Tasmania’s Area Schools
In the 1930’s, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, Tasmanian educators came up with a bold new vision to transform rural schools. They wanted to teach the latest in agricultural science, to instil a lifelong love of learning, and to help Tasmanian rural children develop into informed citizens of a modern democracy. They ended up creating a model that was admired around Australia and the world: the Tasmanian Area School.
Continue reading “Tasmania’s Area Schools”Charles Gould’s Mythical Monsters
Research is not a straight path. It is a trail that twists through mountains and valleys. There are forks in the road and enticing sights that lay off the beaten track. These distractions can be the most treacherous aspects of the journey. Often they can be so alluring that one can forget where one was going in the first place. I stumbled across one of these tangents recently while researching the life and work of Charles Gould (1834-1893), a journey that took me from Tasmania’s wild west coast to mainland China, from giant freshwater crayfish to dragons, and from natural history to the realms of myth.
Continue reading “Charles Gould’s Mythical Monsters”A History of Play: Early Childhood Education in Tasmania
Firstly, a confession. I have struggled to write this blog, to gather references and to find a quiet space to write an intelligent, interesting, engaging and informative piece on the history of early childhood education in Tasmania. My first effort was informative, but it seemed to lack something, and I wasn’t happy with it.
Then, one day, I had an epiphany while walking after work. I feel an immense pride in the public education system in Tasmania. I send both my boys to public schools on the Eastern Shore in Southern Tasmania. My father was a well-loved, enthusiastic and dedicated Physics and Maths teacher in both public and private schools in Northern Tasmania. I still recall him enthusiastically telling me, “Tasmania has the best public education system in Australia.” When I studied at University, I was constantly meeting his past students whose choices were in some way inspired by his teaching methods.
This is how education began in Tasmania – with inspired, talented people dedicated to improving the lives of Tasmanian children.
While researching this blog, I discovered one such person, Joseph Benson Mather, who was determined to provide an education to Tasmania’s poorest children. I and my colleagues went on to find dozens of stories of devoted parents, dedicated teachers, and generous communities who believed that young Tasmanian children deserved high quality early childhood education. Together, they laid the groundwork for early childhood education in Tasmania today, where amazing teachers encourage little children to learn through play, to be curious, and to love school.
Continue reading “A History of Play: Early Childhood Education in Tasmania”Tales of the Unexpected
We’ve just finished celebrating Family History Month, which offered us an opportunity to reflect on some of the unexpected connections to be found in Libraries Tasmania’s archival and heritage collections. In this post, we explore four ‘rare books’ that were not written here, not published here, not about Tasmania in any way, but which unfold extraordinary Tasmanian stories through the history of their ownership and use. From a 17th century Bible once held in royal hands, to a 19th century tanner’s technical manual, here are some tales of the unexpected uncovered in the State Library of Tasmania.
Continue reading “Tales of the Unexpected”Teaching in Tasmania: three teachers’ lives, 1868-1945
We can only imagine what it must have been like to be the first teacher in Tasmania. Jane Noel was a Sydney schoolmistress who began a private school in a hut in a lane off the lower end of Collins Street in Hobart Town in 1806. What follows is a brief look at the lives of three of Jane’s successors between 1868 and 1945. It is also a research journey, investigating the sometimes dark nooks and crannies of the collections of the Tasmanian State Library and Archives. What you think you will find on these journeys is sometimes very different than what you begin looking for, but it is always illuminating.
Continue reading “Teaching in Tasmania: three teachers’ lives, 1868-1945”From “Dangerously Foul Air” to Free School Milk: A Brief History of Public Health in Tasmanian Public Schools, 1900-1975
Schools with no toilets and no sinks to wash your hands. Sick children labelled as “mentally deficient” because of their swollen adenoids and tonsils. Adolescents with a full set of dentures, little children cleaning their teeth with the corner of a sooty towel. A generation of teenagers with curved spines and poor eyesight from bending over their school desks in poorly lit and freezing cold classrooms. This was the picture of public health in Tasmanian schools in 1906. Over the next 75 years, schools found themselves on the front lines of the battle against contagious disease, poor nutrition and poor health. Over time, Tasmanian public schools became a crucial part of the Tasmanian public health system, and transformed the lives of thousands of Tasmanian children. Read on to find out more about this fascinating story.
