#52 Ancestors 2020 - Week 39 - Should Be a Movie

 #52 Ancestors 2020

 Week 39 Should Be a Movie

In 2014 my family made a movie.

The movie was conceived as a way of showcasing and celebrating my mother’s 90 years, and it had its premiere at the party held for her birthday in December, 2014. 

The idea was that, in the early months of 2014, we would take Mum to all of the significant places in her life and film her there, talking about people and events that had made an impression on her. Various family members would attend each place and hold the camera and ask the questions, although it was never difficult to get Mum to tell a story.

A large crowd of family and friends came together for the party.  A huge screen was set up across the courtyard.

Then a surprise beginning.  The familiar strains of the ABC’s “7.30 Report” and the familiar face of its presenter, Quentin Dempster, who announced that tonight’s 7.30 was showcasing the story of a remarkable woman – Gwynn Gleeson. 

(My brother, Michael, had been an ABC reporter and had arranged this – it was an impressive - and very professional - start.)

From there the camera went back to scenes of Mum packing, and then taking off in the car with my sister and her husband to the sound of Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again”.  Off to where it all began, in Quirindi, NSW where Mum was born and grew up, and where she married in 1943.

                           A map of NSW showing Mum's places                               

Here there were stills from her childhood and a voiceover from Michael, and then the highlight of the Quirindi section – a visit to the local picture theatre.

All of us knew the story but Mum told it again in situ.  Aged about 13, she was sitting with her young sister and sniffling through “Captains Courageous” – the scene where Spencer Tracy says goodbye to the young Freddie Bartholemew -  when there was a tap on her shoulder from the man seated behind her.  “Is that you, Gwynne Whitten?” he asked.

“Yes, Mr Gleeson” (her new English teacher!)

“Haven’t you got a handkerchief?”

“No”

“Here, have mine”

Mum took it home and washed it and ironed it and returned it at school.

Reader, she married him.

(Six years later, after he had left town and she had left school)

Together my parents moved to Young, NSW where the first four of their six children were born.  At Young, we filmed their old house and the High School where Dad had taught, and Mum talked about their neighbours and the friends of their early marriage.

On to Glen Innes, where the family moved in 1953.  Here the filming was at the school where Dad taught, the school we children attended, the local swimming pool, and “the house that Bill built”

It was in Glen Innes that Margie was born in 1956.

The swimming pool featured because all of us children were keen swimmers and we knew our mother had been a swimmer but Glen Innes did not have a pool until 1955.  The day it opened was a red letter day for the community and everyone turned up, eager to take the plunge.  The pool was not heated, and it was October.  Mum said she dived in and completely lost her breath, it was so cold!  She swam to the other side, got out, and never swam in Glen Innes again.

                                                                 Directing in Glen Innes

The next stage of the journey was a side trip to Brunswick Heads, where Mum and Dad had honeymooned in 1943.  Then a sleepy little seaside fishing village, it is now a busy tourist town.  Nevertheless, there were elements that were unchanged and she sat by the Brunswick River, opposite the famous Brunswick Hotel, and reminisced about their honeymoon and the many times she and Dad had returned here with their small children.

In 1960. Mum and Dad moved to Dubbo in the Central West of NSW where they were to live for the rest of their lives.  Their youngest child, Michael, was born here in 1965.  All of us grew up here and eventually left.

There were a lot of Dubbo stories.

Skilfully edited throughout the movie were video clips from my parent’s 40^th and 50^th wedding anniversary celebrations and other short clips which indicated some of the social changes that Mum had lived through in her 90 years.

And at the end, Quentin Dempster again, wrapping up this special edition of the 7.30 Report and wishing Mum a happy birthday.

It was quite a movie.

Mum enjoying the movie.

Gwynneth Joyce Gleeson 1924 -2018

#52 Ancestors 2020 Week 37 - Back to School

#52 Ancestors 2020

Week 37 - Back to School

N.J. Gleeson and wife Gwynne at his graduation with M.A from the University of Sydney 1952

 Everyone can probably remember a teacher who had an influence on them – for good or ill – but those of us who are teachers remember some of those who taught us because either we wanted to emulate them, or because we never wanted to become like them 

My father started school in about 1920 and began his career as a teacher in a small two-teacher school in 1935.  When he retired from teaching in 1973 he was the Principal of a large High School in country NSW.  Writing some reminiscences of his childhood, he recalled the first Headmaster he encountered, the man in charge of South Lismore Primary School in the 1920s.  

