BURNING BRIGHT
Teaching Drama 1963 – 1996
by
Frank McKone
In the Foyer for Pre-Show Entertainment
My teaching career spanned the years of huge change in Australian education, from the 1950s to the the promise of a new world order in the 21st Century.
I’ve made it a three-act drama, with two brief intervals, and an epilogue with extra information. The story begins in a remote Australian mining town, Broken Hill, in 1963. The finale takes place in sophisticated Canberra, Australia’s capital city, in 1996.
From the dusty fly-blown outback, via Sydney and the New South Wales Central Coast, and on to the foothills of the 1850 metre high Brindabella Ranges – freezing in winter, bushfires in summer – in the Bush Capital, on the ground it’s a 1200 kilometre journey. In my mind, this is a trip from the rough-and-ready to a settled place; from intrepid exploration to what I see as a high point of understanding. We begin low with 40 minutes a week reading plays in the English classroom (between Grammar, Short Stories and Poetry). We reach the heights in the musical Tyger, written by Adrian Mitchell with music by Mike Westbrook, in my school’s well-equipped 250 seat theatre.
Please be seated.
In the style of Tennessee Williams, above the stage appears the sign
Palma non sine pulvere
This is the motto of Broken Hill High School, which translates metaphorically as
Victory not without toil
or literally as
Shall be free from dust
Explanation:
This is an allusion to Horace, Epistulae, 1.1.51: 'cui sit condicio dulcis sine pulvere palmae'.
'Pulvere' is the ablative case of 'pulvis' which literally means 'dust' but here is used metaphorically for any great toil, effort, or labour. Similarly 'palma' literally means 'palm' (of the tree, carried or won as a sign of victory) but here is used metaphorically for 'victory'.
[ https://www.proz.com/kudoz/latin-to-english/education-pedagogy/2462981-palma-non-sine-pulvere.html ]
ACT ONE: Kicking Up the Dust 1963-65
Scene Locations:
Broken Hill High School
Broken Hill Repertory Theatre
From a beginning teacher’s viewpoint, Broken Hill High School in the height of summer, late January 1963, was an unknown unknown. I had known the dun-coloured city of London, England, where I lived for my first 14 years. By now I knew the visibly magnificent city of Sydney, where I completed my senior secondary schooling and undergraduate education. By now, too, I was a bushwalker, thoroughly used to navigating across rough country in the coastal ranges. But driving for the first time to the far west over the Blue Mountains, where the horizon was a hugely distant circle of hardly visible trees around me, inscribed on an entirely flat surface, I strangely felt as if I were not moving at all as the tiny town of Nevertire slowly disappeared far behind me.
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| Nevertire, New South Wales, Australia |
How would I now come to terms with living – and with the responsibility of teaching – in this mining town, 735 miles (1176 kms) from the New South Wales Department of Education Head Office in Sydney; and where the miners’ unions supposedly had absolute control? I had heard the stories of the six months’ strike in 1919, the ban on married women working, the ban on any woman going underground on the line of lode, and the ban on a man being employed unless he had lived in ‘The Hill’ for at least ten years.
How would I teach the children of these workers who ran their city of 30,000 as if it were an independent city-state? “Where d’ya live to?” they asked. “Aah,” they said. “From away!” And so I was defined, and wondered if it would be ten years before I might have any effect here.
Being single, appointed to Broken Hill for an expected three years’ minimum, I saw this as an opportunity for adventure and to follow up my interests in bushwalking and theatre.
The High School was probably the largest in the State of New South Wales, so my teaching career began with limited chances of early advancement. I would be teaching English and Social Studies to classes only in Years 7 and 8, in a 7 – 12 high school, except for one class in Year 9 still known as 3rd Form. The school was in transition from the colonial British grammar school system of five ‘Forms’ to a new arrangement of 12 ‘Years’ from Kindergarten to Matriculation. Over my three years, in a strictly hierarchical system, I taught the lowest 3rd Form, 1A, 1D, 1J, 1K, 1L, 2B, and 2H.
In the school context, the nearest I got to bushwalking was to form a team of the most difficult boys in the 3rd Form class to compete in the inaugural annual 10-mile charity walkathon. The backstory for this event was that the insolence of Larry, who was – at 14 – at least a foot taller than me, had persuaded me to accept corporal punishment as a weapon of last resort. I quickly learnt my lesson. The deputy principal’s caning made no difference to Larry’s behaviour. I don’t think he even became more resentful of me. For him, to be treated like this was normal. Though it was a long wait for the opportunity to arise, training for the mid-year winter walkathon eased some of my pain.
It wasn’t just the physical activity, but the sense of freedom walking out on dirt tracks miles away from town, and the excitement – of a king brown snake. Before I quite realised what was going on, the lads were off across country, one of them picking up a large flattish rock. As he dropped it, another jumped on it, standing still while others pulled at something. It was the tail of a seven-foot long snake, as thick as my arm. Their whoops of joy rang out as the head came off, and we marched in quick time home with wriggling remains of snake – one of Australia’s most deadly – over our shoulder. Not my shoulder, nor back to my home, thank goodness!
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| King Brown Snake also known as Mulga Snake |
As I came to appreciate the strength of community feeling in this town, isolated not only geographically but socially – it was known as ‘Sin City’ in the sensationalist big-city tabloid newspapers – I realised that to teach effectively I needed to become part of the social network, rather than take the view of many of my colleagues ‘from away’, which was to see themselves as temporary, aiming to get back to ‘civilisation’ as soon as they could get a transfer.
