Robin Haskard

Born on 4 May 1898 at Port Germein, Gordon received his early primary education there and later at the Jamestown Primary School. His secondary education was completed at the Adelaide Boys High school, which was then situated in Currie Street, now the site of the Adelaide Remand Centre. By this time the Haskard family had moved to Prospect.

His tertiary education was at the Adelaide Teachers College, where he was a student teacher, teaching at both Norwood and Parkside Primary Schools. When he finished teaching at the Parkside School the headmaster, C.E.J. Hamence, wrote a very nice reference commending him very highly for his teaching ability, industriousness and organising talent. It seemed that these abilities were to remain with him for the rest of his life.

Gordon was rather young to enlist in the first World War but he received a certificate for Junior Cadet Training in 1917 and in 1920 he gained promotion to sergeant in the Citizen Military Forces.

He started teaching at the Adelaide Technical High School in 1919 and continued teaching there until 1963. He completed most of a Bachelor of Arts degree but said later that he never had time to finish it. The Adelaide Technical High School was attached to the South Australian School of Mines and Industries, now part of the City Campus of the University of South Australia. It is situated at the corner of North Terrace and Frome Road, Adelaide.

North Terrace has been a feature of the City of Adelaide, and along this wide, tree-lined street are the Adelaide Railway Station, Parliament House, Government House, The State Library, The Museum of SA, The Art Gallery of SA, The University of Adelaide, and now much of the University of South Australia, The Royal Adelaide Hospital and The Botanic Gardens. On the opposite side of North Terrace are many fine old buildings which, over the years, have housed banks, clubs and many professional rooms viz. doctors, dentists and para-medical professionals. Frome Road features an avenue of fine plane trees, whose branches intermingle above the road, forming a green tunnel during the summer and a canopy of bare branches during winter months. For over 40 years Gordon Haskard walked daily from the Adelaide Railway Station to ‘the Tech’ along North Terrace, a very pleasant way to start the school day. He only took a car to school when the school was moved to the site at Glenunga.

On 15 April 1922, Gordon married Ina Mary Estelle Stevens at St. Cuthbert’s Church of England, Prospect, and between 1924 and 1936 they had five children, three girls and two boys, one of whom died tragically of tetanus before he reached the age of four in 1932. After a few years living at Prospect, my parents moved to live in Beach Street, The Grange. My most vivid recollections of this home are the immense aviaries in the back yard as Gordon had a wonderful collection of finches and some exotic birds. At one stage he even had a penguin being restored to health after being found washed up on the nearby beach. The local fishermen provided small fish for the penguin during its recovery. Gordon also kept bees as a hobby and some of his hives were on a friend’s property in the Adelaide Hills. He extracted honey using a very strange looking but effective piece of equipment. He was often asked by the Department of Agriculture to remove swarms of bees from domestic properties.

Gordon was very interested in the study of geology and many of the school excursions were arranged with this in mind. Hence the trips to the Flinders Ranges and day trips to Hallett Cove to study the geology of that area. In the late 1920s Gordon went to the Flinders Ranges with Sir Douglas Mawson to study geological formations and collect specimens of rocks. He had quite a collection at home but sadly his children did not realise the significance of it and many pieces were lost in play. I have heard it said that Gordon applied to be a member of Sir Douglas Mawson’s ‘Discovery’ expedition to the Antarctic. Although his teaching of geology seemed to qualify him for the trip his lack of sailing experience counted against him, as it was a ship expedition mainly. In 1929 Sir Douglas wrote, in reply to Gordon’s application that, if a future expedition made arrangements for shore work at land bases, Gordon’s chance of inclusion would be very considerable.

The trips that Gordon arranged started in 1924 with a sports and educational trip to Melbourne for 75 boys. He would take a group of boys to various places, such as Broken Hill, the Flinders Ranges, Alice Springs, Melbourne, Sydney and Hobart. I have met many people over the years who have spoken very highly of the pleasurable experience of being part of one of these trips. Gordon was a very methodical organiser and these trips were arranged to be educational as well as recreational.¹⁰ It was said that the students saw Gordon as a much more humane person away from the school setting. The ATHS magazines have some very interesting descriptions of these trips.

Sport played a very large part in Gordon’s life. At one stage he was captain of the Hilton Cricket Club: he was presented with the ball with which he took a hat-trick as a slow bowler. He was very keen for sports to be played correctly and with good spirit, especially Australian Rules Football and he enjoyed many seasons umpiring at various country venues. He also umpired a season of SANFL competition and sat for many years as a commissioner of the South Australian Amateur Football Tribunal. Gordon and Ina encouraged us to play sport to our highest ability and to enjoy our participation in sport.

In those days he was adamant students played sport firstly for their school team, before playing for an association team of any sort. He felt a student had plenty of time for those competitions when his school days were over. Some of my earliest recollections of my father are of those playing fields on Frome Road, on a Saturday morning, Gordon organising his teams, just like a hen organising her chickens.

The homework at Adelaide Technical High School was set on a weekly basis so students could arrange their homework to allow them time for church, scouting or other such activities. While being fiercely competitive when he played sport, he encouraged students to participate in team sports rather than individual sports.

The playing fields of Adelaide Technical High School were situated on Frome Road, and it was here that Gordon spent many happy hours, being for many years the sports master of the school. He seemed to be interested in all sports, but mainly devoted himself to helping the football and cricket teams. At some stage ‘the Tech’, as he affectionately called the school, had a rifle team and, being quite a good shot himself, it was natural that he was master in charge of the rifle team. He felt students needed time for sport and hobbies, as well as study during their school life.

