Mabel Johnstone arrived in Sydney to teach at the Mulligan’s Flat bush school in the late 19th century, took one look at the school and the accommodation, and caught the coach back to Sydney next day.
“It is impossible for me to stay here, my health would not permit it,” she declared. There was no suitable board for a woman; the best place had boards for windows, and no floors; and she had to cross two creeks before she reached the school. Hardly an ideal placement for a teacher in delicate health, “strictly warned not to get my feet wet nor sit in draughts”.
Miss Johnstone may have baulked at bush schools, but before WWI, there were thousands of them in NSW and what would become the ACT. Most were one-classroom affairs with 10 to 20 students, aged to 7 to 14, and one teacher.
The Hall School Museum and Heritage Centre – once the village’s primary school for nearly a century – tells the stories of the bush schools in the Canberra region: 16 in the ACT at the time it was proclaimed (13 in the public payroll) and another 65 in the region, as far as Goulburn and Bungendore.
This year, the museum has received a heritage grant from the ACT Government to conserve and curate its bush schools collection – research folders, storyboards, photographs, maps and plans, and an on-line database.
Hall Primary School was established in 1911, and closed – much to locals’ dismay – in 2006, five years short of its centenary. It opened as an educational museum on its 75th anniversary in 1986. Under the stewardship of curator Alastair Crombie and his predecessor Phil Robson, it has become part of a larger enterprise addressing the Aboriginal history and pioneer settlement story of the Hall-Ginninderra district.
The NSW bush schools’ heyday was 1913, after which they were mopped up by school buses and other motorised transport, Mr Crombie said. West of the Murrumbidgee, Tharwa Primary School was the last to close, in 2006.
“Little bush schools were threatened with closure if attendance fell below a certain threshold. It was a constant struggle to try to keep enough kids in, so you didn’t lose your school. If schools were marginal, the Education Department would not replace teachers, so parents would have to move their children elsewhere.”
An early sketch map of the bush schools in the Hall district – “a real revelation to us,” Mr Crombie said – showed schools every 10 miles or so, amongst scattered farming families. There was a simple formula for these schools: two acres for the building, and 20 acres for the horses that brought the children and teacher to school.
A Heritage Centre highlight is the recreation of a 1930s classroom, complete with wooden desks, inkwells, slates, and blackboards setting out the lessons for the upper and lower divisions. Cases hold sports equipment, exercise books (one from a geography lesson with a map of South America), books (Biggles, Bulwer-Lytton, and Walter Scott), and a schoolgirl’s embroidery sampler from 1887, showing her skill at sewing and stitching.
“School was pretty basic – the three R’s,” Mr Crombie explained. “There were elements of music, geography, and so on, but basically reading, writing, arithmetic was the focus.”
The lower division learnt phonics, reading, arithmetic, grammar, and composition, and finished the day with painted drawing (of a brown ink bottle). The upper division began the day by saluting the flag, and a little singing of scales, before a long day of arithmetic, mensuration (the area of the rectangle), reading (Rip Van Winkle and Captain Cook), grammar, and composition, with history (Jacques Cartier’s exploration of Canada) and art.
Over everything loomed the shadow of the cane. “Discipline was autocratic, with no excuses,” Mr Crombie said. “Teachers were encouraged to, and taught how to, use the cane.”
The punishment book lists the children’s offences. Children were beaten for laziness, disobedience, unseemly behaviour, kicking another boy while walking to school, passing ‘filthy’ notes around class, hitting girls, using expressions such as ‘slut’, and firing guns in the playground.
Today’s young student visitors also have lessons in the classroom. A school instructor arrives with a severe black uniform and a cane, and pupils take on the persona of a child from the time. (The museum has biographies and photographs of all the 1918 pupils: where they lived, what happened to them after school, and who their families were.)
But they don’t have to fear corporal punishment. Instead, they play old-fashioned games, learn what life was like before electricity, and visit reconstructions of farming homesteads and villages.
“It’s very popular with them,” Mr Crombie said. Many bring their parents back on the weekend.
Teaching was a tough gig, Mr Crombie said. “This was a respected profession, but it was very poorly paid… You were on your own; parents were often the enemy, upset about the kids being punished or suffering one way or another.”
Many persevered, and climbed the eight-rung career ladder. But others endured isolation and poverty.
In the bush, by and large, no accommodation was supplied for teachers; they lodged with local families, in basic rooms with an iron bedstead, a set of drawers, and little else.
Some teachers were not paid for many months; they wrote to the Department of Public Institution complaining they did not have enough money to buy Christmas presents for their children or to feed the horse that took them to school.
It is hardly surprising that some teachers took to the bottle. “They snuck out [of the classroom] and consumed alcohol,” Mr Crombie said. “They weren’t in top form in the afternoons.
“At Tallagandra, the teacher proved himself to be a complete out-and-out drunk – but he was a Catholic, so when push came to shove, the parents decided not to petition to get rid of him. They’d rather have a drunken Catholic than run the risk of getting a sober Protestant!”
Today, you can visit the old Ginninderra school at Gold Creek, and a replica in North Lyneham of Gungahleen School, burnt down in 2007.
One of Mr Crombie’s favourites is the Gibraltar bush school, which stood near what is now the Tidbinbilla Visitors’ Centre.
“It’s a romantic place to have a school, on the foothills of the mountains in the Tidbinbilla Valley,” he said.
Prime Minister Andrew Fisher, no less, signed off on improvements to the girls’ toilets in 1913, when it became part of the newly fledged ACT. “They hadn’t quite sorted out the administrative arrangements!” Mr Crombie said.
Canberra Girls’ Grammar School eventually acquired the building, and set it up as a kindergarten in 1944.
“It was quite common if a school’s population waxed or waned to pick up a school, put it on a jigger, and take it somewhere else,” Mr Crombie said.
The Museum also holds the late local historian Lyall Gillespie’s lifetime collection – diaries, research papers, books, maps, artefacts, artworks, and photographs; displays of Aboriginal stone artefacts; and galleries telling the region’s history: Aboriginal custodianship, reconstructions of the Hall main street in 1913, and stories of local war enlistees and farming families.
The Hall School Museum and Heritage Centre, 17/19 Palmer Street, Hall ACT is open Thursdays 9am to noon, and Sundays noon to 4pm. Visit museum.hall.act.au for more information.
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