Gail Austen was an 11-year-old Taren Point schoolgirl in 1954 when she charged local kids threepence to enter her fundraising billy cart derby.

Next term Taren Point Public School will run its own billy cart derby inspired by Gail’s entrepreneurship as a key event in its centenary year.

Billy carts, in Gail’s day, were made from fruit boxes and scavenged wheels and there were definitely no brakes.

Not so in 2025 as 50 dads and granddads found out when they worked with their kids recently to put together eight billy cart kits – with brakes – for the school’s derby.

Principal James Nobbs said the Fathering Project billy cart build was a great initiative to get dads on site and be part of the school and followed other events for dads such as bangers and bingo and barbecue breakfasts.

Around 40 per cent of parents are Francophone, speaking French as their first language, and send their children to Taren Point Public School for its French immersion program.

Mr Nobbs said the French teacher, Mme Ludivine Robbins, planned lessons with class teachers.

“The planned science lesson, for example, will be taught to the English-speaking students by the class teacher while the French immersion students will complete the same lesson with the French teacher, where all instructions, worksheets and responses, written and oral, are in French,” he said.

Centenary celebrations

Taren Point Public School has been celebrating its centenary all year with special events such as the gala dinner in May attended by alumni prima ballerina Marilyn Rowe, AM OBE.

Ms Rowe started at the school in 1952 and took her first ballet lessons in Kogarah at age 6.

She was one of the first students at the Australian Ballet School when it opened in 1964 and joined the Australian Ballet the following year. Ms Rowe would dance all around the world and was the first graduate of the Australian Ballet School to become its director.

A treasured photo for Taren Point Public is Marilyn Rowe holding the school slate in 1954 with the second grade students, the same year that Gail Austen ran her billy cart derby.

Gail Austen OAM would go on to be a surfing industry pioneer and still runs a surf shop in Brisbane.

Dubbed by Tracks Magazine as “the Iron Lady of Surfing”, Ms Austen founded the Australian Women’s Surfriders Association in 1974 and was awarded an Order of Australia in 1994 for services to youth.

She had made billy carts from the age of seven and sold them on the streets of Redfern where her grandfather had a business. She told ABC radio she raced billy carts from the hills in Taren Point, down and into Botany Bay.

A fan of the Redex Trials she saw on Movietone News at the pictures, Gail was inspired by racing car legend ‘Gelignite’ Jack Murray to fundraise for a local truckdriver injured in an accident.

“I wanted to do what Gelignite Jack did at the Redex Trials but with billy carts,” she said.

Gail wrote to Movietone News, which sent a camera crew, and to the Redex Oil Company, which mailed her 10 shillings for the truckdriver’s family and 10 shillings for her efforts, which she gave to the family.

Local kids were charged threepence to enter “or a bottle or candle we could sell”.

“The speed demons of Taren Point turned on a helter-skelter, rush-and-bustle pipe-opener to this year’s Redex Trial with a hectic ‘Redex billy cart derby today,” The Daily Mirror reported.

Ms Austen plans to attend Taren Point Public School’s billy cart derby in October.