Continue reading “From “Dangerously Foul Air” to Free School Milk: A Brief History of Public Health in Tasmanian Public Schools, 1900-1975”Reading, Writing & Arithmetic: The Public School Curriculum 150 Years Ago
What would you have learned at a Tasmanian public school in 1869? Mostly, just reading, writing and arithmetic, from a teacher not much older than yourself, in a class of 40-60 students, and in a textbook that your grandfather might have read in Ireland thirty years earlier. The texts might have been boring and out of date, but the reasons why are fascinating. That’s because the public school curriculum in 1869 was deliberately designed to be bland and uninteresting, in order to avoid social conflict. What follows is the story of a journey – from the idea that education needed to reform and contain children, to the radical idea that children in public schools should be inspired to learn, and to become curious and informed citizens. Read on to discover more!
For an audio introduction to this story, check out our interview with ABC Radio!
Transcript of the interview
00:00:00 Speaker 1
ABC Radio Hobart and across Tasmania as your afternoon. If you were in a classroom in this state in the late 1800s. You probably would have studied from an Irish textbook.
00:00:13 Speaker 1
You also might have picked up a brutal chest infection from the coal fire, but that’s another matter. It’s not quite a tablet device for every student, is it?
00:00:22 Speaker 1
This year marks 150 years of public education in Tasmania and the Department of Education has a series of events to commemorate that, like a travelling exhibition, visiting libraries around the state, to talk about the history of education and the ABC’s Georgie Burgess has sat down with archivist Anna Clayton to go through some textbooks. Which were used in Tasmanian schools from when education became compulsory in 1868, and she found out why exactly they were Irish ones.
00:00:53 Speaker 2
The greatest part of the settlers are men who were wicked in their own country and become still more so here from the influence of bad examples amongst them. Hi, I’m Anna Clayton, and I’m an archivist at the state library and archive service here in Hobart.
00:01:07 Speaker 3
Anna, you and I whispering to each other at the moment. Why is that?
00:01:12 Speaker 2
That is because we are in the history room at the state library, and we’ve got a couple of researchers doing research at the far end of this wood panelled room with all of our beautiful books and priceless paintings in it, so we’re trying not to bother them too much.
00:01:30 Speaker 3
So we’re having a bit of a chat about what was on the curriculum in Tasmania 150 years ago and what do we have in front of us at the moment.
00:01:41 Speaker 2
Well, we have a variety of textbooks in front of us that would have been used in Tasmanian public schools, including those that would have been used when public schooling became compulsory in 1868 and those are called Irish national readers. And if you are at all curious about why Tasmanian public schools are using Irish national readers, the first reason is because they were cheap and they were plentiful and they were very widely circulated throughout the British Empire, and most of the English speaking colonies. And the reason for that is that they’re designed to be non sectarian. And to understand why that’s important, we had to kind of walk back a little bit and to not think about Tasmanian public schools in 1860 but think about Ireland in 1831 because the fact of the matter is that lots of school children, all public school children in Tasmania who were of Irish descent in 1868, would have been reading textbooks that their grandfathers and grandmothers would have been reading in Ireland 40 years earlier, possibly before they were transported for theft, for maybe stealing a loaf of bread during the height of the potato famine.
00:02:57 Speaker 2
And the reason for that is that the British government instituted a programme of national education in Ireland in the 1830s to try to solve some of the bitter sectarian conflicts that were roiling the island. They saw public schooling as a way to institute a kind of morality, the object wasn’t to make children curious. It wasn’t to make them excited about learning. It was to teach them morality, and the only way that they could think of to do that was to appeal to Christianity, to teach fundamental moral concepts. But of course the problem was that the majority of the Irish population were Catholic, and the British ruling class were Protestant. And to avoid conflict they tried to make these textbooks as bland and as unobjectionable as possible to make them non sectarian and then what happens is that as a result of conditions in Ireland and particularly as a result of the potato famine, you have this mass diaspora of Irish people around the British Empire and you then end up with populations of Catholics and Protestants living together.
00:04:14 Speaker 2
Outside of Ireland and Canada in Australia and in New Zealand, a lot of those tensions between Catholic and Protestant populations get transported with them.
00:04:24 Speaker 2
So the end result is that in Australia and in Canada and in New Zealand, You see people using these Irish national readers in an attempt to instil drive morality into the skulls of the youth, and to do so while avoiding social conflict.
00:04:44 Speaker 3
And this would have been all throughout the colonies in Tasmania that they were being taught this?
00:04:49 Speaker 2
Yeah. So the Irish national readers are the textbook of choice for all public schools in in Tasmania. And there actually a couple more reasons for that.