 The Headmaster of South Lismore Primary School was B.J Reilly, whose name I believe was Bernard, but who was always “Ben” to the pupils of South. Ben was an old-style disciplinarian. In other words, he wielded the cane with gusto, appearing to take pleasure, like so many of his kind, of small boys (the oldest, after all, would have been twelve or thirteen, fourteen at the outside) cowering before him.  He was, I suppose, the sort of disciplinarian remembered fondly by lovers of the “good old days” when they lament the decline of “discipline” in today’s schools.  Such advocated of the “Spare the rod and spoil the child” school of thought are wont to recall with pleasure the thought that a good hiding never harmed anyone, with implication that their own sterling characters are the result of such treatment.  One wonders if, in fact, they were ever the recipients of such treatment and, if so, whether they were so enthusiastic about its benefits at the time.  For my money, far from being a model of perfect discipline, Ben was a sadist who might have made an interesting study for a psychologist.

Dad had not really wanted to become a teacher but as a bright boy of poor parents had few options.  For many years, the NSW Department of Education offered scholarships for teacher training at either University or Teachers’ College.  For Dad, and later for his children, this was the only affordable way to get a University degree.

He wrote:

It seems to me that many of the teachers that I have known in the course of my career did the very same thing and, having committed themselves to several years of training,  followed by several more years of being bonded to the Department of Education, came to accept it and even to like it, as they did it to the best of their ability, feeling, as I did, that the rewards – certainly not financial – outweighed the disappointments and frustrations.  Many talked of leaving and trying some other career but became finally hooked when, in the words of Bacon, they had “given hostages to fortune” by marrying and having children.  Some never reconciled themselves and simply became bad teachers, who never could get along with children, who had never-ending problems with classroom discipline and for whom, every day they spent in the classroom must been sheer purgatory.  Those who finally made the grade were, first, those who had a genuine vocation and really loved teaching and second, those who made a determined effort to do it as well as they could.  It helped to recognise that you would never really be much good unless you really liked children and unless you recognised also that the teacher had an important part to play in preparing the next generation to take its place in society.  It was important, too, to acknowledge that teaching was a professional skill and that it could not be done “off the cuff” without serious preparation and an assiduous attention to its basic principles.

Dad used to say that people who did not like children should not be teachers.  That seems obvious, but people become teachers for many reasons and all of us have encountered the teachers who speak down to children, who don’t believe them or trust them, and who judge too harshly. 

An incident in my childhood comes to mind.  I was kicked out of a class for giggling – by a teacher who was notoriously short-tempered and was struggling to find a way to deal with a group of giggly  10-year old girls.  Sent to the Mistress in charge of Girls (of whom all of us were terrified), I dawdled my way to her office and was hugely relieved when she wasn’t in.  As I wandered back, wondering what I was going to say, I encountered the Headmaster who was watering the garden.

This Headmaster was a kind and courteous man, always beautifully turned-out in three-piece suit, who was loved by his students and his staff.  He was a keen gardener, who did nearly all the school gardening and won prizes for it.  He invited me to walk around with him and extracted the story from me.  We chatted until the bell went, and he sent me off, happy and relieved, to my next class.

The antithesis of Dad’s first Headmaster was the man who was the Principal of the High School to which he was sent in the early 1950s.   This man was a huge influence in my father’s life, and in the kind of Principal he became himself.

Dad wrote: “Frank was an object lesson in how to treat children.  He loved children and treated them with enormous compassion.  To see him worming the truth out of a child who had done something wrong was an education in itself.  It was made easier for him because the child knew that he was not going to be punished by being caned or deprived of anything…he was convinced that children could not be taught by being hit.

(In an era when the cane was routinely used by teachers to discipline or punish even minor infractions, a school where it was banned was an anomaly).

“He also used to say, even of hulking 18-year olds, “They’re only little boys” (he had done most of his teaching in boys’ schools) and “I’m a teacher and it is my job to teach them what is right and what is wrong.”

