'Reflections on Balmain Teachers College'
OCCASIONAL ADDRESS BY JUDY TAYLOR Co-author of To Enlighten Them Our Task: A History of Teacher Education at Balmain and Kuring-gai Colleges, 1946-1990 |
Thank you for inviting me to speak here today. Initially I was very doubtful. I thought, 'Oh no, it's 20 years since I did that research and wrote the book. I will have forgotten most of it.' However, Jim Fletcher was so enthusiastic and so persuasive, I agreed to revisit the boxes of research files in my cellar and see if there was something interesting I could share with you. It was a bit daunting because after all, not only was it a very long time since I had written the book, you are people who were at Balmain in the fifties (plus your long suffering partners of course!) You would all have your own memories and in some ways know more about what happened during your two years at Balmain than I ever did, even 20 years ago when my research was done.
Gathering information and writing history is a very interesting exercise. I gathered historical records from various sources materials in the NSW State Archives, material held by UTS, ASOPA, background books about social history of the time and about the history of teacher education plus personal papers shared with me by the Cantello and Greenhalgh families, Eric Hawcroft and many others. I suppose that all history is made up of a multiplicity of standpoints recreated by individuals whose views are significantly influenced by time and place and their positions in systems. For example, the memories of Balmain will be different for each student and each lecturer. Even though they were there at the time, we all filter our memories by our experiences. We all remember different parts of what happened and those memories skew our judgement about the whole. Time is slippery stuff. The past always looks different when we look back from what it looked way back then. Our memories choose only a few important highlights of lasting importance from all that happens. However my oral history interviews produced a very useful range of views on teacher education at Balmain. Any sample is subjective. People contacted me, eager to tell me what they thought and to pass on to me the names of other people who wanted to talk to me too. Obviously the potential pool of informants was the proverbial cast of thousands, and those included represent a very small and random selection of the possible total. I sought out those with a long association with the College, and others fell into the ‘Oh you must talk to so and so’ category. Over three hundred questionnaires were sent out and nearly 200 people took the time and trouble to reply. Some of them, like Joan Llewellyn, Neil Graham and Noel Gash, wrote pages of information for me. In some areas we had an abundance of material, for example from the forties and fifties. I interviewed many ex-staff and students. Some interviews repeated what I had heard from others, and others contradicted each other not only on matters of opinion, but on matters of fact. There was a fascinating divergence of views as to when a male toilet was provided at the Orange Grove annex, as well as to the perceived value of the type of teacher education provided at the college. A few remembered inflexible rules, appalling lack of resources, boring teaching methods of some lecturers, but for most the memories of teachers’ college were overwhelmingly positive. For many students these memories were memories of their first steps into adulthood, leaving home, being stimulated by new ideas and new information, induction into the teaching profession, the strong sense of community and the feeling of belonging to the Balmain family, the acquisition of what were to become lifetime friends and even marriage partners. I think the number of you here this weekend speaks volumes not only for Jim’s powers of persuasion but for the fact that you want to reconnect and to remember those Balmain years. They were two years which changed the lives of students forever and their memories were vivid and detailed. It has been said that we all edit our life to some extent, and I think that is true. Certainly the oral material I collected, both positive and negative, skewed as some of it may be by failing memories and coloured by personal happiness or difficulties during those years at college and the years following, reflects the rich store of memories that people have about their educational experiences at Balmain, and for me it was a valuable complement to the archival material. The archival holdings of the university about Balmain are not extensive. Other material was found in the archives of the Education Department and the School History section was very helpful. Some material was scattered through the State archives and in the hands of ex-students and staff and the book became the means of collecting a lot of more of that into one place. It is now in the UTS archives. It would be possible to draw deep psychological conclusions about the way Balmain valued itself, or has failed to value itself in failing to preserve its past in the area of teacher education. Probably the major factors have been that the college occupied several sites and had a series of major moves. There was also a lack of funding and staff time. It seems a real shame that there are not even full sets of the student newspapers and magazines that have appeared from time to time. Documents, as well as trophies, photographs