In 2001 that phrase recalls 80 years of frightening twentieth-century history. So many people have suffered from the implementation of state-oriented policies. Whether it was Fascism as promoted by Mussolini through the Fasci di Combattimento in 1919, Hitler’s Nazism, ‘Socialism in one country’- Stalin’s variation of the Communist doctrine, the nationalist ambitions of Japan or the developments in China, under Chiang Kai-shek as well as the Communist rule of Mao Tse-tung, people mattered only in so far as they served the State. Imperialism, the basis of colonisation, had the same purpose. Colonies were there to serve the economic and political interests of the colonising power. Where the English-speaking colonies were concerned self-government meant less expense. Autocratic rule, from a distance, was expensive as well as ineffective.

The phrase ‘to serve best the interest of the State’ comes from the article reproduced in the introductory essay. F.F. Wholohan, the editor of the South Australian Teachers Journal, was postulating the need for a new curriculum in public education in the light of the devastating loss of lives at Gallipoli. He began with this sentence. If ever time was opportune for earnestly considering whether we are fitting our children to serve the best interest of the State that time is the present. This call came in 1915, the same year that the latest Education Act made schooling compulsory until a child turned 14. The government wanted to curb absenteeism, produce conforming adults and provide workers for changing industrial and commercial demands. Girls had a particular way to serve and, for most of them, their curriculum would be directed to that end.

After the war, on the positive financial side, Australia made profitable wheat contracts with England in 1919 worth £12,000,000. A wool contract worth £100,000,000 over two years was the biggest wool contract in the world. However, the war had cost Australia £364,000,000. Britain was demanding repayment, with five per cent interest, of the £42,695,000, that Britain claimed was owed for the transport and maintenance of Australian troops in Europe. Given the bankruptcy of the Weimar Republic Australia was unlikely to receive the expected £100,000,000 in war reparations due as a result of the Treaty of Versailles. While income tax was controlled by the state governments at this time, these pressures on government funds ensured that cost always came before compassion.

In human terms, of the living who returned 166,617 were wounded, and 83,146 sick. Leon Gellert was a South Australian poet and soldier. He wrote poems in the trenches of Gallipoli. When he came home he described what it was like for a wife keeping alive the returned husband who was so different from the man who went to war. In House-Mates, a wife reveals what she must do to ‘keep his body living’.¹ By February 1920 10,000 men were out of work. Some returned servicemen fought for years to have their disabilities recognised and may or may not have received pittances as their pensions. The world-wide epidemic of Spanish influenza killed many young people. In Adelaide, the Exhibition building became an emergency influenza hospital. Of the white Australian population of 5,000,000, 50,000 were unemployed by June 1920. To force children to stay at school longer was one way of limiting the number seeking work. This was one way ‘education’ could serve the state. As well, schools with ‘an industrial, commercial, and home-making bias’ would be set up, but it took till 1925 for these schools to be established.²

Technologically, there was much to excite the imagination. A prize of £10,000 was offered to the first airman to fly from Britain to Australia in under 30 days. Australia had had the electric telegraph since October 1872, thanks to the energy and organisational skills of Charles Todd, South Australia’s Postmaster-General.³ To steam-based transport by land and sea, to Morse Code and telegraphic communication would be added airmail. Captain Ross Smith reached Darwin under that deadline on December 10th 1919. Less than a year later QANTAS began an inland passenger service. By 1920 petrol and diesel engines began to replace steam, although for generating electricity Australia still relied on regionally-mined, coal-fired generators.

Recreation was changing. F. F. Wholohan had dismissed the need for girls to learn the piano. The family could gather around His Master’s Voice. Bamboo needles could scratch out the voices of Caruso, Melba and later Peter Dawson. Nellie Melba made the first advertised radio broadcast in 1920.

Australian pride in its own culture was showing in other ways. In 1919 C. J. Dennis’ poem The Sentimental Bloke was made into a film by Raymond Longford. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet received the laconic C. J. Dennis touch. Cinema was rapidly becoming the new avenue of entertainment. In 1920 three Australian films were made: The Kelly Gang, The Breaking of the Drought and Raymond Longford’s version of Steele Rudd’s On Our Selection. Dad and Dave and Mabel were on the screen. Children’s books took an Australian turn. In 1918 Norman Lindsay published The Magic Pudding. By September 1921 children had May Gibbs’ book Snugglepot and Cuddlepie and the banksia men. Gladys Moncrieff, star of The Maid of the Mountains, was Australia’s ‘Glad’. Customs officials, determined that Australian minds would not be sullied by ‘obscene’ foreign writing, banned Boccaccio’s masterpiece, The Decameron.

Photographic developments brought other innovations. In ‘the sport of kings’, the Port Adelaide Racing Club experimented with cinematography to end disputes about close finishes. In 1923 judges could view the finish 90 seconds after a race. In the 1930s, despite the Great Depression photographs, via the Box Brownie, accompanied family correspondence. However innovation, in the view of William McCoy, the Director of Education responsible for the establishment of these schools, had almost no place in these post-primary extensions administered by primary school headmasters. William Adey, with a broader vision, replaced him in 1929.⁴

Wholohan, in 1915, saw women as being able to discuss issues with their husbands. They should be partners in the life of the home. At a federal level compulsory voting was introduced in 1924. Concern with civics would have a place in the central schools introduced in 1925. Evidence is in the statement of a contributor that debating lessons were part of her educational experience.

Although the depression still had an impact on South Australian culture, a 17-piece radio orchestra was established in Adelaide by the ABC. That meant an extension of what could be available for formal or informal education in schools with radios after 1936. References by contributors to clubs, leisure activities, sports, visits to theatre, opportunities to develop skills through debating and performance, setting up radio stations or through involvement in a range of ‘extra-curricular’ activities matter.

Although the central schools were meant to concentrate on practical vocational subjects, not all teachers felt bound to follow that narrow path. There was more to schooling than state-based or business-based needs. In the words of Edna Matthews, ‘Encouragement meant so much.’ And Mick Ryan, knowing the price paid in lives in the first World War, did not want boys regimented into obedient cannon fodder.

Even though boys and girls were being divided into those supposedly destined for manual, mental or mothering occupations, teachers could and did make a difference for individual students. At least these schools provided opportunities for some parents caught in the grip of the Great Depression. As Margaret Reynolds wrote, ‘They helped parents to give their children the best education possible.’

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