Death of a School
When I was a country parson in the early 1960’s of the little country church in the little country town of Ararat, gateway to the Wimmera, I taught religious instruction each week in the one teacher bush school at Jacksons Creek.
Jacksons Creek was a typical one teacher country school that was still to be found in those days throughout the bush. The one teacher, who had been there for more that 20 years in 1964, was Miss Pat Bradley. She was a no nonsense, country girl made teacher who had dedicated her life to the education of the children in the area where she had grown up.
Miss Bradley was strongly built with good arms, big hands that were used to milking for perhaps the previous 30 years. She wore sensible lace-up walking shoes with flat heels, lisle stockings, and it seemed the same dresses. She was a good hearted Christian who devoted her life to her pupils and when the weekend came spent Saturdays working with the church youth groups and Sundays teaching Sunday School.
Miss Pat Bradley’s whole life centred around children except for when she went back to her parents’ farm which she half ran under the watchful eye of her frail, failing father.
I was a country parson that came out to the little one teacher bush school to teach religious education each Thursday morning. I was a university graduate and had been teaching classes in secondary school for six years. After a week or so Miss Bradley saw that I could cope with the ten, eleven or twelve children who happened to be there and asked if I would mind taking charge for an hour or two while she would slip into Ararat to do the school banking and a few other chores she had to do. That worked well with me and I started a regular routine where I became the teacher for all of Thursday morning while Miss Bradley went into town to do whatever she had to do.
She left me with a good standby “While you are teaching one class your lesson, get the other children to read the next section in the School Reader”, she said. I knew the School Reader fairly well because I had been brought up with it. The School Reader used by the Victorian Education Department, was first issued in 1930 and it was used regularly up until the end of the 60’s. Each child had a School Reader according to their grade and the School Reader became the means of keeping the rest of the classes busy while I taught at an appropriate level. Each week I gave the same lesson three times but adjusted to the advancing grades within the school. The eleven kids were scattered over eight grades.
The impact of Timmy O’Rourke’s death was quite enormous. The whole little country community was saddened with the loss of the little one. His death in a wheat silo was all too familiar to country people. Wheat in a silo has the same effect as quicksand – the more a person struggles the more they are sucked down into it. Little Timmy O’Rourke had struggled following his fall into the wheat silo while on a expedition to capture some mice for his friends diamond head snake. The more he struggled the more he would have been sucked down into the wheat. The grizzly discovery of his body in the silo brought a pall over the whole community.
As we left the Roman Catholic church after the funeral conducted by Monsignor McCarthy who came out of retirement to take the service in respect for the O’Rourke family, Miss Pat Bradley had made the comment to me that the death of little Timmy could possible mean the death of the Jacksons Creek school.
She had said to me with a slowness and a sadness of a mighty truth just dawning, “We are now below the number of children for this school to stay open. Maybe they’ll close the school now. That Melbourne mob don’t care, they only look at the numbers and if the numbers are not there, they just close the school.”
I remember distinctly just standing and looking at Miss Bradley. The death of young Timmy might mean the death of the Jacksons Creek School and with it her life long occupation. Perhaps her 20 years at the one teacher bush school were now being brought to an end. The Melbourne mob only looked at the numbers and the numbers had said for a long time that the school was too small and it was no longer viable. The children would have to be bussed into Ararat. Perhaps when we lost Timothy we also lost the school.
Miss Bradley duly reported the death of Timmy O’Rourke to the Education Department and a letter was received back from the Department expressing sympathy in the death of the student and indicating that the District Inspector would shortly call upon Miss Bradley to discuss matters of importance. She knew instantly what “matters of importance” meant. The Melbourne mob had done their arithmetic and had decided that the school ought to close.
In due course the District Inspector arrived. The arrival of Mr. Wallington-Smythe was never a pleasure at the best of times.
I had only met him on one occasion – that day when I found his maroon coloured Vauxhall with a grey roof stalled in the centre of Jacksons Creek and I had pushed his stalled car out of the creek with my Morris Oxford. In the pouring rain he let me do all the work of getting him going and then left me wet and muddy while he drove up to the school and sat in his car and waited for Miss Bradley to arrive. This was a day when Miss Bradley was in Ararat and I arrived. He didn’t tell me he was the School Inspector but just invited himself into the class room, observed my lesson and a rather raucous instant drama we did that day which certainly didn’t make any impression upon him. He had arrived a day early before his annual inspection of the school and Miss Bradley was dreadfully upset. She felt he had quite deliberately arrived a day early and had criticised her for being absent, for having the class room in a dusty condition, and in his report on her had been quite critical.
