Geoff Wilson

As a student at Adelaide Boys High School, I did Intermediate and Leaving PEB art. While the rest of my class was doing French or German, I would wander over to the girls’ section in Grote Street and be the only student in the art room so I had rather sparse teaching. Tom Bone, the senior master in art, was really responsible for directing me into art teaching. He, also, was the one who got me into landscape water colouring. The subjects of course were the same old PEB standbys; lettering, dimensioned sketching, plant drawing and perspective. Not much artiness or creativity in that lot. Of course those subjects proceeded on at a higher level at Art School and later, as a teacher, one found oneself dealing out the same old stuff.

In the 1930s young people who were interested in going to the art school (perhaps hoping to become artists) were encouraged to become art teachers. Mrs Walloscheck, maiden name Margaret Kelly, would have been one of the urgers. People like Jeff Smart, Jackie Hick, Shirley Adams, Doug Roberts, Dave Dallwitz, Geoff Mainwaring, Ruth Tuck were pre-war trainees. There were others. Geoff Mainwaring was at Thebarton Tech and later became a war artist and retired as head of the Ballarat Art School. Doug Roberts was later head of the SA School of Arts.

The general training in the SA School of Arts still retained in the 1940s vestiges of nineteenth century art philosophy and practice. We were as students not made very aware of twentieth century art developments; and all the teaching work done by Paul Klee and his peers at the Bauhaus, in the 1920s and ’30s, didn’t really become known until the late 1950s and early ’60s.

But I began as a junior teacher at Woodville High School in 1945 working with Enid Heritage, an art teacher who later became the head of a girls’ technical school. My two years at the Kintore Avenue Teachers College were extended to three, 1946 to 1948. Max Birrell and myself were the only two males commencing the Hb course in 1946. Keith Michell was one year ahead.

At the end of 1948 I was appointed to the South Australian School of Art. During the holidays however there was a reshuffle of art teachers in the tech schools. Ken Lammacraft was moved from Croydon Boys Tech, later to become – for a while – head of the School of Art. Thus I commenced teaching at Croydon Boys Tech in 1949.

I can still remember, very clearly, the first morning I walked through the gate on Brown Street into Croydon Boys Technical School. I had come on a tram that ran from the city down Torrens Road towards Woodville. I had hair and a shiny new black brief case, the hall marks of a new boy. The lads hanging around the gate grinned and muttered about a new teacher while I nervously headed into the temporary wooden office, headmaster’s room and staffroom combined.

I hated the first few days, sitting in with the older teachers while they worked on rolls and book lists. It wasn’t until the head, Bill Richards, organised a truck and sent me off with a gang of lads to Croydon Primary School that I began to relax and talk informally to the boys. While the woodwork centre was to remain in the grounds of the primary school, the drawing (art) room was to be cleared out and the contents placed in a wooden prefab building, one of five or four in a row adjacent to Brown Street. The only permanent building on site was the sheetmetal shop which also contained the staff toilet.

The art room like the classrooms was timber prefab and I think all the prefabs were the same size. The art room had above-the-waist windows on the eastern and southern sides so one could see the Adelaide hills and the suburbs and factories in between. The art room had a porch for the students’ bags and gear and a double sliding blackboard on the western wall.

I cannot remember in 1949 whether the room had a sink. The eastern waist-high cupboard was second-hand and brought in possibly from the public works store room. The art room was an adaptation and basically didn’t change during the five years I was there. The standard vertical teacher’s cupboards had to contain all the pencils, paints, paper and paraphernalia for current use. T-squares probably hung on nails on a wall. I forget where the drawing boards were stored and I cannot remember the type of desk used. The seating would have been four-legged wooden stools (placed on the desks at the end of the day).

Each lad was given a manilla envelope; half imperial (15’ by 22’) and my first go at teaching was an over wordy explanation of the construction of capital sans serif letters. Each lad then lettered in pencil his name and class on the corner of the envelope. Following this was the ink spilling, pen (speedball) spattering attempts to Indian ink over the pencil letters.

The size of the classes was halved for art and science, so I guess my share was between 15 and 20 students. There would have been classes of first, second and third years. Occasionally small groups of third years would share the room with other classes. I don’t think there would have been fourth year students who could and did sit for PEB subjects, for example geometrical drawing, lettering, dimensioned drawing and even perspective which was rated as a Leaving subject.

The art teacher in those days had to teach the more formal subjects like geometrical drawing and dimensioned sketching and could allow time for something we called ‘free art.’ I cannot remember any desired ratio between the formal and the free. The lads of course opted for the latter and if a project was going which looked rewarding I would continue it until it was finished. The training one had in Teachers College and Art School really didn’t have much bearing on the day to day practicalities in an art room.