The size of the school – more than 1700 students when other high schools usually held no more than 1200 – was a factor in their attitude. But the reason for the size was that the Minister for Education, Ernie Wetherell, representing the Far West constituency centred on Cobar, (the next famous mining town 450 kms east of BH), had been a Broken Hill lad. He refused to divide the city by splitting up the High School into Broken Hill North and Broken Hill South. For him the unity of the community was sacrosanct. In the years before I arrived, when the city’s population was at its maximum around 50,000, the High School had blown out to 2,200!
Innovation, mining and bush regeneration
February 26, 2014
By Anni Turnbull
February 26, 2014
By Anni Turnbull
There was no bushwalking club, so I joined the Barrier Field Naturalists’ Club. The ‘barrier’ in their title meant the Barrier Ranges, a long line of quite low hills which provided many places, mainly on pastoral sheep stations, to explore for plant and bird species. The local expert was a doyenne of Broken Hill life, May Harding, who also taught art at the Technical College.
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| May Harding https://trove.nla.gov.au/people/716082?q&c=people |
Though I have to admit my skills developed only marginally, since I did not naturally translate what I could see onto the sketch book page, my understanding of visual art grew. I was fortunate to find myself in the same class as an underground mineworker, Kevin, now known as Pro Hart, who was on the verge of abandoning mining to open his first one-man show at the Kim Bonython Gallery in Adelaide. I bought an unusual experimental landscape, in green, from Pro for £5!, and, years later, he gave me and my wife a small landscape in his more usual outback red, as a wedding present. Both paintings still grace our home. That’s a little in-joke, because I originally bought the Pinnacles for my mother, Grace.
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| The Pinnacles (1963) and Near Menindee (1966) Pro Hart Photo ©Meg McKone |
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=xoJWAAAAIBAJ&sjid=7-QDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6888%2C6900955
Mrs Stevenson had become a matriarch, always known as ‘Mrs Stevenson’, or ‘The Missus’ by old timers, and also had a few flats to rent, one of which I shared with other teachers, Peter Farry and Pat Harte. Pat was a science teacher who scared the whole school while demonstrating implosion. Instead of using a small container to exhaust the air from and make a minor ‘pop’ to demonstrate how the outside pressure would collapse the tin, he used a 2 gallon kerosene tin. The implosion-explosion reverberated around the three sides of the main stone building as it might in a rock canyon.
Pat, after a couple of years’ teaching, met some geologists doing helicopter gravity surveys, and ended up based in Canada with a career in oil drilling in North Africa, and we still keep in occasional contact 50 years later.
Bill Stevenson had a workshop in the backyard, where we spent many hours keeping my Series 1 Landrover in working order; while Jean became a teacher facing the same inspector as I did – with a similar result, because she related to the teenagers in Broken Hill as a Broken Hill person, instead of as if she came ‘from away’.
My friendships with locals – artist Pro Hart, art collector and historian Geoff Lithgow, Australian Broadcasting Commission radio personality John Pickup, and the Stephenson family among many others – meant I learnt as much or more from my three years there as ever I might pretend I taught. And this was true of my interest in theatre. As a school student in my matriculation years I had discovered George Bernard Shaw, firstly because of his socialist writings, such as The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism.
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| Cover of The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism Bernard Shaw Constable 1928 |
Shaw had introduced me to reading plays. In 1956, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, written in 1941/42, was finally published three years after this famous playwright’s death. It became news in Sydney that the play would be presented at the Australian Elizabethan Theatre in Newtown, and I think this was the trigger for me to research Eugene O’Neill for my English class presentation. Long Day’s Journey was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 and I saw the production, with Frank Waters as Tyrone and Dinah Shearing as Mary Tyrone, in 1959. From ‘The Gods’ in the highest and most distant balcony in the theatre, all I could afford, I was completely absorbed in the emotion of this dysfunctional family, and drawn in further by the knowledge that it was the author’s own life being revealed through art.
In the meantime I had read every one of O’Neill’s works, studied each for the experimental techniques he used, and took on something of the mysticism of his belief that he should not see his plays on stage because he could always do a better production in his own mind.
I sought out other work to see. Though Alvin Ailey’s Dance Company presented lighter work, I took the opportunity to go backstage, meet the lighting technician and study the expansive lighting plan for such ever-changing dance on such a large stage. My building industry parents had thought I might become an electrician like my uncles, and I could see the connection here.
Merce Cunningham was a quite different experience: images taken from life and abstracted into movement with its own emotional language; even at one point without the crutch of supporting music. To see such intense dance done in complete silence has been an essential memory all my life.
Through my years at Sydney University I had maintained my sense of purity and integrity derived from absorbing Eugene O’Neill. I therefore found the Sydney University Drama Society rather too superficial, not up to the kind of intensity that I required of theatre work. And so I brought to Broken Hill an expectation of finding ways of working at this level. When I got there, of course, drama in the English classroom was no more than stilted reading around the class; and the extra-curricular drama productions were directed by the music teacher. But they were, fortunately, Gilbert and Sullivan, whose work is demanding, and full of satirical humour, which went down very well in this anti-authoritarian mining town.
I learnt to lighten up! (And later learnt that I had left behind in SUDS people like Albie Thoms, who went on to become an important avant-garde film-maker.)
