I referred last week to the person who had helped my father
in his first years of teaching – the person he described as his mother’s Aunt
Lydia.
“Liddy” was in fact not “Lydia” but Elizabeth White, his
mother’s first cousin.
Elizabeth White, born in 1886, was the fifth of John and
Esther White’s seven children – all girls except for John, known as Sonny, who
was to die at the age of 37.
John White was a cedar cutter in the Boorie Creek area of
the Big Scrub, near Lismore. Elizabeth
was a bright child who attended the Lismore Public School and then seems to
have been recruited when very young to be a pupil/teacher.
I think this must have been around the time that Lismore
became a “Superior School” – a primary school that was extended to provide
general secondary education, and some vocational education, in communities
where there was no secondary school.
Sydney Teachers’ College opened in 1906 and before this
there were two training colleges – Hurlstone Residential college for women and
Fort Street High School for men. This was a long way from Lismore, and indeed from country
NSW, where the pupil/teacher scheme continued to operate into the 1920s.
“Pupil teachers received instruction from the head
teacher before or after school and in some cases also on Saturdays. During the
day they were responsible for instructing lower classes under the supervision
of the teacher, although at times they assumed sole responsibility. They received
a minimal salary, which was less than the average farm labourer's wage, and 5
to 6 weeks annual holiday”*
In 1903, the Lismore Superior School had an enrolment of 441
girls with a Principal, 4 teachers and 3 pupil teachers. Liddy later recalled that class sizes
sometimes reached 72, and that she was paid 9 shillings and 4 pence per week (that’s
about $32 in today’s money).
Clearly, while they were young and enthusiastic, they were
shamefully exploited.
An examination of a School Prizes list from Lismore in 1892
gives an understanding of what was being taught. The boys’ prizes were for “Plain writing,
Mapping, Drawing (animal or figure) and Specimen of letter asking for
employment”. Girls’ prizes were for
“Plain Writing, Mapping, Drawing (landscape), Fancy Needlework, Plain
Needlework, Six buttonholes, Darning a pair of cotton stockings and Specimen of
a letter to a Friend.”
In a short essay written in 1981, Liddy recalled that
uniforms were not worn to school , but conventional dress, with lace up shoes
or buttoned boots. Boys generally didn’t
wear shoes at all until they went to High School. In Lismore, that would have meant cold feet
on very frosty mornings. She described the
games that children played in the playground –“rounders, prisoner’s base,
cricket, hide and seek, hopscotch, marbles and jacks (made from pig’s
knuckles)” Some of these are familiar
from my 1950s schooldays but I wonder how many of them are commonplace today?
Liddy was a teacher for 61 years. In the 1930s she was Mistress of the South
Lismore Infants Department, and she was teaching in Bangalow in the 50s. By this time she was well past the official
retirement age.
One of her pupils from those days remembers her well. She wrote:
“My kindergarten teacher and favourite teacher of all time
was Miss White at Bangalow Public School.
She used to arrive by Kirkland’s bus driven by Teddy Spears from Byron
Bay every morning. I used to watch her
preparing for class…she spent time drawing on the blackboard, practising songs
on the piano, making work sheets on the hand driven copier and preparing paints
for class.” This student later won a
National Award for University Teaching and she says that she “felt the love of
teaching was what I learnt watching Miss White drawing the day, the date, birds
and flowers on the blackboard.”
Any of us who have been teachers would be thrilled to think
that we had been so inspirational
.
Liddy lived on in Byron Bay with her sister and her niece
after she retired. She died at the age
of 94 and is buried in the Byron Bay cemetery.
This class group from 1928 shows
the variety of clothes girls wore to school.
The group
includes my mother in law.
*Education Research and Perspectives, Vo133, No. 2, 2006
Changing Patterns of Teacher Education in Australia Tania Aspland The
University of the Sunshine Coast
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