00:04:59 Speaker 2
Partly, it’s to avoid sectarian conflict between Protestants and Catholics. But it’s also partly because they are really clearly graded from infants to grade 6, and it’s really clearly marked out like how you get from one grade to the next grade. They’re also really easy to teach from, and that’s important because most people who are doing the bulk of the teaching were teenagers, most kids in public schools in Tasmania would have been taught in a room of 40 to 60 students.
00:05:27 Speaker 2
And they would have been taught by a pupil teacher who was between the ages of 13 and 18, and the only reason that only way that kid is going to be able to teach other kids is if he’s teaching to the textbook.
00:05:36 Speaker 3
And it’s quite a plain looking publication. It’s, I mean, I’m not sure what colour it would have been originally, but it looks like it would have been quite cheaply bound.
00:05:46 Speaker 3
Yeah. What do you make of it?
00:05:48 Speaker 2
Ohh it is totally cheaply bound. There’s barely any illustrations in it. This is one that is for.
00:05:53 Speaker 2
The 4th class. So you this would be for like an 11 year old. There’s no illustrations at all. This is the generic 4th book of Lessons. So this was on Natural History, descriptive geography, miscellaneous lessons, practical economy. And there’s just like, virtually there’s not really a single picture in here.
And there’s no maps for Geography.
00:06:15 Speaker 3
And what would they have been learning about their own country, Australia at this point in time?
00:06:22 Speaker 2
Very, very little. There is a tiny section here on New Holland, which is what Australia is called. Let’s see what the publication date is.
00:06:31 Speaker 2
OK. So the publication date is 1849 and there’s a tiny section on New Holland. And so if you were an 11 year old child reading this, you would have read that in Van Diemen’s Land and in NSW, the greatest part of the settlers are men who were wicked in their own country and become still more so here from the influence of bad examples amongst them. And then you would have read the children of such parents are not likely to be brought up to any Good.
00:07:00 Speaker 2
And the consequences? We are told that it is quite a rare thing to meet with an honest, well conducted man in the colony and that robbery and murder and all the most horrible crimes are constantly being committed. So all you would learn is that your parents are bad, that you were bad and that you were doomed to badness?
00:07:18 Speaker 3
How long did they use these textbooks for?
00:07:20 Speaker 2
They were in use actually to prior to the establishment of compulsory public education. There’s accounts in Jane Franklin’s journals of going to pick these up to bestow upon deserving young children. You could imagine how grateful they would have been for that.
00:07:35 Speaker 2
And that would have been in the 1830s and 1840s. So they were being used until 1885. So that’s 50 years.
00:07:43 Speaker 3
Let’s have a look at another one. So now we’ve got the Tasmanian readers. So what sort of a year are we talking about now?
00:07:50 Speaker 2
Now these ones were being produced until the early 1940s, but they started, these are A version of what called the royal readers and the royal readers replaced the Irish national readers they came into use in the 1880s.
00:08:04 Speaker 2
We don’t have a lot of copies of the royal readers here, but the Tasmanian readers are basically the royal readers printed with Tasmanian end papers. So these were again, these were produced in Britain. They were ordered from Britain, but they were printed with special covers and printed with special end papers to say they were for Tasmania. This one is great because it has the names of the boys who used it.
00:08:24 Speaker 2
One’s Richard Cook and one is I Engliss, so that they’ve stamped their names.
00:08:31 Speaker 2
All over the front.
00:08:31 Speaker 3
It looks it looks very loved.
00:08:33 Speaker 2
I’m not sure if it’s so much loved as it is abused.
00:08:36 Speaker 3
And interesting to note on the first page is a a nice big crown.
00:08:41 Speaker 2
And these ones, like the Irish national readers, these were still intended to to instil in children like a a basic sense of morality. And the idea is is still to sort of drill into especially.
00:08:55 Speaker 2
Little boys the.
00:08:56 Speaker 2
Proper way to behave, and there’s a lot of anxiety if you read the Tasmanian newspapers about.
00:09:01 Speaker 2
Wild school children roaming the streets and they need to be corralled and brought into the schools and taught manners. This is this is a good one and the great thing about this book too is that you can actually see where the little boy has marked it up so you can see where he would have stopped reading out loud in the class.
00:09:16 Speaker 2
These are targeted towards younger children, so you have lists of vocabulary at the front of each lesson. Instructions how to on how to pronounce words. If you were to do a history of Tasmanian childhood through these books, be a fairly pretty fascinating account of of.
00:09:35 Speaker 2
What children were taught was important in the public schools.
00:09:39 Speaker 3
And again not.
