One teacher, many tasks

Good luck to all teachers and students as they ready themselves for a new year.

Our pioneers saw the need to establish schools from the 1870s.

Mostly, these were remote one-teacher schools. Some eventually were amalgamated with neighbouring schools and others grew larger. Any remaining ones closed by the 1960s when children were taken by bus to larger campuses.

A one-teacher school may have had from 10 to 20 students, ranging in age from five to 14.

Settlers supplied the school building and all the furnishings such as sets of reading books, blackboards, chalk, slates, copybooks and ink, plus a cane.

The Department of Public Instruction supplied the teacher.

At the peak of the 1930s Great Depression, teachers were advised that they could sell off surplus stock to add to their already decreased wages.

A teacher may have come from overseas or a town and so needed to adapt to the conditions of the bush.

Many young, single women became teachers. Of course, marriage meant resigning as the ruling was that married women were taking men’s jobs (up until the 1960s).

At Kiamba in the 1920s, the first teacher Olive Butler needed to learn to ride a pony for transport while living as a boarder with different families.

Children rode as well and sometimes several of them arrived on the one horse.

A horse paddock was a necessary attachment to a school. If children did not have a horse, they might have had to walk a lonely track through miles of bush with creek crossings.

Another Kiamba teacher, Mary Edwards, would often help the family with the milking before she set off for a day of teaching.

Once, she brought along three preschoolers from a family because the mother was ill.

Mavis Penlington recalled how the children were apt at killing snakes and would drape the dead ones over the school fence.

Another story was about them bringing along a carpet snake for  ‘show and tell’.

At playtime, children liked  making cubbies and one would bring  an axe to school to cut down nearby saplings and bushes. Teacher and students would often have to clear and burn-off overgrown vegetation around the school.

At the Lower Doonan Provisional School, Martha Zgraweski recalled that the female teacher boarded with the family and not only shared her bedroom but, because of a lack of spare beds, also her bed.

The teacher was not too pleased with Lower Doonan and wrote to the Education Department, saying the “bad roads no less than the distances involved prohibit travelling … all of which conspires to render Lower Doonan a swamp-pitted, inaccessible jail”.

In 1889, Debra Lalor bravely emigrated alone to Australia from Ireland. She travelled from Brisbane to Maroochydore on the Tarshaw and  a school committee member brought  her 27km upriver to Yandina in a  row boat. The story goes that she had to  contend with arguing committees, but then she married the local storekeeper and left teaching.

A 19th century inspector wrote:  “A lesson once a month may be given on specific virtues, such as truthfulness, courage, self-denial, magnanimity, humanity, manliness, courtesy and  the like.”

We could all learn that lesson.

 Audienne Blyth is a member of the Nambour Historical Museum, open 1-4pm Wednesdays to Fridays, and 10am-3pm on Saturdays.