Mary P. Harris

Seven has always been for me a symbolic number, Jacob served seven years for Rachel and I spent seven years at the School of Arts and Crafts, living at ‘Bardini’, a wonderful old colonial home on the banks of the Torrens at Walkerville, before I went to Tasmania with my friend Marion Stock, who wished to seek out relatives in Hobart.

This visit in the Christmas vacation was a page turned in the story of my life and being: for in Hobart, on Mount Wellington with beautiful friends, I found the spiritual counterpart of Scotland. But first of all I must speak of my visit to Ernest Unwin, headmaster of The Friends School, Hobart. It was my mother’s wish that I should meet him. We talked in his study of The Friends School’s curriculum, and of my teaching at the SA School of Arts and Crafts. It was then the idea came to me that we should teach history of art in our own School of Arts and Crafts in South Australia. I was fascinated to find this subject in The Friends School syllabus.

On returning to Adelaide I was asked by the Education Department if I would teach English literature in a school within a school: that is a Girls Central Art School, as a branch of the School of Arts and Crafts. The idea of this school where the general education of girls might continue along with their art subjects was conceived by Dr Fenner, Superintendent of Technical Education and afterwards to become Director of Education, a fine man of vision. To him we owe the forward era of the Girls Central Art School, where some of our finest artists and teachers-to-be found a new and freer curriculum. History and appreciation of art proved to be a subject which inspired the writing and production of plays, often based on the lives of artists notably Leonardo da Vinci and van Gogh. All an art student’s ingenuity was called forth in costume and stage settings.

One of our first productions needed no student-made background. We played Shakespeare’s As You Like It in the Botanic Gardens, under the green depths of Morton Bay fig trees, by a curving creek. It is good to remember that when the day of the performance arrived, 200 people thronged the banks of the creek and afterwards Dr Fenner stood up amidst applause and announced …’Students must not lose their bows and arrows: I’d like a repeat performance to be given next week, and shall invite the Director of Education to come.’

There were lighter moments too during rehearsals with a hidden gramophone amongst rough tree roots. Old Adam, dying for lack of food, was being helped away, soothed by sad music, when the wrong side of the record had apparently come uppermost and the refrain ‘Onward Christian soldiers’ filled the quiet air!

I still see gardeners, snatching precious moments to watch our performance, doubled up with laughter.

Not always were we congratulated on our choice of plays. In later years we produced several of Laurence Housman’s Little Plays of St Francis. Especially during the years of the 1930s’ Depression were we absorbed in the fine play The Builders: ‘All the World’s a-Building Brother’ is still for me an immortal refrain. And for suffering and pathos there was Sister Clare. At one time it seemed to be thought I had a ‘monk complex’ because of our production of these greatest of peace plays. Unfortunately a later Director of Education did not follow the wisdom and insight of Dr Charles Fenner. In fact, I found myself ‘on the mat’ at the Education Department to be interrogated by a supremely (but quietly) sympathetic second-in-command. The Director had asked ‘Who is this person always producing plays with peace as a theme?’ I was to be duly warned. The Director himself was a military gentleman.

But a great joy and honour was to come to me.

In 1934 John Masefield, Poet Laureate, visited Australia. When in South Australia he came to talk to the Literature Circle of the Lyceum Club. This is one of the cherished memories of my life. The audience left in silence after his reading of the epilogue to The Everlasting Mercy. It was as if my soul yearned towards him, and Lady Mawson, who was President of the Lyceum Club, beckoned me to stay. I was Leader of the Literature Circle. So it was in quietness and remoteness I spoke to Masefield. The inspiration of the teaching of English literature in the School of Arts and Crafts was our theme, and the designing and building by students and staff of the ‘Seven Lamps of Architecture Memorial Library’. When with heart overflowing I thanked Masefield for reading the epilogue to The Everlasting Mercy, he held my hand and softly replied… ‘It is my own favourite amongst my poems, and you are the only audience in Australia to whom I have been able to read it.’

Softly I hear his last words… ‘The corn that makes the holy bread, by which the soul of man is fed, the holy bread, the food unpriced, Thy Everlasting Mercy, Christ.’

The world hungers in 1970 – hungers physically and spiritually amongst poor and under-privileged nations, and spiritually amongst the affluent.

I remember two Indian visitors to the SA School of Arts.

We stood together – it was the lunch hour – before the Seven Lamps of Architecture Memorial Library, carved in European oak and seven bays, each bay having a carved panel above symbolising the seven lamps of Ruskin’s conception – Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory, Obedience.

I told these Indian friends how we had built the Library over many years in memory of a beloved painting mistress, Elizabeth Armstrong. The designs for the lamps were created by individual students and carved by members of the staff and students.

Funds were raised by giving School Play Evenings, and other activities in the Girls Central Art School, and we were helped by the Education Department and Dr Fenner.

There was silence when I had spoken: then one Indian youth said, ‘It is the most beautiful work of art we have seen since we came here.’

After the demolition of the School of Arts and Crafts in the creeper-covered old Exhibition Building, to give place to an excrescence of steel and glass structures,⁵⁶ the Library was the only symbol of our old Art School to be re-established, with its timeless memories in the new Art School in Stanley Street, North Adelaide.

Sanctuary – The Girls Central Art School in wartime

In the years of the depression and the war when many were homeless, we too had to leave our School of Art in the old creeper-covered Exhibition Building and go into rat-infested quarters in various Adelaide buildings. The Military had taken over our school and the old ivy-covered arches and portico were knocked down to make ungracious wood and iron ablution blocks at the back. In the horror scene we thought of the time we had out of door rehearsals of our schools plays there, and the creeper-covered arches were like a medieval background.

I refer to this period because it was then I first met William Ricketts, Crusader in Clay of Mount Dandenong, Victoria.

When the old Exhibition Building on North Terrace, Adelaide, was in course of reconversion to an Art School, after military occupation, the Education Department made an area on the ground floor available for Ricketts to show his sculpture, models in clay on a large scale of Aboriginal legends. His was then an unknown name in South Australia, except to a discerning few, who included Dr Charles Duguid. I took my students to see Ricketts’ work, and from that meeting grew an everlasting friendship. Ricketts himself was a shy man and shrank back when I asked him to speak to the students about his work, which in its peculiar symbolism and mysticism, reminded me of Blake – the poet-artist. He at once denied any kind of influence in his work interpreting the Australian Bush and Beliefs of the Aborigines. He consented to let me talk to the students, and I think may have listened from a hidden place. For thereafter I heard from him in a letter of friendship.

Return to contents Buy A Broader Vision	© Erica Jolly and individual authors