Mary Connell

I was born in Mt Gambier and went to Mt Gambier Primary School whose headmaster was very fond of me – I was a funny little thing and very interested in books. There were books in our home all the time. My mother was a great reader and I read, I think, before I could walk. This headmaster, aware that the local high school only went to Intermediate, arranged for me to go on as a monitor – one of those little things that crept round and helped teachers – and then to go to Adelaide High School.¹¹ To train for a teacher it was necessary to go to Adelaide High School in Grote Street. While it was a mixed school then an iron fence between the boys and girls ensured that never the twain should meet. I was about 15 because mother wouldn’t let me come down earlier because I was so young and, believe me or not, they put me into the Intermediate and then into Leaving. I only had three years at high school.

I didn’t pass in that first year because when you went into Intermediate the teaching was appalling in those days. It was just at the end of the first world war. All we had were women teachers: the boys had good teachers but the girls didn’t. Most women teachers were recruited from primary schools. Others were very young and they just couldn’t teach. We had one good teacher, the English teacher who loved her English, lived it and made us interested in it. We had a history teacher whose only idea was ‘Take out your history books, take out your rulers. Underline.’

I was boarding in Carrington Street, with an awful old woman – she was a strict Methodist. It was 1918. After school I used to walk down to the big old library – mother had shown it to me when she first brought me down – and I was too nervous to go in. I just stood at the door. One of the men came along and said, ‘Do you want to go in the library?’ He showed me where to put my case and showed me where the books were, so every afternoon I used to go down to the library and read for an hour and a half before I went back to the boarding house to have my dinner and do my homework. I remember when I came back from holidays, one of the men said, ‘We’ve changed all the library. Would you like to come and see what we’ve done?’ And he showed me where all the books were that I used to read. We couldn’t borrow from this library. The lending library was on the corner of Kintore Avenue and we paid sixpence to borrow a book there. I only passed four subjects that first year. I had no background so I had to do all the subjects again and, in the second year, I got six subjects and a credit in something or other. Then I came back to Mt Gambier and did a year as a junior teacher in 1920, I think.

In Mt Gambier we had a dreadful old headmaster called Mr Mitchell. I’m sure he was mad. He used to come in waving a stick and saying, ‘Stir up the ‘stew’, stir up the ‘stew’, stir up the stupid child.’ Whack. He was the only one I ever knew who was dreadful like that: I didn’t know any other. I had a younger brother who was a bit deaf and he gave him hell but he wasn’t too bad to me I must admit. Even then I could keep order. I had a class of my own and had a lot of fun with the kids then I went back to Adelaide to the Teachers College and they were the best two years of my life.

I did some subjects I loved. I did history with old Professor Henderson who wasn’t much of a teacher. He was one of the ‘custard-pie’ variety – he threw his notes at you and you threw them back but I did a lot of outside reading and, of course, I still had my beloved library next door.¹² And we had a wonderful English teacher. Professor Strong was marvellous. He just stood up and made things live. He had a beautiful voice and read poetry to us.

At Teachers College we were a rag-taggle mob and met for English in the old Prince of Wales Theatre in the main university building. It was full with about 120 students there in the first term. Professor Strong decided to ‘give us all a little test at the end of the first term’ to see how we were going. We all did this little test, went off for the holidays and, when we came back, he’d weeded out two-thirds of us. The class was down to 36. He’d given us all a chance to show what we could do before deciding who could go on.

Dr Schulz was another very good lecturer, an excellent lecturer. Everyone decries him but I liked him. His people were German and, during the first world war, people weren’t quite so tolerant. His father had been a barber but retired when the war broke out. His sight was very bad. I loved his lectures about education. I got top honours in that and honours in English in that first year. He dealt with Plato and Aristotle and came right down to Montessori. He gave us the history of education beautifully and gave us the background right down to the Greeks. We still depend on the Greeks don’t we?

Our lecturer in child psychology gave us the nitty-gritty, how to approach children, how to work with them and what made children work. His name was Mr Robinson. He made clear that to make children work you had to be interested in them. Students were interested in you and you made your lesson as interesting as you could and you encouraged them. When I was teaching girls, whatever girl I saw that was a bit out of kilter with the others, I always found something to admire in her. I said, ‘Oh your hair’s very pretty dear or what a nice dress you have or something like that.’ I always did that and I found that it worked. It does, doesn’t it?

While I enjoyed all of this, there’s no doubt you mostly learn on the school room floor: you learn to teach while you are teaching. I came out with all my subjects – English I and II, history I and education I and my Teachers College subjects. We had only been allowed to do four university subjects and I had to do all my other subjects when I came out. (I did economic history, political science, geography and English III. That was the nine. When I was at Adelaide High School we didn’t do Latin and I couldn’t get my degree without Latin. Later you could.) After I retired I taught for some time at Norwood High School. Mr Coward, head of Norwood High, used to say I did all the ‘custard tart’ subjects – the soft subjects. I worked for the Red Cross after I gave up teaching. I remember a man from the Education Department used to come in to get books and told me that he’d looked me up. I could go down and get my degree as Latin was no longer compulsory but I’d left teaching and couldn’t be bothered.

I was a primary school teacher. Those who did the one year course didn’t have university subjects but those of us who did two years had some, if you passed them. Infant teachers did the two year course. They had Miss Claxton. There were three group teachers, Miss Claxton, Mr Williams and Mr Robinson. I had been in Mr Robinson’s class. I was on the executive of the Teachers Institute for years and knew Anne Milne there. I had great respect for her. I came across Walter Hutley and liked Wally but I never worked with him.

