Yvonne Miels

Thebarton Girls was a ‘technical’ school. The idea always fascinated me – girls being taught ‘technical subjects’ – trained for a life of practical abilities such as cooking, house keeping and dressmaking, or office work that would keep you employed until marriage took place. When I arrived its purpose seemed deliberate enough; one general stream in first year so that you could make the choice about ‘commercial’ or ‘general’ training for the office, (with its promise of ‘good money’) or preliminary studies leading towards the other two acceptable female careers, teaching or nursing.

But this is surely no more than a reflection of the times and a good 20 years before any of the stirring of women’s liberation. The structure of the school linked with the suburb and says something too of our status as children in a working class western suburb. We weren’t expected to have high aspirations. But to attend a technical school was certainly ‘a step up’ in the opinion of my parents; both were children of a war and depression and neither had any secondary education. Tech school was seen as a privilege by them, and they wanted only the best for me.

To me the school seemed limited, and I was not excited about attending, but rather overcome by inevitability. There was certainly no consultation with students then, and in my case the choice was my parents’ – no teacher intervened or mentioned that I should be considering a liberal education, not a rigid business one. I wanted to be with the girls that I considered ‘the élite’ at Adelaide Girls High. That this high school was considered a prestigious place didn’t much matter to me, but there I could study language, particularly Latin and be able to take music as a serious part of the curriculum. But my parents believed I should aim for a good job. We were lovingly being locked into ‘the machine’ that Barbara Hanrahan describes so accurately in The Scent of Eucalyptus.

The building added to my sense of dreariness – stiff, unimaginative double-storey red brick, with a formal entrance porch that made some kind of gesture towards style, but managed to look tacked on; you can see the building’s repeated image in other older suburbs of Adelaide. Yet the technical school was a haunting building viewed from Thebarton primary school – it seemed important, somehow unattainable. There was an invisible division made by the seats in the primary school yard, and by the pepper trees with shiny pink peppercorns that we crushed in the puddles during winter to make brilliant rainbow patterns. No-one dared cross over and, as I recall, no-one spoke across this divide either. Toilets made another border on the northern end of the primary yard, and the domestic science centre hemmed us in on the south.

The weird outside wooden stairs on the northern end of the Technical School building, with a little galvanised iron enclosure at the top, seemed extremely high and dangerous, and were worrying to descend since you could see through their slats. My second year classroom was just inside to the left at the top of this entrance. Immediately to the right was a cloak room where we hung our hats and left our bags. Amazingly everything was quite safe there.

The front yard was asphalt and along the Henley Beach Road perimeter there was a row of Morton Bay Fig trees; huge things with roots that made the asphalt bulge. They were some kind of refuge at lunch time and certainly a good place to go before school and watch the boys riding by on their bikes to Adelaide High – my boy friend Jon included. You could stand innocently beneath the trees and somehow, at the exact moment, sense when he and his mates were close and manage a quick surreptitious wave. To be caught at such activity was to invite serious trouble.

The way to school was usually through the back streets of Thebarton and Torrensville; we rarely rode along Henley Beach Road. I recall only ever entering by the front gate, wheeling my bike across the front yard to the bike racks that were bordered by the toilets on the eastern perimeter.

First year home group met in a wooden portable classroom with Marnie Speck as teacher in charge of IJK. This was a general year, lightened by art and music and a choice of clubs. This first year had an element of excitement; science attracted me most and, even though I couldn’t draw, art fascinated me too – we explored free use of colour and line, and produced pieces that didn’t particularly need artistic ability but this made me feel I was creating ‘something’. Having techniques explained went some way to diffusing the mystique of art.

In first year I think we were organised into groups alphabetically, nothing to do with intelligence, I hope, since I ended up in IJK. However, in second year there was streaming according to IQ. I was in 2AB (Margaret East as home teacher) and in the A section of the class. The same thing happened in 3AB with Miss Paterson, a bird-like lady who was quite kind and very competent; she was also the deputy principal. I will never forget doing the IQ test; it introduced concepts previously unimagined, a language of symbols and abstractions. I thought that I had done very badly because I simply could not work out the questions that presented logical ideas in symbolic form, or in ‘made up’ words.

3AB classroom was upstairs and the last room west, right at the top of the stairs. This large internal stairway held an attraction that never waned. After the flat terrain of primary school and home, stairs were a novelty. In this year we were given a private locker with key. They stood in the alcove outside the room. I set a trap for Rita who I imagined was trying to steal my dressmaking scissors. I put a piece of tape in the door of my locker so I would know if anyone opened it. A great deal of this year is vague. I was often ill with bronchitis and my school photo shows a girl with a pale haunted face.

Also upstairs there was a section referred to as ‘the balcony’ – an open area leading to a double-room with folding doors that we used for singing lessons. The balcony had a waist-high fence but was then enclosed with a forbidding wire mesh. I often wondered what that meant; had someone already flung herself over the edge to lie in the vicinity of the vile toilets, or was the wire merely a preventative measure. I remember, very vividly, taking examinations in this area, especially a first year science exam where we had to draw the reproductive cycle of a green bean. The sensation of entering any exam room remains clear; clutching all the right pens and pencils, rehearsing scientific formulae, remembering a map outline or trying to remember which damn thing got posted to which side of the hated book-keeping ledger. English exams presented no problems, they were even something of a pleasure; all that wonderful material to revise and to think about again.