I also had to learn not to assume a prima donna directorial role. The head music teacher always directed the stage production, the other music teacher conducted, and a woodwork teacher designed and built the sets. I found myself in a dual role.
First was stage technician, which meant rigging and operating curtains and lights, using ten very hot rheostat dimmers, with levers longer than on one-armed bandits (old-fashioned poker machines). These were set up with five on each side, so that either you needed two people (who can’t see each other because the rack is between them), one to operate 1 – 5 and the other 6 – 10, or one person who madly runs around the rack to make changes. For The Pirates of Penzance I had 13 foolscap pages of lighting cues, including re-patching plugs to use different lights in different scenes, as well as setting levels, and training a keen 3rd Former (not one from my lowest English class) to operate opposite me. Very satisfying!
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| A rheostat resistance dimmer rack Mine was less cluttered with other equipment. The sets of five dimmer levers were placed one on the front side, the other on the rear side. |
The next obvious thing to do was to join Broken Hill Repertory Theatre. This was the one institution where ‘staff’ (that is, managers and administrators) from the three large mines on the line of lode came into contact with ‘town’ – the underground workers, small business people and people ‘from away’ like bank officers and teachers. My participation (1964: The Roaring Days!, The Reluctant Debutante; 1965: South Pacific, The Teahouse of the August Moon, The Harp in the South, All My Sons) ranged from acting a comic miner (I was the short one) in The Roaring Days!, a musical about the beginning of mining at Broken Hill in the 1880s by John Pickup; to All My Sons by Arthur Miller which I directed.
At the High School I teamed up with Don Hammond (who also acted in Teahouse) to add variety to the Gilbert and Sullivan offerings by establishing a Drama Club. There was no provision in the school’s financial arrangements to fund out-of-classtime activities, so we inveigled staff to take part in a fundraiser, aiming to present a serious drama with mainly Year 7 to Year 9s who joined the club.
We devised a 10-minute Macbeth in which Macduff flew in to the attack on a flying-fox arrangement (much later to come to mind when the chandelier flew down over the audience in Phantom of the Opera, and quite in keeping with nearby mining operations); while the high moment of tension took place around the aspidistra and the whatnot in Out in the Cold, Cold Snow. Being producer, director and production manager as well as actor (and teacher!) meant that I had not had time to learn my cues, or in fact most of my words. So as we huddled around the whatnot furiously polishing the aspidistra leaves, the others fed me my lines, much to the amusement of the crowd.
The evening gave us enough cash without having to draw on students’ money for sets and props for Cloud Over the Morning by T B Morris (1959). The story of children naively trying to help in an internecine war, the youngest being killed unwittingly by a bomb planted by their own side, was a telling tragedy in a mining town where sirens would warn of impending blasts. For me this production was an important first experience of successfully working with young people to create a highly emotional impact on stage. But I was only on the cusp of beginning to learn about how drama can spill over off-stage – fortunately in this case into a strong sense of satisfaction for the performers. It was much later in my career, with students playing Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill, before I came to understand more of the depth and spread of emotional overflow; and much later again before I learnt how to plan, implement and guide the workshop, rehearsal, performance and learning process.
Out of school, performing in so many different types of shows over two years saw me find my inner clown, as the comic foil David Bulloch in The Reluctant Debutante (William Douglas Home 1956); as the shortest miner, bopped on the head as he tried to clamber up to reach the good-time girls in The Roaring Days!; and as one of the sailors in South Pacific getting down to bass-ics in ‘Nothing Like a Dame’. I also had to drive an original World War II jeep, with a loose gear lever and virtually no brakes, out of a mine pit, up a ramp crossways onto a flatbed truck, so that I could drive it off the other side onto the raised stage for Teahouse of the August Moon.
That show also taught me to respect Rep’s tradition that a proposed new director had first to be assistant director with an experienced, reliable and trusted mentor. Unfortunately, I laughed so much in rehearsals for Teahouse that Pat Calder finally tossed me on stage as a Japanese peasant.
Back in the classroom, during the 10 nights’ season, my little goatee dyed black was hardly conducive to the normal standards of school discipline; but especially, chrome yellow make-up had its moments. “You’ve got yellow ears, Sir!” came the dreaded cry.
Yet the Committee still accepted my request to direct All My Sons (Arthur Miller, 1947), but only after rejecting my proposal for Look Back in Anger (John Osborne, 1956). It seemed to me at the time that the Committee was not yet ready for kitchen sink drama; but within a few years of my departure they had produced modern Australian works: Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and The One Day of the Year by Alan Seymour, as well as An Enemy of the People (Henrik Ibsen’s still relevant highly political play of 1882).
As it turned out, All My Sons, about the supplier of faulty aeroplane engines to the US war effort, whose elder-son was pilot of a plane which crashed while flying a mission, was just right for an industrial city where machinery had always to be relied on. Corruption or just cutting financial corners to make more profit could easily result in deaths above and below ground. In fact the early history of Broken Hill showed up the risk.
In my last year there, as I was working on All My Sons, I joined with others to form a Historical Society. We found a room in an old building near Argent Street which had once housed a library but was now disused. I discovered books – pages after pages – of death certificates from the period 10 or 15 years prior to World War I. Time and again there were the names of young men, aged around 15 to 18. Cause of death: lead poisoning. Why? Because the mines were not ventilated. Result: finally, after that six months’ strike in 1919 I had heard about, the mine owners agreed to put in the huge extraction fans needed to make a silver, lead and zinc mine safe to work in.