Dad is remembered by his pupils and colleagues as a man of compassion and fairness.  He always thought of Frank as the most interesting person he had ever met. When he became a Principal himself, he often asked himself, “What would Frank do?” when faced with a problem or a difficult person. 

Two of my sisters and I became teachers and I think we all tried to bring to our classrooms our memories of the kind of teacher our father was, and the lessons he had learned from Frank, which were often the subject of dinner time discussions when we were growing up.  While there have been many changes in schools and in teaching practices in the years since 1935, the essential role doesn’t change and the qualities needed to do a good job and have a positive influence remain the same.

#52 Ancestors 2020 - Week 36 - Labour

#52 Ancestors 2020

Week 36 - Labour

It is only since my father’s generation that there have been people in my family who did not work with their hands.  My grandfathers, and their forefathers back as far as I can see – into the 17^th century – were almost all labourers.  Most of them were agricultural workers and very few of them owned the land they were working.

My great grandfather Anthony Whitten was an exception in that his father was a landowner.  The problem was that there were several sons and a finite amount of land.  Anthony and two of his brothers left Ireland to seek their fortune here in Australia in the 1860s.  All of them became land owners, but they nevertheless had to labour hard on their land to make a livelihood.

More typical of my Irish forebears was my other great grandfather James Patrick Gleeson who left County Clare with two of his brothers and a sister in about 1885.  His father worked all his life as an agricultural labourer and the family was very poor.  When I spent time in the Family History Society of Ennis in 2017, we found only one reference to Michael,  which indicated that he had owned no land and paid a pittance for the hut where his family lived. James worked as a labourer in Australia, including on the railways, before finding a mid-life career as a publican.

This 19th century farmhouse is  bigger and better than the one Michael Gleeson lived in.

The English immigrants on Dad’s side of the family were also labourers.  Charles White landed here in 1853 with his wife and four children under the age of 6.  They knew nobody in the colony, but Charles was a gardener and was clearly confident that he would find work.  When he died in Lismore in 1898, his obituary recorded that he had carried on a “market garden in South Lismore and was renowned for the excellence of his produce, which he exhibited at Spring Shows”.

Charles White

James Golding and his wife Eliza also came as Government assisted immigrants from England.  James is described as a labourer – the Goldings form a long line of agricultural labourers who lived in two Suffolk villages – Glemsford and Cavendish.

The immigration papers of another pair of my 3 x great grandparents, Patrick and Mary Power, tell a similar story.

His business is stated as “Farming” and his heath is assessed as “Very Good”.  Mary’s business is “Dairywoman” and she to is in “Very Good” condition.  Considering that they were fleeing from Ireland in 1840 (pre- famine but always poor) this is a good report.

There is some evidence that Mary Power’s father, Bernard Murphy, was a “Hedge teacher”.

Hedge Schools sprang up in Ireland in the 18^th and 19^th centuries to secretly provide the basics of an education to the children of Catholic and other non-Anglican families, for whom there were no other provisions.  Under the penal laws, only schools for those of the Anglican faith were allowed.

The name implies that the classes took place outside (next to a hedgerow) but in fact they were usually held in private homes or barns. Subjects included reading writing and grammar of the Irish and English language, and maths (the three “R’s”). In some schools the Irish bardic tradition, Latin, Greek, history and home economics were also taught. Payment was generally made per subject.  It is unlikely that this was enough for Bernard to support his family, so he probably also worked on the land.

 “The people of Ireland are, I may almost say, universally educated:…. I do not know any part of Ireland so wild, that its inhabitants are not anxious, nay, eagerly anxious for the education of their children.” [Wakefield, Account of Ireland, Vol. II P 307].

 A surviving hedge school

In 2020, I can’t name one member of my extended family who works as a labourer.  Machines and robots are increasingly making manual work a thing of the past in first world countries.  Such manual work as we do – like gardening or woodworking – is done for pleasure and personal fulfillment rather than as a means of keeping a roof over our heads and food in our mouths.

But to find a teacher amongst all the labourers is very exciting. There have been teachers in the family from the 1920s to the present day – now we know that this honourable profession was recorded in our family as long ago as the 1750s and as far away as Ireland.