One tried things and hoped for the best. For example most years we made posters. I avoided the long arduous task of explaining letter forms and trying to correct every lad’s efforts. I remembered an alphabet that was taught to me in a Melbourne Central School in the ’40s. We called it the Five Square Alphabet. Letters and numerals were constructed from squares five high. The larger the squares the bigger the letter.

The lads never seemed to mind the task of drawing up the square foundations and liked the easy and straight forward way of creating letters that didn’t demand a letterer’s skill. Once they had made a sheet of the alphabet and the numerals they had a reference for many lettering projects. By drawing up the letters in reverse on coloured flint paper they had the pleasure of cutting out; – an immaculate coloured surface, and the ease of spacing by just sliding the letters about.

The tram passed the school on Torrens Road. Several times a group would go out and collect discarded tickets lying in quite large numbers in the gutter or on footpaths. They had various colours, according to sections travelled and each had a large number referring to price. We would make all-over patterns by sticking the tickets on constructed grids and add pencil or paint work to make the patterns more involved.

Graphics consisted of relief printing lino and built-up surfaces of cardboard; intaglio – perspex sheets scratched and gouged and printed on a homely washing mangle. Some groups cut lino blocks for printing curtains – probably unbleached calico dyed by mothers who also hemmed the finished products. We attempted to have as many boys as possible make a motif for the curtains, thus with more democratic than aesthetic results. Eventually the two window walls were covered. When I came back after three years in the UK some of the curtains were still up – faded and probably (near the sink) used as hand towels.

Painting with Winsor & Newton powder colour always brought problems of spills and cleaning up.

I learned to set exams and mark the results and still (I don’t know why) have recurring dreams of finding sets of unmarked papers after the report cards had been completed.

As the school grew in numbers I was asked to do a class in social studies and later needed help in the art department. I remember a young woodwork teacher, Glen Schulz, helping out. I think I did one year as a social studies teacher. One topic I remember was the Snowy River Scheme and I made rather elaborate drawings on the chalk board.

Inspections were twice a year. I cannot remember any specialist art inspector but general ones popped in, like ‘Curly’ Statton and ‘Dickie’ Richards.¹¹ They were mainly interested in class discipline and instigated the number of skill marks one got at the end of the year.

There were truant officers who followed up absent students with lots of vigour. Their tales in the staff room were colourful and detective-like and added surprising insights to some of the boys’ other lives.

There seemed to be a Boys Tech School Staff Association probably held in a pub where story tellers told jokes and yarns. Some of them I still retell to this day. In the 1950s the appropriate number of schools was small. The characters who inhabited them were well known and legend, like stories of their exploits, seemed to filter around the schools. Retired staff can still extract such characters from memory. The stories of course embellished over time still retain the cores of the initial incidents.

The staff of Croydon in 1949 was Bill Richards (head), Bob Burnard (deputy), Bob Hoare (woodwork), Jack Winter (metalwork), Neil Bilney (general, whose son became an ALP minister), Glen Schulz (mid 1950s woodwork) and others I forget. Bill Richards was a lively head who was of great help to me as a beginning teacher. Good discipline and a sense of fun; he was no office-only man and enjoyed working groups of the boys across the oval weeding and fertilising when appropriate.

Dave Dallwitz and I called in to see him on his retirement day and years later he rang Dave after reading about Dave’s 80th year Retrospective at the Art Gallery of South Australia (November 1994). I wrote to him soon after and sent some recent photographs.

The ’50s saw the beginning of migrant arrivals. The European boys often arrived with pure garlic sandwiches for lunch. Afternoon lessons were often troubled by the ‘Aussie’ boys’ protests. In the summer the mixture of garlic and playground warmed-up sandshoes was a most heady mixture that promoted gasping groans and the desperate banging of window louvres.

At the end of 1953 I was given 18 months’ leave and off I sailed for Europe and the UK. Eventually I resigned and put my superannuation money aside for a fare home. I returned in October 1956. A week after I had arrived home, stony broke, I paid a visit to Bill Richards and Croydon.

Bill was on the oval. He said, ‘Do you want a job?’

‘Sure,’ I replied.

He went to the office and rang the Education Department. ‘You can start Monday,’ he said. Dick White, who took over from me in 1953, was off for the rest of the year with a hernia operation. So I stayed on until the summer holidays.

So, a week after I got off the ship, I found myself standing in the same art room, looking through the remaining curtains across the oval. I wondered what I was doing there after three exciting years overseas. I often think I should have walked out then and done something different. Then the bell went. I went to the porch and there they were, another line of boys with their ragged kitbags. I mumbled, ‘Good morning’ and we all trooped in. I was well and truly home!

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