00:09:41 Speaker 3
Encouraging independent thinking at all or learning about their own country.
00:09:47 Speaker 2
Well, you get there. There’s a there’s a real arc that you get later on at the end of the 19th and the early 20th century, there’s a push towards more progressive education and teaching children to think for themselves a little bit more. And part of that is also making the textbooks more beautiful to look at.
00:10:07 Speaker 2
But what’s interesting there is that you actually see the influence of European educational thinkers who are still being used today.
00:10:16 Speaker 2
So you get more influence. People like Joseph Freud Bull and Maria Montessori, and people were talking about the the children need to be encouraged to learn, instilled with the love of learning. So you’re getting more of that at the beginning of the 20th century and the early 1900s. And you’re getting away from the idea that children need to be warehoused and reformed.
00:10:38 Speaker 2
And there is a push to have more Australian content reflected in the books. But what’s interesting is that the way that that content is presented to children.
00:10:50 Speaker 2
And it’s presented very much as Australia is part of the British Empire and that your loyalty and your affinity should really rest with Britain first and foremost. And that’s not at all unusual. That’s the whole purpose of public education throughout Europe, throughout Britain, throughout America.
00:11:09 Speaker 2
In the late 19th century, it is to make children citizens of a nation or an empire.
00:11:16 Speaker 2
And Australia is an interesting case after federation because it’s a separate country, but it’s still part of the Commonwealth and expected to go fight British Wars. So you do end up with books like the royal readers. And then like, for example, the Longmans British Empire, readers, all of which have this, really.
00:11:36 Speaker 2
Not so subtle message behind them, which is that the British Empire is a force for good in the world, that it’s normal that it’s natural that certain peoples should be subjected to it and that small children should grow up to love it and defend it.
00:11:51 Speaker 1
The ABC’s Georgie Burgess with archivist Anna Claydon in the History room, speaking softly in Hobart’s library, having a look through some textbooks using classrooms during the late 1800s, and you’ll hear more from that next week.
This war worn piece of old khaki
In the time before postcards, soldiers who wanted to send a token to their loved ones at home had to get creative. Soldiers in the Boer War would tear off a piece of their uniform and send it with the message ‘torn from my coat I send to thee, this war worn piece of old khaki’.
Archivist Jennifer Jerome discovered this lovingly decorated scrap of cloth from an army uniform in a box of anonymous donations, and set about finding out its story.
Continue reading “This war worn piece of old khaki”The Orphan Schools
This year marks the 150th anniversary of public education in Tasmania.
To help us understand where we’ve come from (and perhaps where we’re going!) the librarians and archivists of the State Library and Archive Service are producing a series of blogs on the history of public education in Tasmania. These aren’t comprehensive – rather, they’re snapshots of places, people, and institutions, as well as a guide to the resources we hold at the State Library. Some of the common themes that feature throughout the blogs are concerns about the curriculum; about health, physical fitness, and nutrition; about sanitation; about industrial training and academic outcomes. But these blogs are also something more – they’re about the history of childhood in Tasmania, and how our view of children – and what education means – has changed since the nineteenth century. We hope you enjoy the journey!
The Orphan Schools established in Hobart in 1828 were an early form of public education, but a harsh one. Their aim was to transform poor children into ‘respectable’ industrious adults. The system was cruel even by the standards of the day – based on discipline, religion, punishment and control. Most of the children were not true orphans, but the children of convict parents, whose imprisonment and work for the convict system prevented the parents from caring for them. Others were the children of the unemployed, destitute, or those that the authorities perceived to be leading immoral lives. Some Aboriginal children were institutionalised as well. All were separated from their parents, housed in cold rooms with no fires and poor sanitation; disease was rampant and mortality was high.
What follows is not easy reading, and it is not suitable material for young children. The story is characterized by cruelty, abuse, and neglect, but also by tremendous resilience, resistance, and compassion. The historical records in the Tasmanian Archives tell this story – and throughout this blog, we will link to them. You, the reader and researcher, can choose to follow the story further in as much in depth as you choose to.
Continue reading “The Orphan Schools”Soldier Land Settlement Scheme
The Soldier Land Settlement Scheme was created to help settle returned soldiers on the land after the First and Second World Wars.
“The Returned Soldiers’ Settlement Act, 1916,” and the amending Acts of 1917 and 1918, make provision for the Settlement on land in the State of Tasmania of any returned soldiers with satisfactory discharges, and who have had previous farming experience, desirous of following this occupation. – Government Printer 1919
Continue reading “Soldier Land Settlement Scheme”