My first school was Tailem Bend. I was lucky because I boarded with the post master and his wife who had a daughter my age, Lois. Our headmaster was a lovely old thing, Mr Melbourne. He asked the family to take me in and they did and I had a room to myself. Lois and I remained friends all our lives even though I was only there for a year before they brought me back to Adelaide to the Practising School in Gilles Street.

The headmaster was a Mr Bosch who was a nice enough person but he didn’t like me very much. It was ridiculous sending a girl who’d only been out for a year into a city school to teach a class of rebellious boys. I didn’t have the skill and it was a practising school where people came to learn to teach. So he got rid of me, which was a very sensible thing to do.

I went from there to Highgate where there was a very silly headmaster. The school was crowded. I told the parents once – I used to get into a good bit of strife because I always spoke out – that they should agitate. I taught 50 or 60 students in a room in those days and we couldn’t get in or out of the doorway without shifting a desk. Imagine what it would have been like if there had been a fire. Any parents I met I used to tell so I suppose it got around that I was outspoken and I was moved right out to a place called Light’s Pass – a two teacher school. I had the first, second and third grades while the headmaster took the other four grades up to seventh.

It was terribly lonely. While the people I was boarded out with were very nice, they were German and it was a funny place. I used to walk to the library – the two or three miles to Nuriootpa – on Friday night and change my books. All the young fellows used to pass and say, ‘Good evening teacher.’ I’d say, ‘Good evening.’ The husband where I boarded was the secretary up at a homoeopathic place – a hospital. He’d been a German teacher until they closed the German schools in the first world war when he’d lost his job.

His wife used to tell me about those terrible years and about how the girls went to school. They were very strict. The pastor was very strict. They weren’t allowed to play cards or go to the pictures. They used to go into the orchards and play merry there and when a girl got pregnant the German pastor used to find out the boy responsible and they used to have to go and sit in the front of the church and be preached at. Of course, I was very young in those days and said, ‘They must die of shame.’ She answered, ‘Die of shame! They buy a new dress for it!’

I went to board in Nuriootpa. I was at Light’s Pass for some time until they brought me back to Adelaide. An inspector liked me and thought I should be in Adelaide, so I was sent to Black Forest which was a very good school when I was there and I was there for a long time. In 1935 a friend and I, with practically no money, went to England and Europe and had a wonderful time. Although we stayed in England most of the time – as money was short – we did go through Germany and saw them ‘heiling’ Hitler. It was awful. We went to a restaurant that said, ‘Dogs and Jews keep out.’ That was in Nuremburg. We went to Italy – I love Italy and have been back a couple of times – and when I came back they sent me relieving just till the end of the year.

The next year I got back to Black Forest where there was a good headmaster, Bert Hand. He was a good Head because he was pretty lazy. Have you noticed that good men headmasters are more tolerable than women because they don’t come and interfere with you? The good ones know when they’ve got good teachers and, being lazier, they let them get on with the job. They’re not as spiteful as women. It was depression time of course so, much to his annoyance, they took two of his men away to Edwardstown and sent me to take their places. I was cheaper and I was doing the job of two. I fought for equal pay all my life but never got it.

At Black Forest I taught everything. While I was there we had a visit from the members of the Royal Commission who had come to see what was going on in schools. They came into my room and asked me how many children I was teaching and I said 60. One of them looked at the other and said, ‘I think that’s quite enough for a teacher to teach, don’t you?’ The other man agreed and they moved on to the next classroom where there were small children. I was teaching children in fifth grade. Her class was grade three. There was a tough old girl teaching them. The visitors looked around the room and they were little kids. One of the commissioners said, ‘You haven’t many children to teach, have you?’ She replied, ‘There are 25 desks and two children in each desk. Count for yourselves!’

When I was sent to Edwardstown a lazy old fellow was headmaster. I’d had an accident that year. When I came home from England I took a plane, the first I’d ever been in, from Mt Gambier where my home was, back to Adelaide after the Christmas holidays. The plane came down at Meadows. The engine stopped. The pilot brought it down but it turned over and broke in halves. I got a very bad back out of it. I still have to wear a corset. I had a very rough time until a good doctor manipulated my back. They told me this was the reason, though it wasn’t, that they were going to send me into the central schools, then the technical schools. So, into the central schools I went. I’d been at Edwardstown for two years. It was 1938, I think.

They told me it would be easier but really they sent me there to avoid paying me a secondary teacher’s salary. By this time I had enough university units to give me a secondary teacher’s salary because, in those days, secondary teachers got a bit better salary than the primary teachers. By then I’d done five or six subjects, for interest really. They sent me into a central school which was really an upper primary school.

The school I went to in 1939 was Unley Central School for Girls and the women teaching there were the laziest lot of women I’ve ever met in my life. The woman in charge was a nice little woman but most of them, except for a Miss Maschmedt – a cousin of Zillah Maschmedt, I think – who taught domestic arts,¹³ didn’t do anything. I would have expected far better work from my fifth grade children.

They were doing a little bit of English and a little bit of dressmaking. Most of these teachers had come from primary schools: they hadn’t any background and were very like the teachers I had had at Adelaide High School. The move to technical schools was in the wind. The next year, in 1940, after I entered Unley, the central schools became technical schools and we had to put the children up for examinations.

The central schools had not been forced to put children up for examinations before then. We just waddled along gently. I had rather enjoyed it in a way because I was always interested in drama and drama groups and I used to put on plays for and with kids. We put on Toad of Toad Hall and one act plays, and there were some pretty good one act plays around.

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