All My Sons was also a turning point for my thinking about staging drama. It is an interesting play in the development of Miller’s use of symbolism, written a couple of years before Death of a Salesman. The apple tree, whole in the first act but broken in the second, was a simple device. I needed to give the image more emotional significance and realised for the first time how colour and lighting were as direct in their effects on feelings as music is. Using lighting I could create the contrasts I wanted between the moods of sunlight and moonlight, with a warning implied in a blue whole tree before the storm, which turned broken and red before the impending death, as the single light in the upstairs bedroom window switched off and the gunshot exploded in the silence.
Though the gunshot was no more than a long piece of wood, one end held under the stage manager’s foot, and let go to strike the stage floor along its length, each night that ensuing silence hung undisturbed while the mother and the remaining son sat ever so still in the dark, for at least half a minute – and some nights for more than a minute – before the stage manager would slowly bring lights up ready for curtain call. I did not use a curtain, but waited for the audience to begin to respond with applause before Kate Keller (Marilyn Hall) would softly rise and walk forward in increasing light, bringing her surviving son Chris (Ken Mount) with her. Only when he felt ready did Jim Leo, the now dead Joe Keller, enter on stage from the wings, followed in sombre mood by the rest of the cast.
The feeling was unforgettable, especially for the young woman playing the middle-aged wife. However, one member of the audience on 25th September 1965, the reviewer Ted Mosher, wrote in the Barrier Daily Truth: For those who like comedy and "escape" plays, it must be said that Arthur Miller, the American playwright who married Marilyn Monroe, is rather morbid, and there is a sort of hopeless inevitability about his “All My Sons” which had a depressing effect on this critic at least.
And so it should have, as Wikipedia records in some detail:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_My_Sons
All My Sons is based upon a true story, which Arthur Miller's then mother-in-law pointed out in an Ohio newspaper. The news story described how in 1941-43 the Wright Aeronautical Corporation based in Ohio had conspired with army inspection officers to approve defective aircraft engines destined for military use. The story of defective engines had reached investigators working for Sen. Harry Truman's congressional investigative board after several Wright aircraft assembly workers informed on the company; they would later testify under oath before Congress. In 1944, three Army Air Force officers, Lt. Col. Frank C. Greulich, Major Walter A. Ryan, and Major William Bruckmann were relieved and later convicted of neglect of duty.
Just the story for Broken Hill, where, in a mass meeting of the miners’ union (which I attended as a teachers’ union ‘observer’ through the good graces of a friendly parent), the grass-roots members spoke out and voted against the union leadership. The motion was to no longer give money to continue supporting the union members on strike in Mount Isa, the copper mining town in Queensland. The motion was lost, much to the union president’s chagrin.
Though I had worked on building sites to help pay my way as a student, I was surprised – and impressed – by the capacity of the mine workers to argue their case, against their own leadership, in an open-air stadium, speaking to several hundred members without microphones. This was drama in real life.
I was never privy to the whole story of why these union ‘bosses’ were seemingly acting in the interests of the mine owners. The strike which began in August 1964, was initially over the issue of adequate showers for men at the end of shift. It escalated into a demand for a £4 a week wage rise and better conditions.
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/obituaries/rank-and-file-hero-who-led-mt-isa-miners-strike-20091204-kb1b.html
But this 2009 Sydney Morning Herald obituary did not go on to explain what I discovered at the time. Pat Mackie, as a union organiser, traditionally had the right to attend union business in work-time. But the Mt Isa mine management sacked him for this, only after the industrial negotiations had been under way for quite some time. The workers saw Pat as having represented them in good faith and according to accepted industrial rules. It was his sacking which was the trigger for the strike to begin. But why did the management choose that moment to take action which they knew would start a strike?
The answer came from an examination of the price of copper, the main product of Mt Isa Mines. Over-production or lower international demand meant the price was dropping rapidly in mid-1964. After many weeks on strike, with the mine shut down and production reduced, the price began to rise again. The motion in Broken Hill, if passed, would shorten the strike as Mt Isa miners would have run out of money. The rejection of their leaders’ motion meant the Mt Isa miners had support for longer. Finally, after 32 weeks of the strike, the Mt Isa Mines managers must have reached the point where the price had risen high enough to recoup the losses, and also so high that they could not afford to take the risk of losing market share. So Pat Mackie was mysteriously reinstated, and the strike ended.
Perhaps the union leadership were acting in collusion with the mining company, or were being threatened with total shut down of Mt Isa Mines, and were willing to sacrifice Pat Mackie to save their members’ jobs. What happened about the showers and the wage rise I don’t remember, but surely there was a story here for the likes of Arthur Miller – and a good reason for All My Sons having a very successful season at Broken Hill Repertory Theatre.
But now, to conclude my Act One, I should return to my teaching experience in the school and in relations with the NSW Department of Education.
I always had the feeling that because Australia had begun its modern life in New South Wales as a penal colony way back in 1788, government in that state remained hierarchical and authoritarian, despite Australians regularly claiming to be egalitarian in the ‘Lucky Country’ of the ‘fair go’. So there was both an anti-authority strand in society, which the workers in Broken Hill amply demonstrated, alongside an authoritarian strand also demonstrated in Broken Hill by the dictatorial powers that the union leadership supposedly commanded.
