The pupil-teachers are not listed in the school registers, although ‘P.T.’s are mentioned from time to time. They are now a departmental responsibility. Over the course of Edith’s tenure at Camberwell, the standards seem to improve. The number of students in Class IV increases, with more and more successfully completing their examinations. The pupil-teachers have their own examinations to pass.
‘Visited to examine P.T.s in Art of Teaching,’ Gamble reported. ‘One P.T. uses the falling cadence in speaking to a most objectionable extent, which is calculated to interfere with her effectiveness as a teacher. The training in the art of teaching should go hand in hand with preparation in literary work.’
I wonder if a Surrey accent might be considered to have a falling cadence? Perhaps it just reflected a lack of forcefulness and authority, an inability to maintain discipline in the classroom. Whatever the cause of the problem, it was swiftly rectified by the following year.
‘Visited to examine P.T.s in Art of Teaching,’ Gamble again inscribed in his report. ‘They appear to have received careful training.’
Over the next five years, Edith trained as a teacher, gradually improving in skills and capacity, steadily achieving her third-, second- and first-class ratings (rising to £50 per year) before achieving certification in early 1895. ‘The Art of Teaching’, in her first year, was her only recorded failure.
‘Inexperienced but a fair pupil teacher,’ one inspector began.
‘Of fair promise,’ noted Gamble the following year. Over the next few years, his comments steadily warmed: ‘Improving’, ‘Much improved’, ‘Steadily improving in every way’, ‘Doing good work’ and ‘Has done very creditable work’.
Finally, William Gamble, renowned for his severity, concluded on Edith’s teaching certification that she was ‘a bright, intelligent teacher of great promise’.
In pursuing a teaching career, Edith was following her older siblings Harry and Lottie. Harry, quiet and painstaking, gained his certificate to teach in 1892 and was immediately appointed head teacher for the newly opened school in the tiny settlement of Flowerdale, north of Melbourne. In the recession of the 1890s that followed the collapse of the land boom, the Education Department was forced into a massive contraction. Smaller schools were amalgamated and many teachers, including Harry, lost their jobs. Young female teachers, who received 80 per cent of the salary of young men with the same level of qualification and for the same amount of work, may well have had an advantage at this time. Work was scarce. Harry took up digging drains near Koo Wee Rup but the pay was so poor that he and his good friend Frank Exeter ultimately decided to try their luck in the west, and embarked on the steamer Gabo in the early 1890s, bound for Fremantle. Harry resumed teaching in the 1900s in Pinjarra.
Lottie was appointed a head teacher in 1891 at Dunmunkle East in the Wimmera, where she taught for over four years. She then transferred to Birregurra near the Otways, where she taught as a temporary assistant for a further two years before resigning, as required by the department, to marry. Both Lottie and Harry’s reports suggest they were quietly spoken, gentle teachers – perhaps even a little anxious. By contrast Edith’s reports suggest more confidence and surety. A tiny revelation of character tucked into official paperwork. If Edith followed the familiar footsteps of her older siblings, she did it in her own distinctive way.
During Edith’s time as a pupil-teacher she attended classes at the recently formed Working Men’s College (which later became the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) run by Frank Tate.
When Edith met him, Tate was just 28 and at the start of his meteoric career which would transform public education in Victoria. Like Edith, Frank trained as a pupil-teacher and took up his first temporary appointment at a small rural school in a poor mining district. Many years later, my own children would attend Panton Hill Primary School and I would learn about Frank Tate’s short tenure there. He applied, unsuccessfully, for a permanent position at Panton Hill but was transferred through a succession of outer Melbourne schools, rising through the ranks despite a narrow and uninspiring curriculum, a culture of harsh, sometimes brutal, discipline, poor resources and exceptionally pernickety departmental bureaucracy. Teachers were paid on the basis of school size and attendance, a system which significantly disadvantaged the poorest, smallest schools. Illness, even of just a day, was penalised by docked pay.
This experience hardened Tate’s resolve to improve the situation of teachers and their students. In 1889 he was appointed a junior lecturer at the Central Training Institution in Carlton. He energetically promoted outdoor education and nature study, rural regeneration and agricultural education, as well as literature, particularly Shakespeare. His vision, as he declared at the exhibition for Victorian State Schools in 1906, was for ‘developing a fine type of Australian – strong in body, strong in mind and strong in soul’.
Neither the banking collapse of 1893 nor the closure of the Training Institution deterred Tate. He and Charles Long continued to train pupil-teachers out of the Working Men’s College. Edith undertook singing and drawing classes here in 1892 on Saturday mornings, paying to complete part of her prescribed qualifications. Only drill, gymnastics, elocution and science classes were free. She might also have specialised in one of the sciences: physiology, botany, geology and mineralogy, magnetism and hydrostatics, chemistry or agriculture. Or needlework and cooking. I don’t know which other courses Edith took, nor how she met Tate, but they certainly knew each other.
‘Mr. Tate was very proud of his gifted student,’ Edith’s biographer, Kate Baker, reported.
In later years Edith sent Tate a copy of her booklet, Come back in Wattle Time, and he replied with the benevolent appraisal of a former teacher.
