1877-1968
Alice Constance Tisdall, known as Constance, was born in 1877 at Walhalla, Gippsland, Victoria. Her parents were schoolteachers and Constance and four of her sisters followed their example. Constance graduated from the University of Melbourne with a B.A. in 1903 and an M.A. in 1906. She believed that she was ‘born to teach’, and spent her life doing so at a series of secondary colleges for girls and women.
Constance Tisdall was president of the Victorian Women Graduates Association in 1931 - 1932, and later of the Victorian Headmistresses’ Association.
Constance was a stimulating teacher with an ideal of education as a person-to-person relationship, based on exchange of ideas, mutual trust, firm discipline and above all, on love. She was remembered by former pupils as an affectionate teacher with a capacity for pepperiness.
This short biography is drawn from the much longer account by Lyndsay Gardener in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, which can be accessed here.