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 planted 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.
In the wilds of Gippsland, Edith would have been exposed to the prodigious grandeur of an Australian forest. Here the forest was unlike anything she could have imagined in ‘the home country’. These were not the dappled woodlands of Guildford, with grassy meadows speckled with bluebells and startled deer gazing wide-eyed from paths worn deep by endless generations. Here the trees grew taller and straighter than in any British forest, doubling the height of the tallest Scottish conifer. Long strips of bark shed from silky trunks, piled like discarded garments at their base. Antediluvian ferns grew tree-like in the undergrowth. In the darkness, possums screeched unearthly cries, eyes glowing demonic in reflected lamplight. Unearthly, unidentifiable shapes flung themselves across the bright-starred southern sky, landing with a thud and crash in the canopy. Rumours of native wolves, with bone-crushing jaws, still circulated in these forests. It seemed primeval, an untamed wilderness, so foreign as to be unrecognisable. For many this bush was a frightening place, a deadly place, particularly for children. Early settlers’ tales were filled with stories of dread, fear and tragedy: stories of lost children, weeping mothers and shattered fathers.
‘It came down close all around us, dark and stern,’ wrote Mary Fullerton of the Gippsland forests, ‘along the ranges, lighter-timbered toward the valley, where the fertile land followed the rambling creek. The massed foliage of the ranges flowed back and back; the sombre greens made