‘I have read it with great interest and pleasure,’ he said reassuringly. ‘Your treatment of the subject is just what is needed to stimulate love for these beautiful trees, not merely a dry scientific presentation. You have made such good use of literature throughout your little book, that it will appeal to all lovers of the Australian countryside or the suburban garden.’
I can find no further connections between Tate and his student, but I remain convinced that it is important. Edith never mentions her teaching training or her teaching career. Perhaps the similarities are just a product of their times, but with Tate such a passionate proponent of literature and nature study in education, surely it can’t be a coincidence that these elements are so foundational to the gently educational nature of Edith’s later writing?
The industrial revolution of the eighteenth century changed the face of Western societies across the world. They shifted from a rigid hierarchy segregated by class and race, where wealth was generated on the back of rural property. The modern economy of urban factories and mass production required a mobile and flexible workforce, unshackled from traditional rural posts. People moved from country to city, eager for new opportunities and improvement. Progress was the new catchcry. Public education and literacy expanded and birth rates fell.
The changing status quo shifted the balance of power: disadvantaging some who had enjoyed unrivalled privilege and releasing others from the constraints of tradition. The suffragette movement agitated. One woman’s freedom was another man’s loss of control. Some changes were for the better, others were not. Industrialisation pumped tonnes of toxic chemicals into the skies, rivers and oceans. Rural bondage was replaced by urban exploitation. Skirmishes between the old economy and the new were often fought along the city/country divide. Nature was both a casualty and a cure for the ailments of modernity.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, nature study was central to educational reform. Nature was vital for a healthy life and a thriving society. As a biologist I can’t see this as anything but a good thing. Others, like educational historian Grant Rodwell, see it as a kind of state-controlled program in eugenics and social planning. Agriculture was the powerhouse of the Australian economy, as in America and Britain at the time. The increasin
gly popular and populous cities drew people into an urban life that was crowded, dirty and unhygienic – a cesspit of disease and dissolution. Fear of disease, and a belief in the value of fresh air and hard work, drove campaigners like Caleb Williams Saleeby to promote clean air, sunlight and garden cities to improve health and mortality. In the pre-Hitler years, eugenics and human breeding was still a valid science and fears of human degeneration ran high.
‘The city sits like a parasite,’ declared the influential American ‘country-lifer’, Liberty Hyde Bailey, ‘running its roots into the open country and draining it of its substance.’
It was the very toughness of country life that produced strength and resilience. And the Australian environment, which had forged through adversity a robust new breed of bush warriors from the most unpromising stock of convicts and malcontents, seemed proof enough. The temptation to slide into a softer, easier city life (with its stresses and anxieties leading to alcohol and drug abuse) had to be resisted, the campaigners argued. As Rodwell argues, agricultural education encouraged country children to stay on the land, but so too did a sympathetic appreciation of nature. Nature study was part of a long-term social planning tool that ran from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth century. Town planning in Victoria included open spaces and nature reserves. Nature appreciation was part of a movement that established the groundwork for the modern conservation movement.
‘What is most encouraging in the results achieved so far,’ enthused John Dawson, Chief Inspector of Schools in New South Wales in his 1909 annual report, ‘lies not merely in the knowledge gained, but in the mental attitude engendered in teachers and pupils by this new “return to Nature” . . . Both for the teacher and the pupils it has brought an element of brightness and beauty into school life that was missing before. This brightness and beauty is not merely external – something to be found only in the more pleasing aspects of the schoolroom or garden – it is a mental condition also. Something of the old poetry of life is being recaptured and will be retained.’
I can see Rodwell’s argument about elements of control in nature study and how this might lead to eugenics. Concepts of ecological and species ‘purity’, selective breeding and social control run strongly through the conservation movement. But I can’t bring myself to condemn ‘nature enthusiasm’, all the same. Like Edith, I am utterly enchanted by the poetry of the earth.
Despite her apparent capability as a pupil-teacher, Edith’s path through her training was not smooth. The Education Department required head teachers to file all reported absences on a daily basis, filling their teacher records with mountains of peculiarly formal letters.
‘Sir – I have the honour to report that Miss Edith Harms 1st Pupil Teacher in this school was absent from duty on Wednesday last the 22nd March. Cause: a sudden illness which completely protracted her. Miss Harms resumed duty yesterday morning. I have the honour to be, Sir, Your most obedient servant.’
From her time at Camberwell, there are many such letters. In 1891 she required a fortnight’s absence due to ‘gastric catarrh’. Her surgeon reported that this condition had been ‘brought on by a cold and intensified by prolonged standing’. In April of the following year, she required leave of absence due to neuralgia and in November she was granted three weeks sick leave from Camberwell for gastric catarrh and cardiac weakness brought on by ‘confinement’ – maybe a euphemism for being kept indoors for too long in the company of too many children. Perhaps the doctors prescribed fresh country air. By 1892, Edith was applying for positions in country schools, noting that, ‘owing to ill health, I would like relieving work in the country’.
