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