Why were married women not allowed to work, for example? As The Honourable Justice Mary Gaudron said at a law school graduation ceremony in 1999:
Forty years ago, there was much for a young graduate to question, particularly a young law graduate. Despite our democratic traditions, despite our self-proclaimed egalitarianism and despite our commitment to a fair go, ours was a society of marked inequalities, inequalities which were often entrenched or reinforced by the law itself. A working woman was, by law, worth approximately two-thirds of a male worker doing the same job. In some contexts, a woman was worth nothing at all. For example, a married woman could not work in the Commonwealth Public Service.
http://www.hcourt.gov.au/assets/publications/speeches/former-justices/gaudronj/gaudronj_sydusp2.htm
In the NSW Public Service the 1932 Married Women (Lecturers and Teachers) Act, which had immediately meant the dismissal of some 200 teachers, had to be amended in 1935 to allow for ‘special cases’ – but limited by an annual investigation into matters like whether the husband’s income was sufficient to support the family, in which case the wife would lose her job. This legislation was repealed in 1947 essentially because of the extreme shortage of teachers, as a report in the Sydney Morning Herald shows (trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/18053440).
The Barrier Industrial Council was finally brought to the heel of equality in 1981 by Mrs Jeanine Whitehair, who was employed as the most senior of five dental assistants at the Town Dental Clinic in Broken Hill. After her marriage in November 1980, Jeanine was one of three people who lost their jobs at the clinic purportedly for economic reasons. With the support of the New South Wales Equal Opportunities Board, Jeanine was successful in her attempt to seek reinstatement. This was a landmark case which not only engendered a significant shift in the nature of women's employment in Broken Hill, but also signalled the beginnings of the erosion of the power of the Barrier Industrial Council.
(Georgia Moodie http://www.womenaustralia.info/biogs/AWE4104b.htm )
Being a young graduate I found much to question, not only in my first years of teaching but as I grew older throughout my 33 year career. Some issues were about my community involvement. Generally no-one complained about my stage performances, but one particularly ludicrous situation arose. As a bushwalker I was keen to continue long-distance walking, so I planned to spend a free Sunday on a 50 mile (80kms) walk – 25 miles out of town and back. Some of my students were keen to assist, though they were too young take on the whole distance. So with their parents’ permission a group rode their pushbikes alongside me for the first hour or so, setting me a good pace. Their camaraderie set me up for an average of 4 miles per hour which made for a satisfying day’s walking.
My planned walk became common knowledge, just as news about anyone rapidly flashed down Argent Street as everyone went shopping on Saturday mornings. Early in the week before the chosen Sunday I was having my haircut when the barber asked me about the walk. Shoes became the subject of conversation. For speed and light weight I used Dunlop Volley sandshoes.
“You’ll wear a pair out on a walk like that,” the barber thought. Then he thought some more and said “I’ll give you a pair!” Well...! The next day, Tuesday, the Barrier Daily Truth published a short piece about this momentous example of sponsorship by a local business. On Thursday, my Principal called me up to his office.
“You can’t do it,” he said as a highly mysterious opener to the conversation. I’m sorry, can’t do what? “This walk,” he said. It was the business of the sandshoes.
It turned out that in the Department of Education head office in Sydney somebody was employed to read through every newspaper published in the whole of New South Wales every morning to note any reference to any teacher. I did the walk in my own sandshoes, of course, but I believe the issue, technically, for the Department was that a teacher was not allowed to have a second job without permission of the Director General. Rather than see the value of my being supported by the local community to the tune of a few £’s, the rules were to be followed to a silly extent.
Since my Principal already saw me as a maverick with no proper classroom discipline, he was probably glad to have an opportunity to thwart me. But in town, both the barber and myself gained in reputation, as these authorities ‘from away’ proved how little they understood Broken Hill.
This, my first Principal, had me in his crosshairs on another hairy matter. I had been one of the few men in Sydney to sport a beard. Because I wasn’t sure how this would be received in Broken Hill, I had shaved before my first appearance. After two months, I returned to Sydney for Easter, deciding that shaving was for other men. When I reappeared with a few days’ stubble, Stewart Garnsey bailed me up in a corridor to demand that I shave.
“On what grounds?” I asked. “Your classroom discipline,” he growled. “Or rather, lack of it!”
“Ah,” I said. “Give me two weeks. If my classroom discipline is worse by then than it is now, I’ll shave.” Knowing, of course, that my classroom discipline could never be worse than having a complete lack of it. Fortunately, my standing up to him left him red-faced but silent. The only time I shaved after this was when I had acting parts in plays.
And so it is that I come to the stories of 1A, 2B and 1K.
1A were bright, energetic, enthusiastic – and noisy. In the new education system which had just begun, the Wyndham Scheme, students’ intelligence quotients (IQ) were used to put them into ‘Advanced’, ‘Credit’ or ‘Ordinary’ classes. I had completed three years’ Psychology in my undergraduate degree and, having studied the Binet and Wechsler tests which were used, I had my doubts about the scientific value of this approach. I had also studied the new ideas about people management.
1A became my first experiment. The students loved it, because my way was based on the idea of group cooperation; getting on with things without the teacher boring them or, in 1A’s case, slowing them down; and taking responsibility for their own learning.