Gordon taught algebra, geometry, trigonometry; mathematics and physics for the last ten years of his teaching at ‘the Tech’. In 1922 Elementary Geometry was written by Gordon Haskard and published by Rigby Ltd. Four years after the end of World War I text books for South Australian students were often inadequate. His geology classes had the advantage of his special interest in this study.

While teaching at ‘the Tech’ he taught several evenings a week at the School of Mines which, at that time, provided a wide range of subjects to prepare students for further study. Some of these students had left school before qualifying for tertiary education, or perhaps had taken unsuitable subjects for their chosen course. From my childhood, I cannot remember our father being at home very often in the evenings as he always seemed to have night classes or meetings to attend. When I look back to this time I feel he taught for such long hours because he enjoyed teaching very much indeed. It might well have been to supplement his income as teachers did not appear to be paid very well in those days and, of course, our mother did not ever go out to work. Somehow he managed to send four children to independent schools for most of their schooling. I feel both our parents must have made big sacrifices to do this.

Many people have asked me over the years why I did not go to ‘the Tech’. Perhaps he thought I would not do well enough in the entrance examination which children hoping to be admitted to ‘the Tech’ had to sit towards the end of their primary schooling, but he always said he did not think it was fair to the students or the teachers to have a child at the same school as the parent-teacher. My father was known as being a very strict disciplinarian, but fair, and I think he felt it was difficult for him to apply discipline equally to all students, if a family member attended the school.

In 1941 our parents moved to a double block in Jetty Road, Grange, although the move was made without him because Gordon, even though he was almost too old to serve, was on active service with the Australian Imperial Forces. He gained promotion to captain in the Army Education Service, spending most of his war service in Alice Springs and Darwin where he experienced a number of air raids. His work in the Army Education Service was to arrange courses in accountancy, geology, chemistry, mathematics, physics and music theory. Some of the troops did correspondence courses Gordon arranged with tertiary institutions in the various capital cities of Australia. He also arranged many hobbies activities such as wood turning, chess, music, libraries, iron working and concerts. He was discharged in September 1943 and became involved again in the war savings effort at Henley & Grange where he had been active in community affairs and planted the lawn tennis court he had always wanted to have.

He immediately resumed teaching at ATHS. In addition to his school duties, he became deputy headmaster in 1953 to his very good friend, Sid Moyle. Gordon did a great deal of private tuition to Leaving Honours (later matriculation) level. After World War II many of Gordon’s private students at night classes were people who had migrated to Australia. He loved teaching these people because he thought they were very determined to help themselves. As previously stated, I don’t know if he did this extra work for greater financial gain or not, but I do know he loved teaching and his great joy was to be able to help a student reach his full potential, to be able to reach a standard to pass examinations or even achieve a higher result. I remember well the great anticipation he experienced while waiting for the end of year exam results to be published so he could see how all his students performed. Then he would almost immediately start private tuition of those students who had to sit for supplementary examinations early in the year.

From the end of the school year until Christmas he threw himself enthusiastically into Christmas shopping and other preparations, as he always looked forward to a large family gathering at this time. One of the highlights was to play Father Christmas at the Sunday School Christmas party. Each year he would spend some time deciding how he would enter the hall, sometimes climbing through windows, sometimes coming down a chimney he made and the pièce de resistance was erecting a flying fox so Father Christmas could arrive by aeroplane.

After Christmas, however, one could sense an increasing restlessness, as there was no teaching to be done for several weeks. When the examination results were known his attitude changed to one of eager anticipation, until the telephone would ring with the first request for that little extra tuition which would have such a profound effect on a young person’s future.

Gordon was not a great believer in the public examination system of that era, as he felt some good students were over-awed by the occasion and their results did not do them justice at times. Despite this feeling of unease, he thought the system had to be continued until a better system was instigated. Although he did mark some PEB examination papers, he did not enjoy it because of repeated alterations to the way papers were to be marked, once he had already finished his marking. He was very proud and almost boastful of the success achieved by ATHS students, but as a family we loved to tease him by saying the entrance qualifications weighed heavily in the school’s favour. I don’t think he would have been at all happy with the present system of scoring for the matriculation examination.

To put it bluntly, he did not agree with many things done by the Department of Education. His rejection of the Department of Education I believe stemmed from his thoughts that many of the people in high administrative posts were not very good educationists and were often put in these positions because of their political affiliations. In general he had a poor regard for their teaching and organisational abilities. Just before he reached the retiring age the Department of Education took control of ‘the Tech’, moving it to what was then the Glenunga High School, several kilometres east of the city, at Glenunga. Gordon was not at all happy in that environment, and seemed to be waiting to reach the retiring age: he just could not get his ‘teeth’ into anything there.

It did not mean he was going to retire from teaching; far from it, for he taught for a time at St Peter’s Collegiate School, Prince Alfred College, Henley High School and St. Michael’s College at Henley Beach, feeling very much at home there with very strong discipline being encouraged by the principal. In addition to this he had commenced the Gordon College in the Botanic Chambers, North Terrace, Adelaide, opposite the Royal Adelaide Hospital, where he continued his tuition of private students. Over the years he had also had private students coming to the house. These were mainly students who lived in the vicinity and they would come over the weekend.

The story of his teaching life is part of the history of Adelaide Technical High School until 1962, a school different from the other schools that became part of South Australia’s binary system of secondary education. A Valedictory Dinner was held in his honour on 10 May 1963. He died in 1976 at the beach house our parents had built at Middleton during a working-bee weekend when family members were helping with a general ‘spruce-up’ under his direction.

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