Erica Jolly

Each of us brings to teaching more than we realise. It is a pity that, so often only in hindsight, do we examine the baggage we carry with us into a school. Our perspectives, what we value, what we fear, what we reject, what we hold most dear and our unchallenged assumptions are there to influence, for good or ill, the students we teach. In 1955 I needed to stay in the city to work on the honours’ history thesis that should have been completed the year before. Instead of country service, I was offered a place in a technical school. Despite warnings from the few secondary-trained students in our D4 course I took no notice. I preferred to stay in the city and not be exposed to light-blinded wombats, brought into a country ballroom by young men who thought the wombats’ clumsy efforts to escape the strange high-pitched screams, guffaws of laughter and heavy shoes just the right entertainment for interval at a Saturday night dance.

When I began teaching history at Croydon Girls Technical School I believed in four things. As a former scholarship student at St Peter’s Collegiate Girls’ School, I saw real value in single-sex schools. I resented the notion that the one acceptable and fulfilling future for women was as wives and mothers. I believed that poverty need not impede academic achievement, even if it meant getting to university as a bonded teaching student. Most of all I believed that obedience was not necessarily a virtue. Willingness to question was absolutely essential in the Australia of the ’50s. Therefore, to my mind, nothing was sacrosanct.

That last belief came from a number of sources. Why was it important for girls in particular ‘to be seen and not heard’? Why were girls denied opinions? Why were we expected to sit and smile while young men held the floor? Why, when obedience to orders had been the excuse of Nazis at the Nuremberg trials, should obedience be above humane consideration or conscience? Even in wartime Adelaide some of us, in our imagination, had lived through the horrors of torture and cruelty that made their way into the news and stories we heard about the war. At Teachers College a friend of mine from the Girls Central Art School introduced me to A.S. Neill who insisted that rigid control was not the way to educate young people.¹⁴

In an aside – how often are we influenced by the off-hand comment rather than the most carefully constructed analysis of a problem? A young history lecturer I admired, Hugh Stretton, had challenged the traditional way that history was taught. He preferred to work with students who had studied science at school rather than those who had learnt, usually by rote, the chronological story of Great Britain and her imperial fledglings or had been enthralled by either the romantic or heroic element in the basically European history we had been taught. A willingness to think was what he wanted. He assumed that science was more likely to develop that capacity. He taught us to examine the motives of historians, to ask different questions of the texts. Why was ‘x’ or ‘y’ omitted? What efforts had been made to examine the positive as well as the negative results, for example, of the 1848 revolutions? What significance did coincidence or accident have in consequent developments? For me this approach seemed the way forward. It was too dangerous for our society to continue to accept the traditional assumptions behind the history we had been taught. To bring about the change in approach, it was essential to examine all written materials as documents of their times.

Bringing these beliefs to Croydon had a number of immediate results. By the end of the first month I was on three weeks’ sick leave suffering from total loss of voice. I had antagonised families with a fundamental Christian faith when I dared to encourage questions about the Old Testament in The March of Civilisation. I had provoked one student, with inspectorial approval, to leave the Intermediate history class to concentrate on science and I had begun to write a book entitled Why Bother?

Quite forcefully I was brought face to face with the determination of many girls to leave school as soon as they turned 14. I could not understand their apparent contempt for education. However I was very fond of my first year class. We were new together. There were 40 of us upstairs, crowded into rows of single desks – five rows of eight – at the back of a double room with a thin, shaky, concertina partition, able to be opened for double classes and assemblies, covered by old, worn, almost khaki-coloured board, broken by panels so that no extended, logical blackboard-based work could be developed, with noisy desks on a wooden floor, in an acoustically-awful room, and the verandah side ‘wall’ open to all who walked past so that anyone could see what was happening. That ‘wall’ with its doors to let in the students for assemblies also let in every sound and every gust of cold winter wind. A portable board stood in the corner held up by pegs tied to the legs of the easel but, to get to it, I had to squeeze past my desk. Still, important matters of routine could be put on it and they did not have to be rubbed off all the time.

