Dr Bronwyn Herbert has graduated with a PhD at the age of 90, after decades of experience as a parent, community member, academic and social worker.
It’s an extraordinary feat that came up on my LinkedIn feed this week, with her photo shared among the various milestones and other achievements posted by users to mark the end of 2023.
Dr Herbert doesn’t appear to be on LinkedIn herself, but rather her story has been celebrated after the University of Queensland shared the news last week that the long-term social worker had earned her PhD in social work from the UQ’s School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work.
It’s not just a story of lifelong learning that’s worth celebrating here, with Dr Herbert first enrolling in university in 1962, but also one of a long legacy of care work and the determination to find answers to the problems we witness and experience in different ways across our lifetimes.
Having completed a Master of Social Work in 1982, Dr Herbert has personally seen the changing face of homelessness over the years, with her thesis focussing on the intergenerational impacts of homelessness.
Her career has been far from linear and didn’t accelerate her social work career until she was in her fifties after raising children and caring for others, enabling her to bring real empathy into her various positions across youth and alternative care and supporting families in crisis.
But Dr Herbert’s firsthand experiences have been particularly transformative. She was a single mother after her first husband died when she was just 23, while she was pregnant with their first child.
She says she witnessed over the years how young people who had been homeless as a child with their parents were then falling into homelessness as adults. She wanted to examine what could be done differently to prevent the problem.
“There was little written about how early homelessness affected their relationships, education, and employment, so I decided to follow that up and try and close some of those gaps with information,” she says.
Featured by the UoQ late last week, Dr Herbert says she retired from social work at the age of 81, only because she wanted to get stuck into her thesis and didn’t have the time to work on it.
Dr Herbert tells the UoQ also about some of the things she’s witnessed and experienced over her life, including giving birth as a widow and being put in the room with a mother who had just experienced a stillbirth.
“It made me realise that some young mothers are suffering grief, broken marriages, domestic violence and some had suffered abuse, and they needed more support.
Dr Herbert later remarried and had another three children. She first enrolled in university in 1961 but discontinued her studies to raise her children. When her eldest was finishing school, Dr Herbert started considering her career options, with an old university friend urging her to re-commence her studies.
On graduating in 1982, she started a long career supporting families in crisis.
“In my 50s, when many people were thinking about lessening their workload and perhaps retirement, I was all enthusiastic and just wanted to get going,” she says.
“And I kept going until I was 91.”
But the past few years have been tough, with Dr Herbert experiencing poor health, the tragic death of a son as well as the death of her second husband, whom she cared for in his later years until his death at the age of 95.
Now a grandmother, Dr Herbert isn’t done. She says she’d like to write about the interesting cases she’s had as a social worker and to record some of the amazing outcomes families have achieved despite both the financial and emotional trauma they have experienced.
While Dr Herbert does not appear to personally be on LinkedIn, her family members have been praising her work, including a niece who described her as “an inspiration to us all”.