When the Woodstock Magazine went on sale for sixpence in 1907, the School did not yet call itself Wenona. The small crest beneath the masthead carried the motto we still hold today, Ut Prosim, that I may serve, but the ribbon below the shield read WOODSTOCK. The name Wenona was still six years away.
That change came in 1913, when founder Edith Hooke reopened Woodstock as Wenona, a name she is thought to have drawn from Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, in which Wenonah is a first-born daughter. The colours and the crest came across unchanged; only the wording on the ribbon was new. By the time The Wenonian appeared in 1925, its cover was carrying the School’s Walker Street address, and the shield beneath the title read WENONA, and it has done so ever since.
From there the crest has remained relatively consistent through the decades. It sits, a little redrawn, at the top of the November, 1935 Wenonian. It appears in full colour on the School prospectus, a photograph-filled document produced around 1940. The crest reached the cover of The Wenonian in colour by November, 1959.
The crest took on a significant role in 1961, when over the course of the school year, students laid out a “Mile of Pennies” for charity, kneeling on the playground to set the coins along a large crest painted onto the cement, with the Houses named in panels around it. Five years on, the same crest sat in navy on the cover of Special Dinners for Eight, a recipe book the Old Girls’ Union sold to raise money for the School Building and Acquisition Fund. This collection promised to be for anyone who wished “to produce a meal with the least possible effort”.
By 1971, the ribbon on the crest looked cleaner, with its white detailing pared back. The program for the 125th Anniversary Concert in 2011, Vive Hodie, Women of Spirit, staged at Sydney Town Hall, carried a crest that had been modified further. But again, the changes were slight. None amounted to a reinvention.
As School Archivist Dr Elizabeth Hartnell observes, the alterations have been modest and have nearly always concerned the ribbon, “shading, shortening, shifting … it’s amazing to me that it has remained pretty-much unchanged for 140 years”. For this year’s 140th anniversary, a refreshed crest was unveiled, this time with the founding year, EST 1886, added beneath the shield.
Through every redraw, the motto at the top of the shield has not moved. Ut Prosim was Edith Hooke’s gift to the School in 1886, and 140 years on, it is still lived daily, exactly as she had meant it to be.
