The story of post-primary education in South Australia, particularly from 1929 onward, is depressing if one examines it overall.¹ From 1927 South Australia began to suffer from a deepening economic crisis: the end of the railway rehabilitation scheme came at the same time as a very severe drought. To mechanisation on farms with tractors replacing farm workers, was added the serious loss of income from lowered exports. Quickly, big employers reduced costs by cutting wages and staff. One result, the Port Strike of 1928, was busted by a combination of ‘professional men, university students and farmers’ employed as ‘special constables’.² Conflict between unionists and employers was written up in newspapers in ideological terms. Capitalism, represented by employers, and Communism, represented by unions, were written up as the opposing ideological forces so at ‘war’ that Hitler’s Nazism was seen as the bulwark against the growing strength of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. This explains the decision in the 1930s made by R. G. Menzies, then Australia’s Attorney General, to give in to the demands of the German Ambassador to ban the performance of a play written by a radical American playwright, Clifford Odetts.

After 1918 South Australia had begun to develop a motor body industry to which men came from country towns seeking work. Like the other states, South Australia was developing public works for settlements to meet the needs of natural and immigrant ‘assisted’ population growth. Roads, railway lines, electrified double-decker buses, tram lines, the provision of water, electricity, gas, telephone lines, sewerage pipes, drains had to be put in place. Funds came through loans from English banks and, if London would not oblige, New York. To the national debt owed to Britain, for its provision of transport and food for Australian soldiers in Europe, was added these interest-bearing foreign loans raised to pay for these public works. Early prosperity soon disappeared.

Set up in 1924 by the Gunn Labor government, the central schools were not places where innovation was encouraged. Some innovation came through The Children’s Hour, officially for primary school children, with articles on how to build crystal sets or how aeroplanes flew or road safety. Stan Kirk remembers with great pleasure how much he looked forward to this monthly magazine. Teachers, as always, could make a difference but much was soon to be stacked against them.

While, in 1929, Australians with licensed wirelesses heard the laughing kookaburra for the first time when the National Broadcasting Company broadcast from 3LO in Melbourne, most began to feel the impact of Otto Niemeyer’s report on Australia’s future. What it meant for schools was the insistence that, as ‘an Adelaide business man’ wrote in The News on October 21st 1930, ‘free education should stop short at a thorough grounding in rudimentary subjects’, and ‘all frills … should be rapped on the head’, state secondary schools should be closed, and children of ‘unusually bright intellect’ should be provided with scholarships to private colleges.³ Conservatives feared the ‘over-education’ of working class children.

South Australia made no effort to fight the pressure of Niemeyer and the Bank of England as Jack Lang did in New South Wales. William Adey had to face this anti-educational atmosphere as Director of Education in the decade from 1929 to 1939. Pavla Miller gives the details of the two South Australian reports into education. In the field of practically-oriented education, the Majority Report of the Second Progress Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Education suggested that domestic arts and woodwork should be removed from primary schools because of their cost. The Adelaide Technical College for apprentices should be closed because secondary industries were more likely to be set up in the eastern states! The number of students being enrolled in high schools should be decreased by 50 per cent. Most small country high schools could be closed. Central schools could have more facilities. Parents must pay fees if they wanted any post primary education for their children: £9 a year for high schools and £4. 10s a year for central schools. To overcome resentment in rural areas, the majority report suggested that small schools could be replaced by the unpaid voluntary services of ‘suitable persons, preferably those who have had a university training’.⁴ Senior female positions were abolished. As soon as the Liberal and Country League, under Richard Butler, gained government in 1933, it put the majority recommendations into practice.⁵

William Adey fought their effect by approving over 3,100 applications for exemption of fee payment. In central schools some teachers, like Mary Connell, dared to encourage parents to speak out against the appalling conditions. By 1933 there were 4,840 boys from 14 to 17 not at school and not employed. Suggestions were made that a fraction of the money saved from the cost of education should be paid to employers to pay boys 5 shillings a week, much less than the award payment. A suggestion was made to turn the existing girls’ central schools into institutions to train domestic workers. Parents, who saw the girls’ central schools as ‘home making’ schools, opposed this move.⁶ Fees for secondary education were removed in 1943.

Malnutrition, inadequate clothing, disease, squatting sites on Pinkie Flats by the River Torrens, the sight of beggars scrabbling in bins, the presence of ragged boys worried Adelaide’s affluent. Tragically, depression, resentment and anger were not surprising when boys, who had gained excellent results, found no reward in the skilled work for which they had trained. Anxiety of those who still lived comfortably in the midst of this suffering intensified. Youthful reactions were seen as ‘dangerous to the body politic’.⁷

In 1938, Thomas Playford replaced Richard Butler as Premier. South Australia was coming out of the depression. Secondary manufacturing industries were being encouraged. Whether the central schools would have been disbanded is a question worth asking but two events coincided to bring about their demise. R. G. Menzies, the Prime Minister, declared in 1939 that, as Great Britain was at war with Germany, so was Australia. In the same year two local events occurred. Sir Keith Murdoch brought the international art of Picasso and Dali to Adelaide. Dr Charles Fenner followed William Adey as Director of Education. The state needed more trained apprentices and invigorating art was in the Art Gallery for art students to examine.

Dr Fenner always believed that the central schools’ reputations suffered because they were administered by primary headmasters. He would change that. They would remain single sex schools, administered by the Technical Branch, but secondary Junior Technical Schools would have their own principals who understood the need for sound vocational education with academic education components in the boys’ and girls’ junior technical schools These principals would be relatively young! Girls’ junior technical schools would fit their students for domestic or office work, apprenticeships in dressmaking and motherhood. Concentration on skills would replace the emphasis on character in girls schools.

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