Edith disembarks, one hand gripping her bag and the other holding her hat as she looks down the platform for the porter unloading her luggage. Twenty-one years old with wide eyes and dark hair piled up in the Edwardian bouffant fashion, and smartly dressed: all mutton sleeves, high neck and tight waist. It was promising to be a hot day, nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit, when she left Melbourne but here, closer to the coast, is a little cooler. She had caught the 6.50 am train to Foster so as to have most of Saturday and all of Sunday to organise accommodation and familiarise herself with her new role – her first teaching appointment as temporary assistant at Foster State School No. 1172 in the rolling hills of south Gippsland.
Foster is situated along Stockyard Creek in a region renowned for its scenic beauty. Edith has done her homework. Wilsons Promontory lies just to the south, Venus Bay to the west and Corner Inlet to the east. If she has the time or inclination for nature exploration, some of the region’s finest, if densely forested, natural wonders lie within easy reach.
As Edith steps out into the main street, she can see that Foster is a pretty town, despite the detritus of the gold-mining industry scattering the hillside. She looks down the road, past pale painted weatherboards: the butcher, the post office and hotel. The Mechanics Institute boasts a library of some 494 volumes. But her only thoughts are for the school in which she will soon start work, at 9.10 on Monday morning, and the students currently enrolled under the head teacher James W. Anderson. This is the position she has been training for, as a pupil-teacher, for the last seven years.
FOSTER STATE SCHOOL was typical of many small Victorian country schools opened in the late 1800s. The building was a standard-design, high-gabled weatherboard Education Department building: in effect, two halls joined at right angles, with an added front porch for hats, coats and bags.
At the height of summer, when Edith arrived, the schoolhouse would have been stiflingly hot, the small high windows providing little in the way of ventilation in the standard 20 by 50 foot rooms. Heat poured through the uninsulated tin roof.
‘The long, narrow room with the windows behind the pupils, the faulty means of ventilation, and the inadequate provision for warming were all in evidence,’ recalled educational pioneer Charles Long. ‘Hundreds of thousands of pounds have been spent during the present century in remodelling the buildings in the seventies, eighties and nineties in order to get rid to some extent of their defects.’ Long was overly optimistic in 1922. Many of these buildings are still used today, reverse-cycle air-conditioning finally mitigating their deficiencies.
Fifty students to a class was not uncommon. The children sat in rows, from smallest at the front to oldest at the back, manageable only by strict discipline, regimented routines and the assistance of the older students. Edith’s duties, as a young female assistant, would most likely have been with the ‘bubs’, some of them as young as three. The older children, up to fifteen or sixteen, were taught in the larger room by the head teacher. Technically, children were required to attend school between the ages of six and fifteen, but many parents sent them much earlier. The teachers did not complain. Their wages were determined by the size of their class, irrespective of age.
In Foster, like in many Victorian country schools, most of the children came from mining, forestry or farming families, who were frequently illiterate and sometimes from non-English-speaking backgrounds. The students were often absent due to illness or work commitments. Many would rise before dawn to milk the cows and attend to their chores before walking miles through diggings riven with shafts and stopes, through remnant forests and cleared farmland, past an abundance of hotels and illegal drinking houses that lined muddy or dusty main roads, to school. They frequently fell asleep in class, had no shoes, suffered chilblains from the cold and had no food for lunch. Epidemics of scarlet fever, typhus, measles and diphtheria were common. As their newly qualified teacher, Edith would have to educate them all with little more than her own enthusiasm and the landscape around them to draw upon.
It was surely as different from her own childhood experiences in the village schools of Woking and Guildford, or even the suburban schools of Melbourne, as it was possible to be.
The brief biographies of Edith’s life are sketchy on her early years, unsure if she married before or after she emigrated, uncertain of which schools she attended. One of the few joys of bureaucracy is its bounteous supply of historic paperwork. Somewhere, deep within the bowels of the Public Records Office of Victoria, are all the Education Department archives. Details of budgets and buildings, appointments and resignations. All of Edith’s teaching records, her exam results, inspectors’ reports, correspondence and appointments should be here.
I’ve looked for school records here once before. For a whole day, I searched through index folders which referred me to microfiche which referred me to record numbers, which had to be ordered from the store, which turned out to be another index, or an empty folder. This doesn’t feel like an archive designed for public use. I’m trapped in Dickens’ Circumlocution Office, chasing flying papers around and around the stairwells and always coming up empty-handed.
In the end, I enlist the help of an expert, and all of Edith’s records arrive by post – sorted, labelled, catalogued and annotated.
The path to Edith’s teaching career began almost as soon as the Harms family arrived in Melbourne. They settled into a cottage in Avenue Road, in the eastern suburb of Camberwell. Even today Avenue Road is a quiet little street, sheltered from the busy traffic of the surrounding arterial roads and