I was lucky that, on the other side of the divider, was a gentle teacher, loved by students, who put up with the staccato of chalk on the board, tapping out or stabbing to reinforce an idea or a word. Mary Bowness would have been putting up with scraping chairs, calling out, my loud response, laughter and all the echoing sounds of uncertainty. I wanted my students not to be afraid to ask questions but I wanted to be able to teach. Their experience of schools was that a quiet class was a good class. When I allowed a girl to visit her friend it was a sign, in their minds, of absence of control. A.S. Neill’s Summerhill was not meant for South Australian public schools but I was not yet ready to give up trying to work this way.

I was squashed at the front between the first row of girls and this narrow ‘black board’ space. My small desk had to be out of the way. If I wanted students to concentrate on material on the board I would have to turn away from them. My back would be to more than half of the class. Being right-handed I turned towards the right and noticed students on the left-hand side of the room. Desks had to be left where they were.

As a new teacher I was under the eye of an experienced senior who would appear on the verandah. Her heavy tread usually warned us she was coming. But sometimes, thinking that she was helping me while my back was turned to the board, she would creep up then yell at someone not paying attention at the back of the room. We would all jump. The tension would stretch to breaking point. All this, when I thought the pleasant hum was a sign that we had been working together quite well.

Teaching history and social studies I was constantly frustrated. The maps were faded and out-of-date. Students needed to know where places were. I needed to be able to put maps on boards and leave them there.¹⁵ Every lesson I would have to re-establish the sense of place so that girls in this part of Adelaide would be aware of the world beyond our shores, even beyond our state! Therefore I spent hours, and much of my meagre pay, buying paper, paints, making maps, often historical ones – with compass points and legends, using ideas I took from Van Loon, to bring to life other places and times.

Finding places to pin them or stick them to walls in classrooms was difficult. I needed space to put up current events. Pinboard space was at a premium and often the board was so hard it was difficult to stick in the drawing pins. No blue tack then to make life easy! For me all of this was essential. We were in a world that was moving from a terrible war, in spite of the formation of the United Nations, into an equally frightening ‘cold’ war, made more terrifying by the awful power of the atomic bomb. I believed that no one could afford to ignore the world around us or the prejudices that had brought us to the point that we had reached.

At the same time I was working with young girls whose priorities were very different from mine. This was the era of the ‘bodgies’ and ‘widgies’. A few girls had begun to style their hair like ducks’ tails. They played sport – softball. People interested in the life of the mind were seen to have no connection with their real world. That world was a place where most lived with the stench from the boiling-down works and the choking smell of the gas works, while a few came from places such as Penneshaw on Kangaroo Island. These smells invaded the classrooms whenever the wind was in the right direction. Their world often extended as far as Ferryden Park and semi-detached rented Housing Trust houses, poorly-kept streets and the need always to be careful with money. I thought I understood the effects of poverty but I had never known life in a poor industrial area, with its emphasis on shift work, which had parents or a single parent coming home at different hours forcing the older girls to be more responsible for younger children, leaving boys to run wild. By talking to the girls, as the coach of their softball team (not that they needed one, these girls were talented: I was merely an acceptable adult chaperone who amused them) and making friends I thought I could help them to understand why I was so insistent that they should understand the changing world to which they belonged.

My world seemed to have no place in their future. I was fascinated by the Renaissance, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation as well as by the impact of the revolutions. I saw so much of the influence of the Reformation in Adelaide! They certainly had no interest in the Risorgamento, and other examples of national uprisings, that were part of the Intermediate history course. Even focusing on people in history, as Van Loon had done in the historical conversations over dinner in Van Loon’s Lives, I could only share my enthusiasm with a few. While historical novels appealed to avid readers, most saw no practical value in anything distant in time. Often they were tired of stories of the Australian explorers and the gold rushes because they were repeating primary school work. G.V. Portus’s Australia Since 1606 was still the Australian history text and its conversational style had some appeal.¹⁶

Soon I knew I had to change. These were intelligent girls. I must find a way to connect their present with our past, show how situations had arisen and, through discussion and as much examination of texts as was possible when most families only bought the News or the Mail if that,¹⁷ consider what their impact could be on their future. That way seemed to come through social studies which, with its initial focus on the present connecting geography, history, politics and economics, demanded consideration of the past. At my school, civics had been part of our programme. I had found it fascinating and saw social studies as combining the best of civics and the connected humanities-based disciplines. I began to use this present-to-past approach and was ready to get involved in change when other teachers began to question the courses that these students were required to undertake.

