valley was. He hopes that by providing financial support to two UNE students he can similarly set them on the path to the successful lives he and Mary have enjoyed.

Ironically, their father George was studying to be a lawyer himself when he and his wife Maro set sail for Australia in 1928. “Setting up the café was an act of desperation for my father, who couldn’t speak English well enough to get work in other roles,” said Jim. “Our mother was a very intelligent woman and started studying nursing when she came to Australia, but then the Great Depression hit, and they were forced to leave Sydney and our mother had to abandon her studies.

“They left Sydney and worked for George Anast in the Monterey Café in Coonamble, where they learnt the trade, before starting the Namoi Café in Pilliga in 1933. Theirs was a tough life, but they knew the value of education.”