By this stage the Harms family had moved from their villa on Avenue Road, firstly to nearby Seymour Grove and then further afield, to a property on Bath Road in Burwood (now Glen Iris) where her father Henry had established a nursery. Today, Burwood lies in the heart of Melbourne’s busy eastern suburbs, but at the turn of last century Bath Road demarcated the outermost edge of the city. Even on aerial photographs from 1945, open paddocks and patchwork fields stretch south and east of the Hartwell Sportsgrounds near Edith’s former home. Today, the same view shows tight-packed rows of tiled roofs aligned on endless quarter-acre blocks all the way into the foothills of the Dandenongs.
For Edith this change in location meant commuting 5 kilometres back into town to work. In 1894 she again required a month’s leave from Camberwell to recover from ‘general debility’ on reduced pay. I do not know what this illness was – a continuation of the ‘weak chest’ that had plagued the family in England, or something else? Edith’s health issues remain hidden beneath the vague and cursory language of nineteenth-century medical certificates.
At the completion of her pupil-teacher training, she applied for position at Burwood School, closer to her home, but this application was not successful. Like most young teachers, Edith would have to serve her time at a remote country posting before working her way back to the more prized suburban positions.
The proliferation of one-class schools in tiny towns like Foster was due to the law stipulating children must attend a school within two miles of their residence. In 1872 the Victorian Education Act required that free, secular and compulsory education be provided for all children, the first state in Australia to do so. In the six years that followed, the Education Department built over 600 standard template schools across the state, and education ceased to be a luxury few could afford. It was a formidable project in social engineering.
With public education being rolled out on such a vast scale, the budget rarely extended much beyond the building and staff. Most of these schools would have been lucky to have been equipped with a few readers to share around the class (soon learnt by heart) and an assortment of cracked slates, writing models and counting frames. The long, standard-issue desks allowed many more children to be crammed along their length than was desirable. Their built-in benches, without back rests, were bad for posture and for children of varying sizes.
Sanitation was minimal; emptying the pans from the student ‘thunderboxes’ out the back of the school was often part of teaching service. The head teacher’s living quarters, if provided, were often shabby and dirty – with peeling canvas and paper walls and few amenities. They were sometimes separated from the classrooms by nothing more than a curtain. Rent was automatically deducted from the teacher’s pay, whether they used the rooms or not, creating an additional hardship for teachers with large families, or for single women. For the most part, teaching assistants like Edith found lodging with a local family, paying for food and board, and walking to school each day on unmade roads.
A photo of Foster State School from these times displays rows of boys and girls, neatly collared and aproned, oldest at the back, smallest at the front. There are about 100 children, with two adults in the background – about the teaching ratio I’d expected. But later I find another picture of Foster State School, from the personal album of James W. Anderson, who was principal from 1888 to 1898. There are fewer children, and more adults. The building is similar in style but definitely a different building. Perhaps the larger school is earlier, or later, than Anderson’s time. Schools often changed buildings, a house being replaced by a custom-built school, or a building from a school closed in one district being moved or added to another nearby. I can’t be absolutely certain which image best reflects the school when Edith taught there.
Foster State School, at around the time Edith was posted here
In Anderson’s picture of Foster State School, he’s holding the hand of a small child, probably his own. In another photo he’s carrying the child. I imagine the woman standing off to the left of the picture is his wife. But there are two female teachers and the principal for 42 children. One of the women looks very much like Edith, but I can’t be sure. She’s smiling in the picture. So are some of the little boys. It looks like a happy school.
The one resource even the poorest country school could provide was nature. Most schools were plant
ed with pines, blue gums, cypresses, white mulberries and oaks. In many old regional schools, these trees still stand, their age and history often unappreciated. My own children retain a great fondness for oak trees, born of their early years at Panton Hill State School, where the only summer shade beyond the regulation sunhats was provided by the historic oaks in the playground, apparently planted to commemorate visiting princes in 1881.
Teachers and school communities kept up this environmental improvement, with the encouragement of school inspectors and, later, articles in The School Paper, which began distribution in the 1890s. Gardening, outdoor education and nature walks all formed an important part of the curriculum. Such environmental education would culminate in Arbor Days, Bird Days and Wattle Days, shoring up a newly federated Australian identity with native wildlife, free from the awkward ambiguity of ‘Empire Day’ and ‘Foundation Day’.
Midwinter in 1896, Edith transferred north to nearby Traralgon for seven weeks. Traralgon was much bigger than Foster, a school of 200 in a thriving town, with goods flowing from forestry and dairies on the railway back to Melbourne. The main street was filled with popular hotels and busy stores – greengrocers, butchers, haberdasheries – interspersed with those upright symbols of prosperity and order: the shire offices, post office and courthouse.
One of the local dairies was run by the Galbraiths, a family of devout Scottish Christadelphians who lived to the north in the settlement of Tyers. They had initially run a bakery in Traralgon, but had turned to full-time butter production by the time Edith arrived. There is no evidence that Edith ever met the Galbraiths during her short time at Traralgon, but their yet-to-be-born granddaughter Jean would one day become her protégé and firm friend.
The Wasp and the Orchid Page 6
