SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
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Rome: There I was, sitting in a quiet corner of Rome, the Vatican’s chimney stack just visible in the distance, waiting for the puff of white smoke that would declare a new pope.
It was a moment wrapped in tradition, symbolism and centuries of history – the kind of global story I could have only imagined reporting on. The kind that once lived only in the margins of a high school history textbook, brought to life by a woman named Ms Needham.
A street musician plays a violin outside the Sant’Angelo castle as the sun sets in Rome on Sunday.Credit: AP
Three and a bit years ago, I left Australia with a suitcase, a passport and a quiet sense of disbelief. I was to cover Europe’s biggest stories – the politics, the protests, the wars and the wonders. I’ve since stood inside a centuries-old chapel as Elizabeth II was laid to rest, and witnessed the pomp of a king’s coronation. I’ve watched firelit protests engulf Parisian streets, heard air raid sirens in Kyiv and wandered the cobbled corners of Berlin, imagining the wall still looming above.
In Krakow, I met survivors of the Holocaust. In London, I stood at the door of 10 Downing Street and watched four prime ministers walk in and out. So often, I was struck by deja vu – that eerie sense I’d been here before, only I hadn’t. It was Ms Needham who’d taken me there first.
Teacher MaryAnne Needham turned faraway places and long-ago people into something intimate and real for a young Rob Harris.Credit:
As the world awaited smoke and meaning, I found myself returning to a simpler, more personal question: How lucky am I? And more quietly: Did I do Ms Needham proud?
It was she who, from a classroom in Traralgon, made me feel the weight of Robespierre’s guillotine and the grit of Mao’s Long March. She made the horrors of Auschwitz more than just a name in a book, and the bravery of people such as John Monash something I could understand as a teenager. She turned faraway places and long-ago people into something intimate. Real.
Not long ago, I came across a thought in a book from Greek philosopher Nikos Kazantzakis that stopped me cold: “True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create bridges of their own.”
That was her. MaryAnne – always one-word, capital A – Needham.
She gave so much of herself, not just to history, but to us. Her students. She shared stories of her family, her loves, her opinions (plenty of them), her quiet rage at injustice and her fierce loyalty to the power of the humanities. She believed the world was there to be interrogated, not memorised. And she showed me that an education wasn’t about having the right answers – it was about learning how to ask the right questions.
Rob Harris reported on the coronation of King Charles III.Credit: AP
There are dozens – probably hundreds – of Needhamites out in the world now. Some in courtrooms, some in classrooms of their own. Some in boardrooms or on building sites or quietly raising thoughtful kids.
An old school friend who ended up advising a prime minister remembers her as the person who showed her that politics could be a force for good. Another, now a lawyer, credits her with saving him from a career in plumbing by showing him the power of an idea.
And I get it. Because it was the same for me. I try to tell her that, or tried to, in sporadic updates over the years – a new job, a byline she might’ve seen in The Age or the Herald Sun, a piece I hoped she’d quietly critique. Perhaps she even red-penned the odd clunky sentence in her head, with that familiar blend of love and literary exasperation.
The last time I saw her, we met for tea near the War Memorial in Canberra.
We sat under the gaze of Weary Dunlop – a man I knew so well, thanks to her lessons – and spoke about the world, about politics, about the strange joy of being curious.
In December, her brother, Mark, emailed to say she didn’t have long left. But miraculously, she is still hanging on, in a hospice in the Latrobe Valley. So not long after Pope Francis’ funeral, I called to tell her where I was and what I’d seen. She was, after all, a devout Catholic.
I told her, every day I do this job – from Dublin to Dnipro, from royal palaces to border checkpoints – I carry her with me. In the questions I ask. In the way I try to see people in their full context. In the simple belief that history matters, and that words, when used carefully, can shape how we understand the world.
How lucky am I to have had a teacher like that? Very. And did I do her proud? Gosh, I hope so.
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