By Ruth Lee
Socrates said that: Education is the kindling of a flame – not the filling of a vessel. I started school in 1939, the year World War I I began. I am not sure how I got to school in my early years. Perhaps I was given a ride to Dad’s shop and then walked from there. Once petrol rationing began there was no unnecessary driving around taking children to and from school. Very soon we were all riding bikes, sometimes doubling a younger one. This had its hazards because tyres and tubes were hard to come by during the war years, so they were patched, and patched, and patched.
Living in the country we were aware of the war but as children, we were not conscious of the real danger it posed to Australia. Long air raid trenches were built in the school grounds and every so often a siren sounded and we practised evacuating to the trenches. My cousin Keith was ‘evacuated’ from Brisbane and came to join Grandma’s family for a couple of years during the war.
Like all good mothers, Mum always tried to keep us warm in wintertime. This involved Joan and me being sent to school wearing stockings. We really disliked them so when we got to the top of the hill and out of Mum’s sight we rolled them down, where they stayed around our ankles until we were on the way home.
To reach our home at the far end of College Road we had to go along a slightly downhill, corrugated, granite, gravel road. This was disastrous for knees when we came a buster off our bikes. Fortunately, to get to school we had to pass the Ambulance Station not far from the school so we were regular visitors there having our knees bandaged.
School reports came home with us every six months for parents to be aware of our progress. I do not ever remember having parent-teacher nights.
I went to boarding school in Warwick in my sub-senior year as there was no high school in Stanthorpe, just a ‘high-top’ attached to the primary school with a total enrolment of less than 30 students. One unhappy memory for me of this time was that my father thought we should all learn Latin. No other students were undertaking this subject so I was given my lesson in the staffroom during the lunch break. How embarrassing! Many tears later I was allowed to drop this unwelcome addition to what I was expected to learn.
To be able to attend high school in those days a student had to pass the Scholarship Examination in Grade Seven. I had Miss Johnson as my Grade Seven teacher. She worked on a theory that she thought she knew what topics for a composition would come up in the Scholarship Examination. In 1947 she decided that it was to be something on the Australian Coal Industry. Alas, that didn’t happen and all the well-prepared and memorised essays on this topic were to no avail. We had to write as essay off the cuff – and I don’t remember which of the six topics I chose to write about. I passed the exam so my offering must have been okay. I then received a document from the Department of Public Instruction which stated that “This result sheet may be presented by a successful candidate as an authority to seek admission to any approved Secondary School in Queensland”.
Our exposure to science at school was a couple of glass cases with a few stuffed birds in them and there was no Library. Our reading material consisted mainly of a ‘ recycled ’ Queensland School Reader, the content of which remained the same for years and years, and was used by all the family. There was one produced for each grade. My Grade VII copy was used by nine others, including family and friends, from 1938 to 1953. It still remains in the family as proof, with all the names and dates recorded on it. Parents did not have to buy new school textbooks each year. They had a good hand-me-down or pass-it-on system. It was called “recycling”.
