CEO First of the month update

August 2025

Dear Colleagues

National Teachers Conference

Thank you to the 180 people who attended our recent conference, plus the keynote speakers, workshop and other presenters, and most especially to the staff of Noosa Pengari Steiner school who hosted the event. It’s difficult to pick out highlights but here are two:

• Bernd Ruf’s presentations on Emergency Pedagogy were a remarkable affirmation of the power of Steiner education in healing trauma, and the story of his pioneering interventions applying this educational method around the world in crisis situations over the past 20 years was simply inspirational.
• Also inspirational was Netanela Mizrahi and Dr Aunty Bilawara Lee’s musical collaboration which produced Dalba Gulwa - Children Sing, a resource that will live on for all Steiner schools in the country. It was a privilege for Steiner Education Australia to commission this beautiful work and to hear it officially premiered at Noosa.

And after a short pause to catch our breath, we will start pondering our next National Conference in 2027!

Indonesia 1

This First of the Month is being written in Bandung, Indonesia where I am attending the first ever Indonesian International conference on Anthroposophy. This auspicious event augurs well for the development of Steiner’s work in Australia’s largest and strategically most significant neighbour. This country with a population 10 times larger than Australia (280 million people), begins just 400 kilometres from Darwin. The future of Australia’s next generations will be closely bound up with what happens here. 

On the weekend I visited Steiner Education Australia’s newest International member, the Madu Waldorf School in Ubud, Bali. It was a great pleasure to spend time with Paul and Nicole Lawrence, the Australians who work as part of the school’s leadership team, and to record a podcast episode which tells Paul’s very interesting story of his long connection with Bali. You will be able to hear Paul’s podcast on Steiner Voices XYZ next Tuesday.

The school’s parent body is very diverse, with about one quarter local Indonesian families, and the other three quarters drawn from over 20 different nations. Bali is indeed an international magnet! The class teachers are Indonesian with a number of expat teachers providing specialist lessons. The classrooms were designed by a parent, a Venezuelan architect, and the use of bamboo in a flowing style creates a beautiful aesthetic that is both local in flavour while stimulating the inward mobility that genuine organic architecture inspires. 

Meeting the class teachers was a great pleasure and I was impressed with their commitment to Steiner education. The school is only nine years old, and in recent years has taken on a deep commitment to being a Waldorf school in a real sense. Like all new schools, finding experienced teachers can be a challenge, as can deepening the work. Teacher training initiatives are developing in Indonesia and we hope that some new projects may emerge from this week’s conference.

Indonesia 2

Indonesia was also a place that was formative for a number of people closely connected with Rudolf Steiner, the most significant of whom was Dr Ita Wegman, the remarkable pioneer of Anthroposophical medicine. Ita Wegman was born in Karawang, not far from Bandung, and spent her first 18 years here as the child of a Dutch factory manager. 

Travelling in Germany she met Rudolf Steiner in 1906 and studied medicine in Zurich which was one of the few universities that accepted women medical students at the time. She founded her own medical practice specialising in gynecology, and later worked with Rudolf Steiner in developing a complementary medicine based on the anthroposophic picture of the human being. 

Dr Wegman founded the first anthroposophical medical clinic, in Arlesheim near Dornach, then founded a curative home for children with disabilities (the Sonnenhof). She also founded the company that became Weleda (preparing and distributing pharmaceutical medicines and personal health care products). She later founded another clinic in Ascona, Switzerland and also created a therapy based on rhythmical massage. All of these initiatives continue to this day. With Steiner she co-wrote the basic text in anthroposophic medicine (originally titled Fundamentals of Therapy), and cared for him in his final illness. A remarkable woman indeed!

More Steiner Network

Dr Phil Stutz has been called the psychiatrist to the stars, having practised psychiatry in Los Angeles and Hollywood for a few decades. Jonah Hill (no relation 😀) made a documentary about his own therapeutic work as a patient with Phil Stutz which screens on Netflix, simply called Stutz. The documentary describes Stutz’s methods based around what he calls The Tools, a flexible method he developed in his own work. He is very open about where he draws his inspiration from in his personal life and work. When interviewed by Omega, an online magazine, this was his response:

Omega magazine asked him, “Who are your biggest influences? What wisdom moves and inspires you?
Dr Phil Stutz: My biggest influence by far is Rudolf Steiner. He started out as a philosopher and then switched to the study of the spiritual world. He was a prolific author and speaker and had such credibility – there was no power trip, no hierarchy, nothing. He connected the evolution of human consciousness with the history of philosophy, political history, the history of science, the history of art. He called what he did Spiritual Science and basically said, “Believe nothing that I tell you. I’m gonna show you how to render yourself evolved enough to actually see for yourself what the spiritual world is comprised of.” And he said, “If you don’t see, if it doesn’t look the way I told you it looked, stop buying my books, pay no attention to me.”

With best wishes,

Andrew Hill
CEO, Steiner Education Australia