Like a Wolf on the Fold
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.
I had been telling the story of Joseph from the Old Testament for several weeks now. The story of Joseph really has a great deal in it to interest kids. There was the favouritism of his father and the jealousy of his brothers and the rather wicked desire of the older boys to get rid of their young brother. There was also interest in the fact that he was sold as a slave into Egypt and of his good fortune because he always remained a person of integrity while he served in the household of his master, Potiphar, in spite of the scheming plots of Mrs. Potiphar.
I used to tell the kids the story three times, teaching a different group each time and bringing out a more mature point for their understanding. I taught the first three grades in the school which consisted of young Timothy O’Rourke and the Tynan twins, Evelyn and Elwyn, and a couple of others. They were very much over-awed by my presence and I guess at age 25 I was quite old to them. I then taught the same story to those in Grades 4, 5 and 6, and that included another couple of the O’Rourke children – Paddy O’Rourke had quite a tribe and if it wasn’t for him the school would have been closed long ago. They were a poor family and Paddy managed a farm down Maroona way with more good luck than good management. In the midst of that group was Lisa Goldridge, a very shy and attractive girl, with nice long blonde hair who didn’t really fit in to the typical child in a country school. She was sensitive and her mother always brought her to school and took her home afterwards, quite the opposite by way of parental attention that most of the other kids received.
The third part of the class was the most difficult. It was the Bethridge boys, Tom and Jason, who were the sole occupants of Grades 7 and 8, with Tom being the oldest and biggest boy in the school. I wish I could have said he was always the brightest, but just because he was in the most senior grade didn’t mean to say that he knew any more than the others. In fact Lisa Goldridge in Grade 5 had a better understanding of most things than Tom, except for life. Tom couldn’t spell and the words in the back of the Eighth Grade Reader which they were supposed to learn were just simply beyond him. Most of the stories in the Eighth Grade Reader were beyond him.
I always could get the Bethridge boys to pay attention to the story if the setting of the story had just a bit of violence and bloodshed in it. I remember when I came to telling how the brothers, jealous of the boastful brother Joseph, took him, beat him and threw him roughly down into a dry well and then sold him to a passing caravan of slave traders, the story of Joseph came alive to them. I must admit that I spent a fair amount of time telling how the brothers grabbed him, jumped up on him, pushed him over, bent his arm up his back and gave him a Chinese wrist burn to make him confess that they were better than he was even though he had a coat of many colours. Some purists might wonder where the Chinese wrist burn managed to get into the Scripture, but when you were dealing with the Bethridge boys a verse or two added to the action certainly kept their attention.
While I was telling the stories I would often get the other classes to read sections in their school reader. Sometimes they read it out aloud but it didn’t seem to interrupt the rest of us as we continued with our work, they were used to people standing beside Miss Bradley while she worked at her desk. While some would be working upon arithmetic or geography a person from another class would be standing beside her slowly reading out aloud some section from the school reader. They were quite used to doing it but I must admit I found it disconcerting. While I was telling of poor Joseph being wrestled to the ground by his rough brothers who beat him up and threw him into the dry well the Tynan twins, Evelyn and Elwyn, were reciting in a sing-song voice from the Third Grade Reader:
“There was a naughty boy
And a naughty boy was he;
He ran away to Scotland,
The people there to see.Then he found
That the ground
Was as hard,
That a yard
Was as long,
That a song
Was as merry
That a cherry
Was as red,
That a door
Was as wooden,
As in England.So he stood in his shoes,
And he wondered,
He wondered;
He stood in his shoes,
And he wondered.John Keats
The School Reader became a great friend and ally to me. No matter what the story was we usually found something in one of the School Readers or another which could be used to tie in with the Bible passage. For example when I was talking about the slave caravan that came from the land of Midian one of the boys said, “Where is Midian?” That would lead me in turn to drawing a rough sketch map on the board of the Middle East and pointing out the land of Egypt and Israel, Assyria, Babylonia and the land of the Midianites. I was speaking about how the slave traders crossed the desert on their camels and how the armies from the north frequently passed through the land of Palestine on a raid upon the Egyptians. That was bad news for the people of Israel when the foreign armies occupied their country. One such army, however, was defeated not by Israel’s might but by the plague – a dreaded virus carried by rats who came into the camp at night and passed on the disease. In the morning, many of the soldiers woke up ill and by nightfall, thousands of them were dead.
Suddenly Lisa Goldridge spoke up. She was a quiet and nervous child, very good looking with lovely golden hair. Her mother was very protective and was the only mother to take an active interest in the school. Lisa did not mix well with the others and spent much of time reading. She told me there was a poem in her School Reader that told all about it. She seemed to know. She told me she had written an essay about how pride goes before a fall but the Biblical allusion escaped me. She brought out her Fifth Grade Reader turning over the pages and came to a poem that she had marked in three parts entitled “Pride, Disaster and Consequences”. She certainly knew it and so I paused in the story to jump a few centuries and to read “The Destruction of Sennacherib’s Army”:
“The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming with purple and gold,
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue waves roll nightly on deep Galilee.”“Like the leaves of the forest when summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen;
Like the leaves of the forest when autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.”“For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever were still.”“And there lay the steed with his nostrils all wide,
But through them there rolled not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.”“And there lay the rider, distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow and the rust on his mail;
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpets unblown.”“And the widows of Asshur are loud in their wail;
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!”
Lord Byron
As I finished the last line of Lord Byron’s poem there was an awesome silence around the classroom. I let the weight of it sink in. Then Tom Bethridge broke the silence: “What’s a syrrian?” I looked at the big strapping lad who spent time every night helping his dad bring in a mob of sheep or crutching some lambs and I wondered whether it really would matter if he found out who were the Assyrians after all. I looked with a sigh of defeat at big Tom Bethridge but it was almost as if he was waiting for a proper answer. “Well they are cousins of the Midianites who came over and took Joseph down into Egypt.” Tom looked satisfied.
My geography was out and my racial lineage was incorrect but with a difference of three thousand years as well as the distance from the Middle East to Jacksons Creek, I didn’t think that it mattered much.
School was for getting an education and if nothing else the students in the school were getting to know John Keats, Lord Bryon, Moses the story teller and a little bit of history and geography thrown in.
The one teacher bush school at Jacksons Creek was a mighty place for learning.
The School Reader was my constant friend in those days when I lived in Ararat and taught the eight classes in the one teacher bush school at Jacksons Creek.
GORDON MOYES