and other non-print materials have been scattered, preservation has been haphazard. Someone once said that every time an old person died with all their memories unrecorded, it is if a library has burned down. For example Brock Rowe and Alan Bunker died only months after their interviews so I was lucky to get to them in time. Out of all this material both oral and written, strong patterns emerged so that the book almost wrote itself. It is the story of an institution with a very strong sense of community and unity and the idea of the Balmain family was a recurring theme from those I talked to. It was a college which provided a good all round education for teachers with a strong emphasis on practical skills but life at Balmain was not easy. The college motto, Luctor et emergo – I struggle and I emerge – was borrowed from the Dutch underground during World War 2. It was very appropriate. Until 1972 teacher education at Balmain was provided with very limited resources and took place in appalling conditions. The old school building was dilapidated and designed for instructing children in 1887, not for teacher education in 1946. It was a public school from 1887 to 1890 when it became a Superior Public School until the end of 1914. It was a Public School again from 1915 to 1945. It continued as an infants school sharing the site with the College from 1946 until 1963. In 1946 Balmain was dominated by the big industrial sites such as Lever Brothers, Pearsons and Colgate Palmolive. There was also the coal mine, power stations at White Bay and Iron Cove, chemical factories, oil depots, wheat silos, docks, ships and other industrial sites. The air was full of smells and pollution and soot. Lecturers recalled that they had to wipe the soot off their desks and books each morning before starting work. The air was full of soot and pollution of every kind. To quote To Enlighten Them Our Task, p.18: |
Physical conditions were appalling. The college was founded as an emergency college for the quick training of teachers after the war. The department took over the old Balmain primary school which had been condemned as unfit for children, and did very little to upgrade it. There were still 2 or 3 classes of children in portables down the back, and this was useful for practice and observation purposes for the students. The playground was asphalted all over, and would have made a pocket handkerchief feel like a car cover. It was cluttered with buildings and thoroughly depressing. The two-storey building which had been condemned was painted outside all over with that particular appalling shade of yellowish brown known in the department as 'elephant's breath'. Inside there was very little taste shown in paint colours either. At the end of each lecture, held in the old classrooms – a couple had been knocked together into an assembly hall – you couldn't move because of the bottlenecks of students in corridors of the old primary school which was not made for mobile classes. Teachers' colleges require them. This was accepted with the utmost good humour by students and staff alike. Conditions for the students and the staff were equally poor. Staff had a small common room set up with a small table and chairs and a stove where on days when things got particularly desperate, Marjorie Morrow used to bake hot scones for the staff. These things indicate a certain camaraderie among the members of that staff which was something very special and rarely found. I think it gave the place an enormous amount of its strength. Students felt the same. They felt very proud of being Balmain people. Heaven only knows, when you looked at the place, they had nothing to be proud of!
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Informal socialising took place under the camphor laurel tree or in the Students’ Common Room. In the sixties Lynette Silver, a 1963-1964 student remembers that it had a green lino floor and long tables and benches painted cream. By the time you were there it seated only half the student body at a time and even the Assembly Hall did not hold all the students, let alone staff or visitors, according to a 1966 submission by lecturers to the Minister for Education on conditions at the college. Orange Grove Annex opened in 1957 and various buildings were put on the already overcrowded Balmain site over the years. The library was appalling. Student numbers increased and by the late sixties enrolments had trebled to about 900 students. The cramped conditions became even more intolerable.
In my interview with Eric Hawcroft, he said he saw the conditions as having both positive and negative results. He said: |
It was an old school building, not much yard, people always bumping into one another or passing one another. There were no corners where you could go and hide except the local pub, no corners where you could get away at all. … The principal’s office was a broom cupboard under the stairs.
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Eric Hawcroft remembered that in the early days he was giving a lecture and suddenly while the students were very quiet listening to my words of wisdom, I heard the words coming through the window quite loudly and clearly ‘Clothes props! Clothes props! One and six[pence]’. Of course coming from Sydney Eric said, 'I found Balmain a very depressing building but after I had been there for a while I realised that it’s not the building that counts, it’s what’s going on in the building'.