Even though I was appalled by the toilets and did anything to avoid them, when physical education lessons loomed then they sometimes became a place of refuge. One day I actually stayed there hoping no-one would find me. I suffered every time sport or PE was mentioned; I did have ‘an endless diary note’ that kept me away and safely in the classroom with a book, but somehow it got checked on occasionally and I was made to go. Miss Le Cornu, the local ballet teacher, presided over this torture. We had to jump the wooden horse, roll on dusty mats doing forward and backwards somersaults, swing clubs to music – things that generally revealed my complete lack of co-ordination. Once Patty Turley twisted her neck as she leapt from the ‘horse’ and lay on the mat gibbering and writhing. How I hated the sight of Eileen Le Cornu’s tape recorder but I suppose it was some kind of technological marvel in 1956. These lessons were held upstairs in an almost derelict warehouse on the eastern side of the school – once the Snow White Laundry. It was dusty and looked and felt rickety, unsafe. It stood at the end of a lane where ‘dirty old men’ were inclined to loiter, so we believed.

Sports days were another matter altogether – something akin to real torture, especially the practice sessions in the yard. I inwardly rebelled because we were forced into this. The intricacies, let alone the sense, of tunnel ball, pass the baton and other team games eluded me. Costumed in baggy black shorts and sand shoes we were all awkward gangling girls, me worse than most – longing to hide in a corner with a Dickens novel. As well we were forced to take tennis lessons or to ride up the steep Bakewell Bridge, me gasping for breath, to play more silly games like volleyball, on the Railway Oval.

The school motto was ‘Build Together’. I thought this very bland and longed for a Latin one. I inscribed my own on my ruler – Nil sine labore. Thebarton Girls insignia was a bridge with a bird flying over it and this was embroidered in blue, gold and white on our blazer pockets. The soft, navy felt hats had a matching blue, gold and white band, with a metal hat-band badge bearing the same bird design. The rest of our uniform was uninspiring. A navy serge pleated uniform with a square yoke; white shirt, tie striped with the school colours (that had to be tied properly in a Windsor knot); lace up shoes, stockings, gloves. In summer a straw hat and lighter navy dress replaced the gloomy winter attire. When I started in 1956 the headmistress was Mavis Watkinson, described so exactly by Barbara Hanrahan. Ruth Park was the deputy, a thin, unsmiling lady. When Zena Vera Williams arrived (I think in my second year) I remember her giving an inspirational speech on the matter of birds flying over symbolic bridges.

An ornate 1930s building, just across Taylors Road – the Thebarton Town Hall – was almost an annexe of the school. Assemblies were held there regularly on Monday morning. I suppose they consisted of general message dissemination, organisation, and inspirational talks but I can’t recall much more than choir work and speeches by girls like the ‘sporty’ head prefect who caused audible gasps from the audience by addressing us as ‘youse girls’. The School Ball and Speech Days were held in the Town Hall. More torture sessions! The Ball was regimented and stiffly formal. I usually stood upstairs and watched the supposedly sophisticated girls with their boy friends. It looked like another world that I’d never enter. The day that I was singled out in front of a Speech Day audience as the girl who got the most credits in the Intermediate Certificate I remember more as a surreal dream rather than an occasion where I should have felt pleased with myself. It didn’t feel like much of an achievement to be top in dressmaking and typing, home economics and history; to be top in English was another matter!

Some rooms and staff are memorable. The science lab, for one, was presided over by ‘old Buring’ as we rudely named him. I admired his precision and was enchanted by the magic of the laboratory with its Bunsen burners and rows of chemicals in jars. There was a ‘light wheel’ made up of the colours of the rainbow which, when spun, turned white, and prisms that sent flashing colours around the room. Mr Buring rode a bicycle, and wore clips on his trouser cuffs. On the back carrier was strapped ‘the mysterious Weetbix box’. We speculated endlessly but never discovered what was in it; it certainly wasn’t Weetbix. I still have my science book, the one where we recorded the experiments, and after 40 years I can still remember the feeling of excitement when observing the ‘magical’ but predictable results.

If there was generally a sense of grinding dullness, English was the exception. I relished every moment. We read Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in class and I played Olivia. Another memorable exercise was dramatising a poem called The Highwayman, and always the novels lured me. I still own several poetry anthologies, but not my Bradbury Grammar book. Amongst the weird, I adored parsing sentences and working my way through formal grammar exercises. I recall having to present a book review and deliberately choosing something provocative from C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. Writing also went on at home. Each night I created a verbal chapter in a long, highly dramatic serial-type story which I told my sisters once we were in bed. I later wrote it down and one of my sisters illustrated the chapters.

