In memoriam: Valerie Yule: 1929 – 2021
Valerie Constance Yule (2 January 1929 – 28 January 2021) was the first of three daughters born to Constance (Keil) East and Lewis Ronald East. She often said that her greatest childhood influences were her extended Methodist family of energetic individualists and Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia, contributing to her lifelong commitment to improving the lives of the disadvantaged and passing onto others a love of books.
Initially, the family lived in the house her father had built with his War Service Loan in semi-rural Blackburn before moving to a new house in Urquhart Street, Hawthorn in 1937. Val and her sisters went to MLC, where Val matriculated in 1945 as Dux of her year, winning a scholarship to Janet Clarke Hall at the University of Melbourne. She began an Arts course soon after turning 17, completing an honours degree majoring in history and English. At university she was an active participant in the Labour Club and the Student Christian Movement, and developed an abiding passion for literacy, spoken and written. She also met George Yule, a historian and Presbyterian minister, who she married at the then Methodist Church in Auburn in December 1948.
Early in 1950, Val and George went to South Korea to teach at the Christian university in Pusan, but shortly after the North Korean invasion forced them to flee. Separated during the chaos of the evacuation, it was a week before they found each other at Tokyo central station. Val’s dramatic account of the escape from Korea was printed in the Age on 20 July 1950, the first of hundreds of contributions to this newspaper over more than half a century. They stayed in Japan for three months, with Val working at the Australian Mission in Tokyo, where she acquired touch typing skills that through her life helped her to generate a prodigious volume of books, articles, academic papers, poetry, letters to newspapers and journals of her ideas.
With the Korean War dragging on, Val and George returned to Australia where George resumed his career as an historian at Melbourne University and their first child, Esther, was born in 1951. Following a year at Oxford University in 1953, George was appointed Presbyterian minister in the then heavily industrial, working class suburb of Abbotsford and he and Val and their young daughter moved into the manse, with their son Peter being born soon after. Another son Patrick, born in December 1955, tragically died of cot death aged three months. A daughter Catherine was born in 1957, the same year as George was appointed Professor of Church History at Ormond College and they moved into a large house in the college grounds. There was a constant flow of family, friends, boarders and student visitors. Some stayed for short times, others moved in for the duration of their university studies. Val made all most welcome and many became life-long friends.
Once the family was settled and the children happily attending the primary school in the university grounds, Val returned to work, teaching English at Merton Hall and undertaking post-graduate study, obtaining her Masters in Psychology, and a Diploma of Education. For several years she taught psychology at Melbourne University before joining the Department of Psychiatry at the Royal Children’s Hospital as a clinical child psychologist. For much of the 1970s she worked as a psychologist in disadvantaged schools in both the government and Catholic systems, during which she built up a large collection of children’s drawings and stories, that formed the basis of several of her books. Most significantly, she became convinced that the conventions for writing in the English language with non-phonetic spelling and difficult grammar created unnecessary complexities for many children and was a major cause of illiteracy and social disadvantage. Val became a vocal advocate of spelling reform and the use of phonics in teaching reading. Her fiery debates on spelling reform with her brother-in-law Peter Westcott, the senior English master at Geelong Grammar (and a long-time contributor to the Age) were a highlight of many family gatherings. The trend back towards phonics in recent years gave her great delight.
Val was an early adopter of new technology. For her Master’s thesis, she programmed Melbourne University’s second computer, a room-sized IBM 7044, with large piles of punch cards, which overflowed from her study and proved handy for shopping lists and bookmarks for many years. She remained up to date with computer technology through the early Apple desktops and beyond, only falling behind after the introduction of the iPhone.
While George was an inveterate traveller both for work and leisure, Val looked after those who stayed at home. It was only when George took his sabbaticals in the UK that Val travelled with the whole family, making happy homes in Cambridge and enjoying the stimulation of working with leading researchers in her field. She loved the long weeks of the sea voyages with their uninterrupted reading time and endless games of Scrabble – she invariably won the Scrabble competitions.
In 1978, Val and George left Ormond College, for George to take up the Chair of Church History at the University of Aberdeen, where his grandfather had studied a century before. She reflected that her nine years living in a Georgian house in Old Aberdeen were some of the happiest of her life. She worked at the Royal Aberdeen Children’s Hospital and was an honorary research fellow (Psychology) at Aberdeen University. She also built up an eclectic group of friends and collaborators in the UK including authors Douglas Adams, Marina Warner and Nicholas Albery (with whom she wrote the Encyclopedia of Social Inventions).
Following their return to Australia in 1988, Val and George lived at Mount Waverley, where they cared for Val’s father until his death in 1994. Val had an honorary position at Monash University where she completed her PhD thesis on ‘Orthography and Reading, Spelling and Society’ in which she analysed the arguments for and against spelling reform.
After George’s death in 2001, Val continued to live in Mount Waverley, writing prolifically in support of many causes, ranging from conservation, sustainability and the environment social innovations and literacy. She produced a video/DVD ‘Teach yourself to read and spell’ and a large number of articles and books related to reading and spelling, including ‘The Book of Spells and Misspells’ and ‘Writing systems and how they change.’ Many of her articles can be found on her website www.valerieyule.com. She was for many years Vice President of the English Spelling Society.
Her father, a leading water engineer in Victoria, taught Val the necessity of water conservation and protection of scarce resources. Val loathed waste in all forms. She was extremely proud of her Monash City Council award for the lowest household water use one year. She enjoyed working in her (low water-use) garden and delighted in sharing her flowers and vegetables with friends and neighbours. Following a stroke, Val spent her last three years living with family.
She was posthumously awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the 2021 Queen’s Birthday Honours, June 2021, for services to psychology as a clinician and author.
Val was a much loved and loving mother, mother-in-law, grandmother, great grandmother, aunt and great aunt, and friend, who all cherish her memory.