There was no love lost between with Mr. E. Wallington-Smythe, B.A., Dip.Ed, and Miss Bradley. They had both been in the Education Department for a long time and they both knew the system quite well. Mr. Wallington-Smythe had little time for Miss Bradley whom he regarded as an anachronism in the Education Department and Miss Bradley didn’t have much time for the District Inspector whom she felt had an over-critical attitude and a cushy job.
I received a call a couple of days later from Miss Bradley who said, “Old Wallington-Smythe came to see me and to tell me that as from next Friday, the end of Term 2, the school is going to go into recession. He told me they were not closing the school but classes would be suspended and that I am to report to Ararat West.”
The tone in Miss Bradley’s voice told it all. She had had 20 years teaching in the little one teacher bush school and she knew better than Wallington-Smythe or the Melbourne mob that there would not be a future population explosion which would give cause for the school to be re-opened. The talk about the school being just temporarily in recession was just putting off the evil moment, “They may as well just go out and put a bulldozer through the place now”, she said. “Anyone with two eyes in his head and an ability to count the babies in our district would know that we are not going to have enough children to get over their minimum number. But I guess in a way I am glad. I wouldn’t like to see the old school demolished.”
The decision by the Education Department to put the school into recession meant of course that that was the end of my teaching Religious Instruction to the little bush kids in that area. It didn’t mean that I was finished teaching in little bush schools, because I immediately took up the new challenge of a school which was at that time not receiving any religious instruction at all out at Moyston on the Stawell Road. Moyston, like Jacksons Creek, had once been the centre of a big gold rush, but the area had dwindled with every decade this century having fewer people in the area than the previous one. However Moyston was not a one teacher bush school – it was well ahead of Jacksons Creek – it was a two teacher bush school with each teacher taking four classes and with the school having over 30 children. My Thursday mornings were now centred out at Moyston where I continued the practice of teaching of the children in the entire school.
Out at Jacksons Creek Miss Bradley had been told to tidy up the school and to make sure everything was secure and then just return the keys down to the Ballarat Office of the District Inspector. She did that and promptly reported at the start of Term 3 to the Ararat West Primary School. The parents had three weeks in which to find alternate transport for the children to get to school. There was not enough of them to justify the cost of sending one of McMillan’s buses out to Jacksons Creek because some of the kids lived between Jacksons Creek and the Ararat Highway anyway. So the parents simply had to organise themselves into driving the children out to the highway where they would wait each morning for the school bus on its run, and where they would be dropped each night at about 4.30 p.m. Someone had brought in an old 5,000 gallon galvanised iron water tank and left it lying without a lid on its side, just near where the road to Maroona came out on the Western Highway. If it was raining the kids sheltered inside the old tank. A couple of kids left their bikes there all day and they rode home the rest of the distance. For most of the parents this meant a complete upheaval in their lives, developing a new transportation system out to the highway.
But for Miss Pat Bradley it was an even greater upheaval. After teaching in the one school for 20 years, and being the sole teacher and person in charge, she was appointed to take Grade 5 in the thriving Ararat West State School.
I saw her from time to time throughout the next term and each time asked how she liked the teaching. She did not. She didn’t like the school. She didn’t like the routine and she didn’t like the headmaster who was quite officious.
Things changed for me as well. Because at the end of that time my wife and I, our three year old daughter and our baby son left Ararat for a new appointment ourselves. We were to go down to the city where I was to start a new chapter in my life as a suburban pastor of one of the largest and most active churches in the nation.
The last time I spoke to Miss Bradley was at my farewell given by the church and the community. During the evening’s activities and entertainments between the lavish supper and the speeches of appreciation, I sat beside Miss Bradley and thanked her for being a good friend and companion for the two years I had taught in the one teacher bush school at Jacksons Creek. It was then that she told me that she was experiencing a change too. “I have retired from the Department. It wasn’t the same up at Ararat West and my real love for teaching has waned since they closed the Jacksons Creek School.” I looked at her rather surprised, “But, Pat, what are you going to do?” She looked at me and eyes lit up with enthusiasm and a sparkle I hadn’t seen for a long time. “Well as a matter of fact, it’s not official yet, but I’ve accepted an invitation from the Methodist Church to work four days a week with them. I’ll do most of the pastoral work for Geoffrey Stanton-Crouch because the Parish is too big for him to cope with on his own. And I really love visiting the oldies, so I’ll do all the visitation up at Pyrenees House and I’ll also run the youth group and – wait for it – teach religious instruction in all the schools round. I’m going to take over your classes out at Moyston. I always wanted to be a deaconess, and although I won’t be officially a deaconess I’ll be doing all the things a Methodist deaconess does. For me this is just a wonderful fresh start to my life.” I could see that Miss Pat Bradley was fulfilling a dream, and that with her retirement and superannuation benefits she could continue to live on her parents’ farm, give them a helping hand where needed, and then do what she always wanted to do – the work of a Methodist deaconess.