Miss Fowler is the only English teacher I remember clearly. She was intent on creating a simple grammar book to be understood by all students. Her love of literature was obvious. She had a curious habit of categorising students as either ‘fairies’ or ‘elephants’, as we noisily moved between lessons.

One set of books still in my possession is Tenen’s This England, the standard history text book; I also have Portus’ Australia Since 1606. Miss Jolly – most memorable of all teachers – took us for history. I have never forgotten a rousing lecture on ‘how you must take responsibility for your own results’ in the impending Intermediate exam – a ‘lecture’ I now repeat to my own students. Unforgettable were her entrances, generally stormy and scowling, dressed in black or dark green. Pacing the platform was part of her teaching technique, and to drive a point home there’d be a map with a legend scribbled on the board. On wintry days Miss Jolly gravitated towards the one meagre fire in the classroom and stayed there, flinging paper tissues into the fire.

In domestic arts we learned how to wash windows, iron shirts and clean a hair brush; as well as many tiresome procedures for cooking meals and cakes, all of which I was already thoroughly familiar with. There was no art to it, it was simply practical and without challenge.

Dorothy Morris led me through embroidery, water colour design, and other kinds of ‘art’. There was another art teacher, Miss Stoward, and it was whispered that ‘she was a famous artist’. Why we felt this was secret is a mystery.

Lessons in dressmaking were a mindless escape. Since I could already sew quite well I hardly needed teaching, so this was a good dreaming time. Miss Jones didn’t suffer any nonsense and often annoyed me by making sour remarks about ‘students who thought they could take on difficult sewing tasks’, for example a dress with a flared skirt and a collar in broderie anglaise cut on the cross. One day at home I said, ‘Curse her.’ My mother convinced me that something terrible would happen, that somehow, like the fig tree in the Bible, Miss Jones would wither up and I’d be responsible.

Typing and book-keeping were taught by a middle-aged man with a blue rinse in his wavy hair. Miss Paterson taught shorthand and there was something of a challenge in this subject; it was a bit like a language. Typing must have appealed to my sense of order and rhythm and the skill came easily. It’s a nice irony that these commercial subjects, preferred by my parents, have continued to make me employable.

I went for one term only to the camera club, but I bought myself a German box camera with an adjustable lens, plus a case to keep it in. The case with my initials in gold on the front still carries my current camera.

I enjoyed ordinary music lessons, that is singing, taken by the lively, petite Mrs Roberts-Goodman, that is Miss Mavis Roberts. She knew her music and also organised the club that put on annual ‘operas’. One year it was Hansel and Gretel; I was the Sandman and spent hours sewing sequins onto a long grey cloak. Performed in the Australia Hall, Angas Street, it was a traumatic occasion. Ellie, the girl who played the Witch forgot her lines entirely and ad-libbed in the most dramatic manner, shrieking and cackling and rushing about the stage on her broom; Miss Roberts had to leave her conductor’s stand and come up and put a stop to the hysteria. No-one mentioned whether I did well or not. Generally I think it was something of a flop.

Many girls who were my colleagues at school remain vague and colourless even as I look again at their photographs. There were no radicals, no lively personalities. Even Barbara Hanrahan ‘fitted in’. (There was an early painting of hers of Saint Francis that decorated the office foyer). I remember her wearing a cardigan under her thin blazer. This struck me – she looked poor and awkward.

There were rumours, but they didn’t interest me much, of the girl in second year who was expelled, something to do with loitering outside the fence of Thebby Boys Tech in Ashley Street. The more spicy versions said she was pregnant.

Helen Whitehorne’s death stunned us all. Her ghostly face is captured in 3AB’s class photo. She was a quiet girl, suddenly made ‘famous’ because of the fierce speed of a cancer that grew and killed her.

I had no particular friends – the most faithful was Coralie Knighton; she was a gentle and kind soul. While passionate issues absorbed me, and thinking caused a lot of unnecessary anguish, Coralie went quietly on. I have never forgotten her reply when I was obsessed with the fact that I was killing ants by inadvertently stepping on them: it was all high moral ground to me, but she simply told me not to be silly, that ‘they would easily slip into the cracks and not be killed’.

In second year two girls fascinated me. I sensed something quite unknown about them, an aura of intrigue and passion. I caught glimpses of it and couldn’t work out what was going on. I loitered near them at playtime, struggling to understand why they seemed so absorbed with each other. In the school production of Merrie England they appropriately played Robert Dudley and Lady Anne. They didn’t need to act, the passion was already there.

At home the piano claimed almost my total attention; school work took a lot of time too, because I believed I had to give complete effort to achieve the academic excellence I always aimed for. Music and literature provided the focus and interest in those years and most of my important reading went on in every spare moment away from school. I discovered T.S. Eliot by myself and, thanks to Miss Jolly, moved along in my musical education to discover the world of Brahms – a world filled with an intensity and passion that seemed to match my own, and explained something of those feelings that kept me isolated from my peers.

Thebarton Girls Technical School brings back memories more of feelings than actions. I was learning more about myself than anything, discovering the frustration of having to conform, yet glimpsing something of the kind of life that was to elude me for years.

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