Gordon Phillips

My first experience of teaching came at Berri where my father was headmaster and monitors received £15 per annum. At Berri Primary School we had 32 desks for 64 pupils and another row to hold a total of 84 children. Three teachers and seventh grade were all in one room. As a student from 1923 to 1928 I was head prefect in my final year at Adelaide High School with Alby Jones who had come from Adelaide Technical High School for this final year. Ken Barter, one of the prefects of that year, was in the same class. Those connections probably helped with later jobs. I was certainly shaped, in my approach to education by a number of teachers, among them Danny David, later Dr Penny’s deputy at the Adelaide Teachers College.

I was at Adelaide Teachers College from 1929 to 1930 and I was shunted out first to Murray Bridge. While I was there I remember I had 35 girls, Laura Finlayson had 40 girls and Jack Ellingsworth had 35 fourth grade students in a ‘room’ set up in the middle of the shelter area. The teacher there faced an awful situation if other students were let out early. After two months, at four hours’ notice, I was moved to Forest.

At Forest, between Lenswood and Basket Range – the school had been put there on the one place they couldn’t grow apples – there were three on the staff. I wanted to go to Crystal Brook where there were higher primary classes doing secondary subjects set by the Adelaide University, so I swapped with Louis Redden who wanted to go to Forest because he lived in the eastern suburbs and would find it easier to take the bus to Lenswood. While I was at Crystal Brook I went to Wongyarra to relieve someone – six or seven miles north of Wirrabarra. The school had 40 youngsters. It was a one teacher school and a sewing mistress came one afternoon a week. I took the children for gardening. Later, when we were teaching children to read, fourth grade was much better than first grade. The fourth grade girls acted as teachers for the first grade students. They remembered their own difficulties at that earlier age and could talk to the first grade children in their own language.

During the depression a number of schools added extra classes to the ordinary primary schools because boys and girls wanted to stay on. There may have been no work and parents might have felt that more education would help their children to gain employment. A three man commission, made up of two business men and ‘Plugger’ Adey from the Education Department, was working out ways to cut the costs of education at that time. The business men saw no reason to keep in school any one who would not, as they saw it, earn his keep. I remember one of the men saying ‘Let them pay for their own education.’ With two to one, William Adey didn’t have much of a chance to soften any measures they decided to make. The Bank of England controlled South Australia’s finances just as it dominated the Commonwealth’s financial arrangements during the depression. I’ll never forget the impact of Sir Otto Niemeyer – that representative of the Bank of England with that very British name!

In 1934 I was transferred to Thebarton Primary which was one of these higher primary schools. I was there for six years. I was completing my degree and was half way through Latin and French, maths, physics and chemistry, economic history and geography, a university subject started by Dr Fenner. Professor McKellar Stewart, a classicist, was appalled that geography should be thought worthy of inclusion for university study. I remember Bob Barber, a Rhodes Scholar from Sydney, who took us for ethics in philosophy. He made us think about the reasons for and results of actions.

Among the lecturers my favourite was Professor ‘Gerry’ Portus who believed in talking with the class. He brought a long pointer to each lecture and would poke someone in the chest when he asked for an opinion, with reasons, for the response to a hypothesis he would put forward. This was 1939. I remember when war broke out he came to the lecture theatre door as we left, shook us solemnly by the hand and said, ‘You will be asked to act in a certain way. You will have to be very careful how you decide what choice you might make.’

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