I trust that in modern times as you read this book, these ideas do not seem too radical. In 1963, the result was conflict with other teachers taking the class for other subjects; a year’s delay on my being passed by an Inspector for permanency and a salary upgrade; and a serious attempt on my part to leave teaching.
To take these in turn – I was teaching Year 7 English and Social Studies with a curriculum which was already terribly old-fashioned. Even for academically capable students, but especially in the social context of Broken Hill, top-down instruction was not what they needed to open up their responses to arts and history. Outside the school the arts and history were vibrant forces in daily life, as Pro Hart, the Repertory Theatre and the drama of the union movement made clear.
Inside, they were expected to have their desks in serried rows, watch the blackboard and listen to the teacher without comment – and learn all they needed to know. Harold Wyndham, though, in the forefront of new developments in education, had taken ten years since his appointment as Director-General in 1952 to set up his new scheme, about which Wikipedia records: Key amongst the changes was the objective of presenting all students with the opportunity to experience a wide range of subjects, including visual arts, industrial arts, music and drama, and a wide range of languages. The Five-year Secondary School system was abandoned in favour of adding another year to the course, with major state-wide external examinations at the end of the tenth (School Certificate) and the twelfth (Higher School Certificate) years of schooling. This was my new system, and I was determined to take every opportunity to fulfil its aims.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Wyndham
So I moved the furniture. I took the 1A class for fourteen 40 minute periods per week, in which I set up the (fortunately small) desks into groups scattered about the room, so that my 41 students were divided into 8.2 groups, with 5 in each facing each other in a squarish circle. Using my knowledge of the newly published information about the Volvo car manufacturing management techniques, I observed the dynamics in each group and chose, after consulting the five members in each case (the 0.2 made one group 6) one of their number to be the ‘foreman’.
They had chosen their own groups in the first place, so most groups were of boys or girls with a few mixed. The class had about the same number of each sex in total. I didn’t use the word ‘foreman’, as Volvo did in its factory. They became something like ‘organiser’ and ‘representative’, and as they did projects I found myself dealing with four girls and four boys who took the leadership roles. The result was that the class operated like a network with me as coordinator.
I had to prepare materials which could go to each group so that they could work independently. Only occasionally did I need to use the blackboard to write up instructions or a written explanation of an answer to a question that may have arisen in one group so that everyone could see it. Most of the time I would be moving around among the groups, checking how they were going, making sure as well as I could that everyone was taking part equally, and explaining things.
However ... another teacher took the same class for fourteen periods of Maths and Science. He insisted that all the desks had to be moved back into straight rows from the back to the front, each row having desks in pairs, the spaces between each row such that he could walk up and down next to every student. It appeared he could only teach to students in a grid pattern. Though I took the rap, and spent wasted time moving desks to avoid direct conflict, it was a year of bad blood, however cheerful and forthright I was. After all I was just the new, inexperienced, ineffectual youngster at the bottom of the pecking order.
By the time of my first Departmental Inspection well into the second half of the year I had come to understand and enjoy the nature of the people of Broken Hill. However I was faced with a tall spartan kind of woman who had been promoted to Inspector from the elite Sydney High. She was a stickler for convention and conformity to academic standards which had little or no relevance for most of the students I taught. She displayed no sense of humour – the very quality which I had found was necessary to establish a working relationship with these people, my students and their parents.
She came into classes, often taking them over rather than watching me work. Finally, in the crucial interview she turned out to be terribly disappointed that I had not had every English class learn a piece of poetry by heart to present to her. Of course, I took the discussion up to her, explaining about my approach to group dynamics, but – of course – I was deemed not to have passed my inspection.
But I did have a major in Psychology, which got me into more strife with the Principal. Against his apparent type, he announced – possibly under pressure from the Department to take a more modern approach – that he would hold a special staff meeting in which we younger teachers could present new ideas. We would call this inservice training in later times.
I led a presentation by a team of three, including Don Hammond, about student assessment. An important part of my degree had been the study of psychological testing, emphasising two essential issues: reliability and validity.
The theme of our talk, illustrated with quite simple examples, showed first that it was very unlikely that all the items in a test made up by a teacher would be technically reliable. Test items needed to be checked out by item analysis for faults, such as in the wording of test questions. I was still using my undergraduate notes in 1963, but the book published in 1966, Psychological Tests by Edgar Anstey, lays out “Twenty-one Types of Item Fault” from p142!
A simple example in Anstey explains the basic problem. Fill in the second word:
OBSTINATE STU . . . . .
In a group of 103 people, 33 whose mean on the whole test was 54.5 put the correct answer STUBBORN. But 10, whose mean on the whole test was 55, put the incorrect answer STUPID. This was presumably because the 10 were influenced simply by how common the word ‘stupid’ is, rather than concentrating on finding the nearest less common synonym. But their results over the whole test showed they were similar to or even a little better than the other 33. The item is at fault, not the people who chose the ‘wrong’ answer: they may all have known the correct answer but in the test situation didn’t stop to think.
In my day I had learnt the Friedman chi-square F test for analysis-of-variance, but Anstey goes into the d Method and Short-Cut Methods of item analysis.
By this stage of the inservice, our audience was already placed in the invidious position of either realising that none of their tests could be taken as reliable, or had glazed eyes of incomprehension.
