According to the Sands & McDougall street directory, the Harms family lived in ‘the fourth house on the east side from Riversdale Road to Camberwell Road’. I find myself in front of an immaculate nineteenth-century weatherboard cottage with a neat picket fence. Unlike its neighbours, the front garden of Edith’s former home has an element of wildness about it. A spectacular ornamental gum is hung with clusters of large gumnuts like silver cowbells. It looks as if the tree has been spray-painted for Christmas. It is a Western Australian species – Eucalyptus caesia or the silver princess.
I suspect Henry purchased this house, rather than renting or building. The footprint of a similar building appears on a map from 1851. Even so, Henry the builder immediately set to work on arrival, calling for tenders for ‘slating Villa all materials’. Henry was either repairing the house himself or he had already re-entered the building trade.
I head west down a lane, arriving at Camberwell State School three minutes later. The two youngest Harms children, Edith and George, enrolled here on their arrival in Australia. From the street, the school looks much like it would have in 1888 – a handsome little brick building with elaborate Federation Queen Anne ornamentation, surrounded by trees and large playing fields, which in Edith’s time bordered open paddocks.
I grasp the antique doorknob, heeding the instructions on the door to turn firmly, and step across the threshold into Edith’s old school.
Students and staff at Edith’s school, Camberwell State, in 1890
The once high-ceilinged hall has been cropped and divided into a warren of stairs and mezzanines. I sit at a desk in a quiet room as the busy school ebbs and flows to the electronic bell. Piles of frayed pupil registers and inspectors’ reports are stacked on the desk in front of me: neatly transcribed ledgers of school performance entered into columns like an accountant’s balance book. Their coverage is patchy. I can’t find the pupil registers before 1900. But the inspectors’ reports for 1886–1889 are here.
The Education Department in Victoria used to have a history branch, which helped archive, research and document school histories like this. But it closed in the 1980s. There is no funding for schools to maintain their own histories now. Schools are only expected to teach a narrowly prescribed national version of history, not to live, learn or conserve their own.
In 1889, Melbourne and its suburbs were rapidly expanding. Camberwell State School enrolments grew from 34 children when it opened in 1867, to 150 the next year and nearly 300 children by the time Edith enrolled, mostly in the younger classes.
The inspectors’ reports are musty and frayed, their fabric binding stretched across the years. Cryptic pencil marks annotate the margins, faded in time and meaning. On one page an inspector has scrawled a blunt comment in orange pencil down the side. Inspector William M. Gamble was neater, more circumspect, when he recorded his opinions on the school in 1887. Cursive script scrawls across the page, written with pen and ink. I am grateful to be part of the last generation of Australian students to learn cursive script at school, even though my own children claim they cannot read mine. I am out of the habit of reading it, and I have to concentrate, as if reading in a foreign language, to decode the unfamiliar formality of Gamble’s conclusions.
‘Buildings are clean and tidy,’ he notes. ‘When will the shade trees be planted?’
It’s a complaint he’s clearly made before.
‘Furniture and apparatus. Of what use are short pencils that they should be in such general use? I am disappointed that previous suggestions have borne so little fruit.’
Edith would have been in Class IV when she arrived. I cannot find the class lists for her years, but George completed his standard Class IV examination in 1889 at the age of twelve years and eleven months. Unlike Edith, he must have left school at this point. Edith became a pupil-teacher at the end of 1889 when she was fifteen, on £20 per year. A housemaid earnt £30–40 per year at that time, as well as food and lodging.
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
