Skip to main content

Education


If you started school in Queensland in the late 1950s (as I did) then you would have sat at a desk just like this - one equipped with slates and slate pencils.  You would almost certainly have carried a school 'port' like that on your back when you walked to school and it would have had a pencil case just like that nestled beside a sponge in a bottle of water and cleaning rag (for wiping your slate) and vegemite sandwiches wrapped in reusable greaseproof paper.  You would not have waved a plastic Aussie flag like that but you would have stood on parade each morning and put your hand over your heart as you looked at the flag and recited "I love my God, I serve my Queen and Country, I honour the flag and I shall cheerfully obey my country's laws". Then you would have stood to attention as the national anthem God Save the Queen was played before marching in line to your school room -- I think we were still very regimented from the war years.

I had a lovely chat to the lady in the museum about the latest developments at the School of Distance Education which reaches out to children on remote properties. She also reminded me that Charters Towers has a strong continuing tradition of boarding schools catering to children from remote rural properties.


Comments

  1. Although I live in Queensland, I went to school in Sydney. We didn't have slates, we had books and pencils and then pens with inkwells that boys used to dip the end of my plaits into. The other memories are much the same.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We used pencils and paper from Grade 2, then "scratch pens" and inkwells but not until about Grade 4. By the time we reached Grade 6 those new fangled "biros" were getting cheap enough so we were allowed to use them instead.

      Delete
  2. Replies
    1. At the end of the day the kids who were on the end had to lift the "bench" up onto the desk so the floors could be cleaned overnight.

      Delete
  3. Nowadays slates have have been replaced by iPads... A bit less messy but I guess the mess is half the fun.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I didn't think of iPads being a slate -- what a difference! When I was a kid I had a toy called a "glass slate" which was a piece of frosted glass in a wooden frame. There were pictures behind the glass and the idea was to trace the outline with a pencil. That was fun but the hard part was washing off the image. It was a treasured toy ... I've still got it!

      My sister is a few years younger and she got "magic slate" where you could erase the image just by lifting the plastic ... magic.

      Delete
  4. Love this glimpse of Australian history.

    I don't remember there being bench seating/desks when I was at school.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Coolibah?

Is that a Coolibah tree beside the abandoned house? Every Australian knows about Coolibah trees because the bush ballad Waltzing Matilda is nigh on our unoffical national anthem but most of us live nowhere near the inland where they grow. Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong, Under the shade of a Coolibah tree, And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled, You'll come a Waltzing Matilda with me. Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda, You'll come a Waltzing Matilda with me, And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled You'll come a Waltzing Matilda with me.

The end

I retire from the workforce this week and to celebrate have decided to retire my current blogs and start afresh with a single consolidated blog -  My Bright Field  - to record the delights of my new life adventure. If you are interested follow me over there.  I will still be Sweet Wayfaring and collecting Royal Hotels.  The delights I discover along the way will appear together with my gardens and towns where I live.

Brown streams and soft dim skies

I gave my husband a thick book on the history of Australian Art for Christmas. It documents just how long it took the artists to paint what they actually saw -- at the hands of early artists our wild Australian landscapes looked like rolling green English countryside. Today's photo has "that look" so I have referenced words from the poem describing England. It was Christmas Eve. We were camped by the Tumut River in the Snowy Mountains of NSW. A shady spot planted with exotic trees from the "old world" and with the soft burble of a swiftly flowing stream. Bliss after a hot afternoon drive. But the old world dies slowly, a hot roast for Christmas dinner followed by plum pudding is one of those traditions that just won't die. Knowing we were going to be on the move on Christmas Day we settled for having our traditional hot meal on Christmas Eve this year.