Guiding light: Josie Podbury is looking forward to this year’s Girl Guides celebration in Geelong. Picture: Tommy Ritchie 54383
Andrew Mathieson
TALKING to Josie Podbury about Girl Guides is like journeying back to another time.
She can recall the changes since she joined the Guides as a 10-year-old wearing a third-hand uniform in 1939.
Rather than toasting marshmallows over campfires, the Guides of yesteryear were more concerned helping the war effort.
“All the young fellas were heading off to the war and, although I was only a kid, all of us were out collecting scrap,” remembers the sharp 82-year-old from Ocean Grove.
“Every Saturday we’d have a billy kart and would walk along, knock on doors and ask people whether they had a scrap heap in their backyard. But the scrap we were often collecting was old toothpaste because the toothpaste holders were made of lead.”
As one of Geelong’s oldest surviving Guides, Josie is telling her story for a Barwon reunion to celebrate 100 years of the movement next weekend.
Hundreds of old Girl Guides from as far back as 1927 will converge on Geelong from all corners of Australia.
For Josie, the most conflicting memory is the deep social divisions she encountered when aspiring to become a Guides leader.
“Kids that were Catholic like us didn’t mix outside their own church,” she says, “so I was keen to do something in that very realm and that wasn’t what they had in mind.
“It was a stalemate for quite a while. Eventually they let me start the first Catholic Guides company in Victoria, which, when I look back now, was a pretty big thing.”
After forming the first Guides at the Ashby church in 1948, Josie eventually rose to commissioner of Geelong in an involvement with the organisation that would last more than 50 years.