But validity was the cruncher. Since no-one on staff could have their tests validated against whole populations, of which their particular class would be only a small part, the scores given to students in the classroom or even in yearly tests were virtually meaningless. As we know, statistical manipulation of raw scores to make standardised scores which allow scores to be compared across a state system or across the whole country is a huge operation.
At this point, we had shown that all the effort that went into classroom testing was pointless. Most teachers could probably guess the rank order of their students and reach just as, or more useful conclusions.
Stewart Garnsey never called another new ideas meeting, and transferred to Finley on the Murray River at the end of the year.
In the September holidays I put in an application for a job in the Vocational Guidance Bureau which was a small section of the NSW Public Service designed to assist young people, most of whom still left school at 15 in those days, mainly to find apprenticeships. The work was seen as counselling rather than mere administration, and at the interview in Sydney it was made clear to me that I was a candidate the Bureau wanted to take on.
Throughout the final term after this interview, however, I heard nothing to say that I had been accepted or rejected. But quite unexpectedly, I found I was to have another inspection, this time by the local inspector who was responsible for the Far West region. This event turned out to have the same result as before, but with an interesting twist. The gentleman inspector (I call him that because he was very polite) only observed one class. I had found some war poetry which mentioned types of aircraft, so I asked the class (especially for Year 8 boys) to draw pictures of the planes. This inspector didn’t take over the class, but walked around looking at the kid’s books, all very relaxed.
Then he said, politely, to a girl that the plane she had drawn looked like an airliner, but that wasn’t the kind of plane mentioned in the poem. He knew about warplanes because he had been a pilot in the airforce. My reaction was to ask him if he would tell us more about his experiences, but he almost seemed shy and wouldn’t offer anything further. It was a great opportunity missed from my point of view, because he could have brought the poems alive in a way I could never do.
He went away politely and I was told some time later that I still hadn’t been passed. Yet I still have the feeling that if it had been entirely up to him, I might have been OK.
In early January 1964 during the six-week Christmas holidays (this is summer in the southern hemisphere), while I was staying with my parents in Sydney, I received a telegram instructing me to attend the office of the Deputy Director of Education. This seemed an unexpected privilege considering my status in the Department.
As I entered the office, the first words spoken were “You haven’t got the job with the Vocational Guidance Bureau!” Here was another example of officialdom keeping tabs on my personal information. I came to understand later from other sources that the Bureau was not going to be allowed to ‘poach’ a Department employee.
Before I could respond to this blunt instrument piece of information, I was harangued for my behaviour in Broken Hill, but then told that I was to go back to redeem myself. This was not put in terms of any concern for my development as a teacher, but clearly as a punishment for my misdemeanours.
So I stood up and said, “I think this interview is over” and walked out.
I had a choice, but not so much as you might think. A friend of the family had taken on the role of guarantor for my Teachers’ College Scholarship which had paid not only my university fees but also a small living allowance which had been the only way I could have afforded to attend university. This scholarship required me to teach for five years. If I resigned at this point, my guarantor would be expected to cough up perhaps £500 – but I knew there was no way he could afford it, or should be put in the position of having to face up to such a demand because of my self-indulgence. My year’s wages were no more than the amount that would be owed, so my savings at that point would be nowhere near enough. My parents were certainly in no position to help from their small plastering sub-contracting business.
Even considering the Department’s dictatorial approach, it was also true that I enjoyed teaching young people, and I was confident that my approach was the right way to go, even if I was never going to be the sort of disciplinarian that people like the Deputy Director assumed I should be. I knew that a teacher could not become too close to his students personally, but I also knew that for the student to be motivated to learn, humour and friendship were an essential ingredient. Psychology made it clear to me that motivation was the key to all learning: students only really internalise new learning because they are emotionally engaged.
And there was no doubt that I was not going to let the Department win.
So I began my second year, still with no permanent Teaching Certificate, with a new Principal. Unfortunately I proceeded to put this Principal into a difficult spot. 2B was the other academically ‘good’ class I had, so I introduced them to literature, including To Sir, With Love by E.R.Braithwaite. This was a famous semi-autobiographical novel by a black teacher in a school in London long before Britain became anything like as multicultural as it is now. In a sense, his experiences were a bit like mine teaching in Broken Hill ‘from away’.
The book is still famous (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._R._Braithwaite ) and is a regular on curriculum reading lists, but although I only presented it to the class by reading passages, carefully chosen to avoid controversy, a parent complained to the Principal. One feature of the new Wyndham Scheme was that class materials were no longer to be strictly prescribed. No longer was it true that at any point in time one could know that every Year 8 student would be reading the same text. Now the teacher could and should choose material to suit the class, and for this class To Sir, With Love could generate lively discussion about the characters, the story, and the experience of going to school in another country, as well as about social issues such as discrimination and prejudice.
The upshot was that the Principal insisted I give him what was my only, personal, copy of the book to pass on to the parents. I never got the book back and, although I was never formally disciplined, I was probably a kind of persona non grata for having caused embarrassment to the Principal. Rather like E.R.Braithwaite’s experience, though he had a much more empathetic Principal. I was not looking forward to my inspection.
This year I taught 1J not only to remember the mediaeval ballad, Lord Rendell, but to sing it in the manner of the famous counter-tenor Alfred Deller, by playing the tune to them on the harmonica. The same woman inspector took over the class as was her wont, kept them until the lunchtime bell had rung, and then said, “And have you a poem for me?”