After we left Ararat we continued every year for the next 15 years or so to go back to the old country town where we had so many good friends for our annual holidays. We always stayed out at the Mount Ararat property of Jeff and Marj Judd. Our children loved it on the farm and I loved the opportunity to meet with old friends like Miss Bradley.
I guess it was the third year after we left that being in Ararat one January holiday I took time out from the usual things we used to do around the farm to help Jeff, to drive out on the Maroona Road just to visit Jacksons Creek and to look at the old school where I had taught.
Just driving into Jacksons Creek one could notice the difference. In a small farming community that had seen dwindling numbers ever since the gold ran out, the community had been dying. It was death by 100 closures. The smaller farms had closed down and amalgamated into bigger properties. The cool store had lost business and closed down. The man who used to buy the rabbit skins and carcases then had nowhere to keep his carcases and so his business closed down. The general store had closed down, the school had closed down and the general mechanic and what passed as a garage had closed down. There wasn’t much left in Jacksons Creek and with the coming of the automatic telephone exchange in Ararat, the telephone sub-exchange at Jacksons Creek was no longer required and it had closed down. Some of the old buildings still stood there but the windows were full of dead blow flies and covered in dust. Another bush town was close to death and when the school closed it was almost the last gasp of a dying town.
I pulled up outside the school. The eight foot gate through which I used to drive and park my car around the back each week was securely padlocked. I climbed through the rabbit-proof fence and the first thing I saw was a rabbit which ducked underneath the front steps going into the school. Apparently even the rabbit-proof fence no longer worked. I paused just inside the gate. There were a row of huge trees and there on the side of the trunk were the signs that Miss Bradley had nailed up – hand painted signs many years previously to teach the children something about Australian trees. The hand painted black and white sign said “Eucalyptus macrorhyncha, red stringy bark, tall”. I read the sign and moved on to the next one. I will always remember that because inevitably I read it as I came out of the front steps of the school “Eucalyptus maculata – spotted gum (windbreak)”. There were other trees with their names on them as I walked around the school “Acacia normalis – black wattle”. It happened to be in full flower with huge balls of yellow wattle blossom. Around the school yard the old peppercorn trees, the melaleucas and the poplars down by the creek, were all in their prime. The absence of children climbing up into their boughs and making cubbies had not harmed the trees. Down along the creek the weeping willows which bore the name “Saxil babylonica” looked as if they were weeping over the closure of the school. I always thought their name “saxil babylonica” was most appropriate as I remembered the children of Israel in slavery in Babylon saying:
“By the rivers of Babylon
We wept when we remembered Jerusalem”.
Out the back the old school dunny with its two doors bearing the titles “girls” and “boys” stood exactly the same. Around the tank stand, however, the little garden that Miss Bradley had planted was blooming and full of life. I saw why. There were quite a few rust holes around the water tank and every time it rained the holes dribbled water down onto the garden for maybe the next two or three weeks until the water reached the level of the hole. They were the only signs of life. I stared in the windows from the back of the school. Everything was dusty but just as if the class had been spirited out. The blackboard was clean and along the ledge there were full sticks of chalk complete with a set square, a wooden protractor for working out angles on the blackboard, and a beautifully carved pair of wooden compasses for use on the blackboard. No one had been in the school since the day Miss Bradley had locked the door for the last time. The desks were in neat rows and the books were neatly stacked on the shelves. The Education Department had decreed that the school was not closed, it was merely “in recession”. Someone from the Melbourne mob who didn’t know anything about the area probably thought there may be a population explosion one day and then all they had to do was to re-open the school.
But to anybody who knew anything about the area around Jacksons Creek they would know that most of the people on the farms were past the age of having children, and the few managers that were around were moving out slowly. The community, like many of the rural communities of Australia, was dying.
I guess that today, 25 years later than those 1960’s, the school is exactly the same. Certainly the few old people who lived in the area would keep an eye on the place because none of the shops or other buildings around the little centre of Jacksons Creek had been vandalised. It had just been left to dry rot.
As I climbed back through the fence that day and drove away I realised that a part of me had died also. The years of teaching in the one teacher bush school had been a real pleasure and part of a tremendous growth experience which I would never forget in that little one teacher bush school at Jacksons Creek.
GORDON MOYES