However he also found positives. He said that probably because of the small size of the college and terrible conditions they shared, the staff worked together in a way he had not experienced at Sydney or Wagga. They participated together in informal staff meetings and in weekly assemblies. They lunched together and most shared cramped office accommodation. They were all on Christian name terms and some met socially outside the college. They worked out together how to help struggling students. They worked together to devise the notorious BLP – the Balmain Lesson Plan. They were a very cohesive group and the size of the college meant that they knew every student on a first name basis. One other positive turned out to be that because the college was so cramped, students used community facilities. They had camps and swimming schools and they had sport outside the college every Wednesday afternoon. They went to facilities in the community and because of that they learned how to run sports so when they were going out into schools and had to do it themselves, they had already had experience of running sports days. Mind you the community facilities weren’t great either. One student said that when they had to swim in Elkington Park Baths, which is now the Dawn Fraser Pool, they would go into the water one colour and come out another, due to the high level of oil and sawdust in the water. But in all these difficult circumstances, students learned to be resourceful, to make do and improvise in their classrooms as they had seen their lecturers do at college. Balmain was noted for its unity even as it grew larger, also for its practical orientation, its sense of community, its pride in the teaching profession, its recognition of the paternalistic role of the Principal as unquestioned head of the college family, its pastoral care of students, its emphasis on the teaching ability of staff, its richness of extra curricular activities. The college gave students great pride in their profession. Balmain teachers knew that teaching was a very important vocation and they took pride in their work. Graduates were sought after by school principals and it is impossible to assess the influence that the teachers educated in this institution have had on the schoolchildren of New South Wales, but it was great. The college motto Luctor et Emergo conveyed the idea that the struggle against unfavourable odds is a good thing which builds character and produces better teachers. The main aim of Balmain was always to produce good teacher practitioners, but if people think that is all it did, they are selling it short. For many students and later for the children they taught, Balmain opened their minds to music and art and literature and drama. As the college song says, the college saw enlightenment was its task and that meant not only enlightening children about reading, writing and arithmetic but education of the whole person to enjoy all that life could offer them in the future. You will have your own memories of college and your own opinion of how it changed your life and there will be an opportunity later for you to share these memories. But I would like to finish by telling you something about just two men out of the many people who were impacted by Balmain Teachers College. I knew both of them well and worked with them on the staff of Kuring-gai and Sydney University. They were my lecturers and later we worked together as colleagues and friends. MAURIE SAXBY The first one is Maurie Saxby who came to Balmain college in 1948 as a mature age student, but went on to lecture at both ASOPA and the college proper and then at Sydney University and UTS Kuring-gai Like many other Balmain students, Maurie went on after Balmain to further study and then to lecturing in various teachers colleges and universities. He arrived at Balmain as a mature age student of 24 after serving in the army in Papua New Guinea in the Second World War, attaining the rank of sergeant. He was dux of Balmain and went on to do a B.A., with honours in English, and a Master in Education at Sydney University. He worked as a teacher librarian and he never wavered from his belief in the value of teacher librarians in promoting reading. The School Library Association of NSW named an award in his honour for excellence and passion in promoting reading and or writing for young people in NSW, noting that his relentless focus on promoting children’s literature had established him as a lifelong advocate for enriching young people’s engagement in life through literature. His Masters and PHD theses were later published as a three-volume book on the history of Australian children’s literature which became the definitive text on the subject. He became known as the godfather of Australian children’s literature. And his influence was world wide. He lectured all over the world and was in demand as a literary awards judge. An American publisher was overheard one year at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair saying, ‘Well Mickey Mouse would have won if he had been championed by Maurice Saxby’. His many awards included an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Sydney in 2013 recognising his contribution to children’s literature. He died late last year just short of his ninetieth birthday. In the foreword to our book Maurie wrote about how Balmain changed him: |
Being accepted into Balmain Teachers’ College in 1948 changed the course of my life. Not only did George Cantello, the Principal, and his outstandingly energetic staff inspire in me a sense of vocation, but it was as though every day new windows of my mind were being flung open. The view was both exciting and breathtaking. Edna Holt helped provide me with an understanding of the universe and the place of our earth in its vast complexity, Marj Morrow stimulated an ongoing appreciation of living organisms and the wonders of biology; Allen Strom opened my eyes to patterns of colour and form, to the richness of texture and to the fact that good craftsmanship is essentially creative; and Marion Dallison aroused in me a life-long passion for the theatre. Every member of the staff had something unique and stimulating to offer. But, above all, it was George Cantello’s belief in the place of literature in one’s intellectual, emotional, psychological and spiritual development that helped, not only in my person growth, but gave me a conviction that was to be integral to my career as a teacher and educator. It was in the course of one of Jimmy Peake’s lectures on the great Australian novelist, Henry Handel Richardson, that I knew that my ambition was to follow in his footsteps and became a lecturer in Language and Literature. My career had begun.
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Teacher training at Balmain was not only a narrow preparation for teaching. It fostered learning for life.
CLIFF TURNEY The second person I would like to talk about is Cliff Turney, who co-wrote the Balmain history book. Cliff was a different sort of Balmain student from Maurie. He was 18 and had come straight from Fort Street Boys High school where his main interests were sport and girls. In 1947 when Cliff arrived at Fort Street from Drummoyne Boys’ many of the staff were old and tired and uninspiring to Cliff. Most had returned to teaching during the war because of staff shortages. There was one teacher however who was outstanding and who inspired Cliff to think teaching was important. His name was Francis Brodie and he was both the Geography Master and the rugby coach. He had a great influence on Cliff and on his choice of career. However sport and girls were more important to Cliff in 1948 than study and he failed the Leaving Certificate. He was bitterly disappointed but decided to repeat in 1949. He did much better partly because he tore a thigh muscle and had to give up rugby for the season and because his close relationship with his girl friend was waning. He had more time available for studying and was relieved to pass the Leaving and to matriculate at his second attempt. Unfortunately his parents could not afford to send him to University so he applied for a Teachers College scholarship and ended up at Balmain Teachers College in 1950. Later he was to say: |
I thus decided to become a primary school teacher virtually as a last resort! However I must say, I have never ever regretted the decision to train as a teacher. From that moment my professional and scholarly progress never really faltered. I had found the job I loved.
