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.

The school at Jacksons Creek was home for about eight years to each child from the dozen farms that surrounded it. At one time, it had 42 children, but that was back in the 1920’s when a farm of 240 acres was still able to provide a living for a family. However, as the years had gone by most of the farms had amalgamated to larger properties and now Jacksons Creek was close to that dreaded number of ten children, at which level the Education Department would close the school, making the parents take the children ten miles or so out to the main road where they would then catch a bus into Ararat. No one wanted to do that! It was almost a time of local celebration whenever someone on a farm announced that they were expecting – the future of the school became a little more certain for all of them!

Miss Bradley did her bit. There were 11 or 12 children during the early 1960’s. She marked the roll at the start of every day and then again just after lunch. Every child was always present – a remarkable act of devotion and consistency on behalf of the children at Jacksons Creek until I discovered one day that the rolls were marked present for each child even if they were absent. Any boy staying home to help with the shearing or the harvesting as was usual with the boys in Grade 7 and 8, were marked as “present” because, as Miss Bradley told me once, he would have been at school but for a legitimate district reason.

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 guess many people thought it was easy to teach the dozen kids at Jacksons Creek the facts about the Christian faith. But experience proved it was far from easy. Miss Pat Bradley, who was quite a devout Christian, took every opportunity to teach some basic Christian truths but these kids mostly came from backgrounds and families utterly devoid of Christian truth and the influence of their parents far outweighed anything that Miss Pat Bradley could do during her hours as teacher, or I could add during my Thursday mornings.

The Bethridge boys were both totally ignorant of any matters of Christian faith. If any parent tried to bring up children more pagan then I doubt if they could have achieved more than Mr. and Mrs. Bethridge had.

Lisa Goldridge, the hope of the side, was the most intelligent, and sophisticated of the children. Her Grade Five knowledge was simple and fairly clear and the example of her Mum and Dad helped her more than anyone else.

The Tynan twins knew only fights and arguments as their railway worker father came home drunk most nights. It was quite regular for them to see their mother beaten or to have a black eye. She had bumped her head on the table, or into a door, or on the copper stick, she would say, but always the drunken father who came back late at night with his evening meal spoiled sitting on a plate over a pan of water on the wood stove, their drunken father would inevitably make disparaging remarks about the state of his meal and throw it at his wife across the kitchen and bash her. There wasn’t much Christian love practised in that home. Indeed it was a wonder Mrs. Tynan stayed. But she loved him, and she thought it was best for the girls if they stayed together. To talk about “Our Father in Heaven” was always a dubious issue because the only knowledge of a father they had was one who was drunken, abusive and bashing. What kind of a God would there be in Heaven made in his image?

That left the other family – the O’Rourkes. Mrs. O’Rourke was a thin inadequate woman who was always brushing hair from her eyes and I doubt if she ever made much of a contribution to anything about that family. Paddy O’Rourke looked after the half dozen children they had including the four that were in the Jacksons Creek school while he managed the poor, run down farm out Maroona way. He was a dirt poor farmer, Catholic by tradition but not by practise. I doubt if the O’Rourke ever got any resemblance of Christian tradition in their family.

Indeed as I look back on it teaching the kids Christian faith at Jacksons Creek was no different to teaching a bunch of village kids outside of Madras or Calcutta. There were Australian pagans. Most of them second and third generation pagans and therefore even the most common knowledge of the Christian faith was beyond them. I could take nothing for granted.

Sometimes I was amazed that they remembered anything, especially from Easter to Christmas. Those festivals were easy to get mixed up and when I would ask the meaning of Christmas it would be quite usual to have one of the O’Rourke boys say “It was the time Jesus got murdered.”.

One day talking about the meaning of Christmas I spoke of how the young baby Jesus was threatened by the murderous King Herod and Joseph, warned in a dream, took Mary and the baby Jesus and fled down to Egypt.

As part of some expression work I described the scene and then asked if they would care to draw it. Everybody cottoned on fairly quickly and we soon had pictures of Mary on a donkey with the baby Jesus in her arms while Joseph walked along either ahead or behind the donkey, usually with a stick in his hand.

It was always amusing to me to see that the trees down in Egypt were gum trees and that behind the donkey there always came a sheep dog. That is the way they thought about it at Jacksons Creek, except for Tom Bethridge. This tall, gangly, slow boy had his own vision. There on a full page of his Religious Instruction book was the heading “The Flight to Egypt” in large and awkward letters copied down faithfully from the blackboard. Underneath there was a drawing of a plane, a large one, an American bomber like we used to see on the television sets at night when the news of the progress of the Vietnam War was presented. It was a large four engine bomber and inside the window I could see the heads of a man and a lady and a little baby.

I said to Tom, “I don’t think that was the way Mary and Joseph got to Egypt.”

He looked me in the eye, “Yes it was. The flight to Egypt was on a big plane like that and I know it for certain.”

“For certain?” I questioned.

“How do you know it was certain?”

“Coz I know the bloke what flew it.”

I looked at Tom Bethridge and said to him, “How do you know the bloke who flew the plane on the flight to Egypt?”

“Coz you told us.”

I looked at Tom for a while, puzzled. “I told you?”

“Yes, you told us. The plane was flown by Pontius the pilot.”

The ignorance of some of the students at Jacksons Creek was only surpassed by their quick wit. That day when the lessons were finished and the drawings were completed and Tom Bethridge had been corrected on his understanding, I thought I would read him a section out of the School Reader. It was close to Christmas and I thought I would read them one about a group of kids who were going up before the bishop before they would be confirmed and he wanted to question them about their knowledge of the Christian faith. I guess it was my thought of Tom Bethridge that led me to John O’Brien’s poem called –

TANGMALANGALOO

The bishop sat in lordly state and purple cap sublime,
And galvanised the old bush church at Confirmation time;
And all the kids were mustered up from fifty miles around,
With Sunday clothes, and staring eyes, and ignorance profound.
Now was it fate, or was it grace, whereby they yarded too
An overgrown two-storey lad from Tangmalangaloo?

A hefty son of virgin soil, where nature has her fling,
And grows the trefoil three feet high and mats it in the spring;
Where mighty hills uplift their heads to pierce the welkin’s rim,
And trees sprout up a hundred feet before they shoot a limb;
There everything is big and grand, and men are giants too –
But Christian Knowledge wilts, alas, at Tangmalangaloo.

“he bishop summed the youngsters up, as bishops only can;
He cast a searching glance around, then fixed upon his man.
But glum and dumb and undismayed through every bout he sat;
He seemed to think that he was there, but wasn’t sure of that.
The bishop gave a scornful look, as bishops sometimes do,
And glared right through the pagan in from Tangmalangaloo.

“Come, tell me, boy,” his lordship said in crushing tones severe,
“Come, tell my why is Christmas Day the greatest of the year?
“How is it that around the world we celebrate that day
“And send a name upon a card to those who’re far away?
“Why is it wandering ones return with smiles and greetings, too?”
A squall of knowledge hit the lad from Tangmalangaloo.

He gave a lurch which set a-shake the vases on the shelf,
He knocked the benches all askew, up-ending of himself.
And oh, how pleased his lordship was, and how he smiled to say,
“That’s good, my boy. Come, tell me now; and what is Christmas Day?”
The ready answer bared a fact no bishop ever knew –
“It’s the day before the races out at Tangmalangaloo.”

John O’Brien

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

Friday, 10th February, 2006, 11:39 am | A Bush Teacher, Australian Short Stories