Collie

Distinguished and Famous people from Collie

🌟 Dr Hilda Turnbull

Hilda Turnbull combined medicine with public life in Collie. After graduating in medicine at the University of Western Australia, she worked as a general practitioner in the town with her husband, James, from 1967. She subsequently represented Collie in the Western Australian Legislative Assembly from 1989 to 2001 as a National Party member. Her parliamentary career followed years of treating local families, giving her connection with the coal-mining community a practical foundation well before election day.

📚 Sir Paul Hasluck

Paul Hasluck spent much of his childhood at Collie, where his Salvation Army parents ran a home for boys. He attended a single-teacher primary school before the family moved to Guildford for his further education. Later work ranged from journalism and poetry to wartime history, diplomacy and government. As minister for territories he promoted assimilation policies that drew criticism for giving insufficient weight to Aboriginal cultural identity. Collie’s connection is the childhood and schooling behind that complex public career, not an assumption that his later policies represented the views of the town.

📚 Erica Underwood

Erica Underwood taught at Collie from 1930 to 1933 after studying psychology and education. Budget cuts had prevented an expected psychology appointment, so classroom work became her immediate profession. Later she tutored in psychology, spoke on radio and helped guide educational and community organisations. She argued for retraining and part-time opportunities for married women, questioning why voluntary work was applauded while paid work could draw disapproval. Collie’s connection is a definite teaching appointment before those wider roles, a practical early chapter in a career concerned with learning and the circumstances of everyday lives.

🎭 Nita Pannell

Nita Pannell worked as an assistant teacher at Collie High School in 1925, before becoming a leading figure in Western Australian theatre. Her teaching included music, movement and acting, interests that later found a much larger stage. In 1950 she helped establish the Company of Four, and her performance in The Shifting Heart brought national attention in 1958. Roles in The One Day of the Year and Patrick White’s plays followed. Collie’s connection belongs to her early teaching career, rather than to a claim that these later professional productions took place locally.