Lord Rendell is a long narrative ballad which the students had made fun of as they learned it, but they understood (without prompting from me) that this recitation was important to me. They did it straight without hesitation – all 10 or so verses – and Madam allowed them to go late to lunch: and gave me a pass!
What for me was even more wonderful about the students was that to be held back after the bell in the city where the unions ruled, was the worst thing that insensitive inspector could have done. They were overjoyed when I was able to tell them that their effort had resulted in success. And so I stayed in Broken Hill.
But, despite the dramas in my role as a teacher, I still haven’t written about teaching drama. In fact, it was 1K that taught me.
Trying to teach this lively, outspoken bunch of kids according to the standard approach of chalk and talk was simply nonsensical. Whatever my reputation, I simply had to find another way. I managed Social Science mainly by giving them information – for example, about the use of the shadoof in ancient Egypt – by drawing comic-book story-boards on the board. They found these interesting enough to copy into their classwork books which they were quite happy to bring out for me to inspect, giving me the opportunity to talk one-on-one or to a small group.
English was a different matter. Off the scale below 1K in the academic hierarchy, starting from 1A, were three ‘GA’ classes, called General Activity because it was believed that, with such low IQs these students were barely able to learn anything worthwhile. Though 1K might be classed as ‘slow learners’, most behaved as if they were normal kids. But writing and reading was certainly way behind the average for their age group.
Yet they had imaginations which I could hardly avoid noticing. One day I asked them to entertain me. Almost in an instant they began to act out an improvised story. From day to day they would come with different stories, many based on pirates and similar kinds of derring-do adventures. Even within one period of 40 minutes stories would diverge, sometimes into several different lines of development running in parallel in different parts of the classroom.
Though this activity hardly endeared me to those teachers who wanted classrooms to be havens of peace and quiet, fortunately our room was in a ‘portable’, that is a temporary building somewhat isolated from the main building. When it was installed as temporary I don’t know – perhaps when the school population had been 2200 – but it was certainly in use throughout my three years there.
Giving 1K the licence to entertain opened them up to the possibility of taking responsibility for what happened, and being concerned about what should happen in their classroom. For a long time most of the action was boys’ adventure. I had never had any experience of children’s improvisation and became fascinated to see how in an instant someone would pick up a shoe and immediately talk into it. Another person would hear a book ‘ringing’, pick it up and answer the other person on the shoe. I watched as over time any loose object in the room could become anything, from a foghorn on a pirate ship, to its mast, or its navigation light, or a megaphone to speak through the fog to the captain of another ship.
But I was concerned that most of this kind of action involved the boys – and there were more boys than girls in the class. A group of three girls obviously looked down on these dramas, and one day announced that what was happening was stupid. They would put on a play.
Over a period of a week or more, these girls took charge. The script was never written down, in fact I don’t even remember a title, but they did what in later times we would learn to call ‘workshopping’. They set people to improvising ideas for a dramatic story, which gradually coalesced into the tragic story of a princess who had two lovers. The whole class could be involved as members of the court, encouraging the princess to decide. But she could see the good sides of both, and found them so equal that she couldn’t make up her mind which to accept.
Finally, in a ritual ending, the two suitors were set up to fight each other: the winner to have her hand in marriage. But the two were so equal in their strengths that the fight only ended when each had dealt the death blow to the other in the same moment. The princess in sorrow was left alone to contemplate her sense of guilt, knowing that one would have been her husband if she had chosen him, while the other, though without her as his wife, would at least have lived.
I could not miss the opportunity to stage their play in the main hall and invited other Year 7 classes to come along. We had a good crowd interested, so production went into full swing with costumes and rehearsals. I took the backseat role of operating lights and curtains.
I have never forgotten the image, which I saw from above on the lighting platform, of the two dead swordsmen and the grieving princess in the final spotlight – so simple, so sad, so quiet, as I slowly dimmed the spot and closed the curtain.
The question at the end of my first three years’ teaching was never so much about my teaching drama; the answer was how much I was taught by 1K. It was about trust; about recognising that to learn, the students must – indeed, can only – begin where they are at; and about my learning that real learning comes from being engaged in creativity – on my part as much as for the students.
The class party at the end of the year was a well-established tradition. The students ate cup-cakes and soft-drink and gave their teachers gifts of appreciation. I hope such celebrations still take place in schools. Once again it was 1K that took the cake.
Quite small, almost tiny, red-haired Alan was always good for a side-comment and a laugh, sitting right up the front, right under my nose. It was his task to present me with a very large parcel, wrapped in newspaper, but which weighed almost nothing. What on earth could it be?
I had become well-known in town, in my bushwalking mode, for my old Series 1 Landrover. There’s another quite long short story to be written about my bush adventures from the Blue Mountains in the east to the Flinders Ranges in South Australia, and north to Tibooburra and the Queensland Dog Fence. I began unwrapping – and unwrapping...and unwrapping, layer after layer of newspapers.
I was down to something solid but no more than about two inches long, an inch wide and an inch high. A tiny model Series One Landrover!
So happy and yet sad at the same time, for by now, looking at the world from a bushwalker’s point of view, in the landscape of life I had met my future wife on a literal and metaphorical mountain top some six years previously. We had followed ridges and creeks, sometimes in company together, often in many different directions in the company of others, yet now we had reached a confluence, a meeting of the waters, late in 1965, looking ahead together across a new kind of bushland which we named ‘marriage’. It was time for me to leave Broken Hill.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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