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His practical teaching skills saw him appointed to Haberfield Demonstration School. Cliff taught at Haberfield and Gladesville by day while doing an Arts degree at Sydney University at night. He was an outstanding scholar and graduated with first class Honours in Education. He was then offered a seconded lectureship in Education at Sydney Teachers College while doing a Masters in Education. Again he graduated with first class honours. In 1957 he was lecturing at the North Newtown Annex and he met Miss Roslyn Ferguson who was one of his students and in 1960 she became his wife. He finished his Ph.D. in 1964 having left the Department of Education in 1962 to became a Lecturer in Education at Sydney University. After four years he was promoted to senior lecturer and then to associate professor in 1973. In 1976 he became professor of education, then head of the school of teaching and curriculum studies. From 1986 he was the foundation dean of the faculty of education. In 1994 he was made Professor Emeritus at Sydney Uni and awarded the degree of Honorary Doctor of Letters.
The citation began as follows: |
Emeritus Professor Cliff Turney is acknowledged as one of Australia’s most influential figures in the field of teacher education. As a scholar Professor Turney has made a major impact on the development of the field of the History of Australian Education with highly influential analyses of educational leadership and influence. As a prominent figure within the University of Sydney, being employed here for more than three decades, Professor Turney is remembered as the foundation Dean of the faculty of Education who, probably more than any other individual, shaped the study and promotion of educational studies at this university.
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I can’t begin to tell you all the amazing things Cliff achieved and if I listed the books he had published I would be still going by dinner time. His research work in teaching and teacher education and the history of education made gave him a reputation all over Australia and indeed internationally. Just as Maurie Saxby was known as the foremost expert on Australian children’s literature, Cliff is still regarded as the guru on the history of Australian Education. Like Maurie his Ph.D. thesis turned into a three-volume history and it remains today the definitive work on the history of Australian education.
And for both these men their careers and their lifelong love of learning began at Balmain Teachers College. What was it that influenced them so strongly? Balmain teachers were actively sought after by Principals and commended by inspectors. Many rose rapidly through the ranks and became school principals. Many went on to further study at university. And yet they came from a small cramped run-down college which started from scratch with no traditions and few resources. It is hard to see how this could happen but it seems that Cantello the first principal set the pattern and although his successors were very different men, all of them valued the College’s unity, smallness and practical orientation, its sense of community, its pride in the teaching profession, its recognition of the paternalistic role of the Principal as unquestioned head of the college family, its emphasis on the teaching ability of staff, its richness of extra curricular activities and its pastoral care of students. It was as if the appalling conditions made staff and students realise that success could only occur with great difficulty and effort. A boy spent hours watching a butterfly struggling to emerge from its cocoon. It managed to make a small hole, but its body was too large to get through it. After a long struggle, it appeared to be exhausted and remained absolutely still. The man decided to help the butterfly and, with a pair of scissors, he cut open the cocoon, thus releasing the butterfly. However, the butterfly’s body was very small and wrinkled and its wings were all crumpled. The boy continued to watch, hoping that, at any moment, the butterfly would open its wings and fly away. Nothing happened; in fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its brief life dragging around its shrunken body and shrivelled wings, incapable of flight. What the boy – out of kindness and his eagerness to help – had failed to understand was that the tight cocoon and the efforts that the butterfly had to make in order to squeeze out of that tiny hole were Nature’s way of training the butterfly and of strengthening its wings. Sometimes, a little extra effort is precisely what prepares us for the next obstacle to be faced. Anyone who refuses to make that effort, or gets the wrong sort of help, is left unprepared to fight the next battle and never manages to fly off to their destiny. You all know that conditions at Balmain were terrible. The college motto Luctor et Emergo conveyed the idea that the struggle against unfavourable odds is a good thing which builds character and produces better teachers and somehow that is exactly what happened at Balmain. You are those teachers. I thought that perhaps you would like to share how you think Balmain Teachers College shaped your ideas, your teaching and your life. Peter [O'Brien] is going to chair this bit. |