There were so many problems in those first two years. Not the least was the need to get from one building to another building, streets away, in rain and cold, heat or wind, to give lessons. By borrowing students’ bikes I made the trip, often on ratchety old ‘treadlies’, most of the time without accident. If I were carrying exercise books the journey could be hazardous. I was always a little late for the start of a lesson when no timetabling allowance had been made for travelling time without a car.

In my second year I had a class in the corner upstairs room. There was the raised daïs to lift me above the class, space for a good teacher’s table, a drawer on the left for the roll, another on the right, a bright class in front of me and an adequate blackboard behind me. On one occasion after the usual tiring ride between schools and that final race upstairs I came, almost breathless, into my first year class taking off my coat, congratulating my girls on the quiet working atmosphere they had established in my absence. My hand went into the left-hand drawer to take out the roll. It fell onto a dead mouse and a note. ‘Dear Miss Jolly, Introducing Herbie.’ A scream, a cry, tears and I was out of that room immediately, leaving a stunned class behind me, and I refused to go back. Some time later girls came, apologised and we continued to work together.

That class was very bright. To teach history at Intermediate I had to teach this class for English, social studies and arithmetic. How to teach arithmetic? I hated it. Luckily I had a very able student. Gloria became the ‘teacher’. She would work at the board. She was better than I was, more patient, and I stood at the back working out the solutions, taking over when I was sure of myself. I cannot remember asking other girls to demonstrate methods. I probably did but Gloria was my mainstay. I never asked her how she felt about being singled out but to this day I thank her for what she taught me. At the same time we surprised the senior in arithmetic. The class did well in the tests set across the year.

I prefer to forget the second year classes but remember a young girl, made deaf by rubella, who helped me to deal with a girl who was thrashing on the floor in an epileptic attack. My training in hygiene had given me the theory but, faced with the reality and the panic of the class, I knew why I had not become a nurse.¹⁸ If I had not made connection with students through softball I would have had no way of working with girls, many of whom were now only waiting to turn 14 and leave.

I enjoyed music which, at Croydon, was in the hands of a short, iron-grey short haired, plump, peacock-strutting, chain-smoking, theatrically-flamboyant, amusingly-vulgar English woman. Music equalled singing and that suited me. Music became my second connection. The third was one I didn’t enjoy – caterpillars in my coat-pocket, the inevitable jokes on my name and the dangers of coaching at softball those who thought I favoured others: the fourth was a fellow feeling for young girls wanting to untie maternal apron-strings.

The small third year PEB history class was supposed to be my reward. In a way it was. A few shared my love of history, enjoyed seeing through the abstractions to the human stories, the blood, sweat, tears and ironies, the exploration of what lay behind the facades and the languages of nineteenth century nationalism and industrialism and doctrines of laisser faire and the assumptions in the so-called ‘march of civilisation’ that had led to two world wars. Many put up with my enthusiasm. One didn’t. Another invited me to Penneshaw where I saw black snakes stoned at the bottom of a concrete tank, had a joey ripped from a dead mother wallaby’s pouch laid in the dark of the cab roof under my unsuspecting hand and came back to Adelaide with a new name, ‘Cassy’ for sarcastic, because these incidents turned my tongue into a razor. Nevertheless, by the end of the first year, I had satisfied myself that it was more important to concentrate upon the contemporary world in which these girls would live than remain self-indulgently exploring the history I had grown up with. As we moved from present to past I would be able to make the connections in such a way that they would have validity and perhaps the girls would ask questions and learn not to accept everything at face value.

I was just beginning to feel at home when I was suddenly transferred, at the end of my second year, to Thebarton. I thought the reason lay in my increasing friendship with a family in the area. I had not been keeping an appropriate professional distance. On that last day when we sat on the steps, with all my rolled up maps and books, I was very angry and unhappy. Those girls had taught me so much while I was at Croydon. They had taught me that children came first not subjects. They had been honest – without the veneer of sophistication I had often found irritating in some students at Saints – straight-forward and definitely not dull. And they had taught me, for my own self-preservation, to leave behind the teachings of A.S. Neill.

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