A broken windowpane at Gwambygine School: a bush saga
A Western Australian bush School, early 1920s. Image from McKenzie (undated)
There is a well-known poem by Australian bush poet Henry Lawson called The Old Bark School. It begins:
It was built of bark and poles, and the floor was full of holes
Where each leak in rainy weather made a pool;
And the walls were mostly cracks lined with calico and sacks —
There was little need for windows in the school.
There were no windows perhaps in Lawson’s school, but there were in others, well, as least there was one window in one particular one-teacher bush school in Western Australia … and which is the subject of this story.
Background
The one-teacher school is an icon of Australian bush history. Today they have all but disappeared, and the teachers and students who peopled them are also fast fading away. By a stroke of luck I discovered one excellent historical resource which provided me with insights into a school that had long ago disappeared: this resource was the archives of the State Records library. These contain a repository of old files containing records of correspondence between the Western Australian Education Department Head Office in Perth and individual schoolteachers, parents and other bodies out in the bush, dating back to the earliest days of settlement.
It all started when I was researching the history of the bushland reserve known as Gwambygine Park, for which I was preparing a management plan. The reserve is about 10 kms south of York on the west bank of the Avon River in the central wheatbelt of Western Australia, and about two kilometres from the small property on which my wife and I are growing trees. A one-teacher school was located on the reserve in the first half of the 20th C, and although the school is long gone, the file of correspondence between the Education Department and the School’s teachers is still extant, and I found it in the archives. It proved to be a treasure trove of information about the district and its background.
The file
By arrangement, I visited the State Records library where the librarian handed over the file, which I was allowed to consult in their reading room. Knowing Public Service files, I started at the back cover, in the year 1908, and read toward to the front cover, picking up the historical thread over a period of nearly 50 years. Turning the pages, a cast of wonderful characters emerged, and the scene at the little school and on the nearby farms, came to life. Here were the letters in flowing copperplate, written with pens dipped in inkwells, of the redoubtable early settlers of the area, such as J.M. Young of Rosebank, and C.R.H. Clifton of Cave Hill; here were the records of remarkable early teachers such as Flora Gilmour, Geraldine Egan and Stella Bramley….and here was the saga of the broken window pane of my story.
The context
In the late 19th century, most of the land along the Avon River south of York was still held as large pastoral properties (known as sheep stations), often several thousand acres in size. These ran out at an oblique angle from the river, northeast to southwest, and were given identifying letters (such as p, q, s etc) rather than lot or location numbers (although the owners had given their station a name). One of the first of the old pastoral properties to be subdivided into freehold farming properties was Gwambygine Station, which had originally been part of the estate of the pioneering Wittenoom family. The subdivision occurred a few years after completion of the Great Southern Railway, which provided both the impetus and the means for more intensive farm development along the line. The new farms on the “Gwambygine Estate” were tiny by today’s standards. They ranged from 100 to 250 acres for the main farms and 15 – 20 acres for the “homestead” blocks along the river (one of which I own today).
The small size and large number of the new farms at Gwambygine, meant an influx of settlers and families. An early map (Avon 499) shows their names; in 1905 they included Hicks, Young, Clifton, Davies and Ovens, all names still well known in the district today. The locale initially became known as Hicks Siding, after the railway siding located opposite the junction of the Great Southern Highway and the East Gwambygine Road.
The first school
When the new settlers moved onto their farms on the Gwambygine Estate, they brought with them, of course, their children. However, the government had made no provision for a school when the estate was created. Almost immediately the settlers began to agitate for one. But government funds were limited, and there were many competing demands, with new farming areas and settlements springing up all over the wheatbelt, the southwest and the Goldfields at that time. Eventually in 1908, an unlined shed was supplied, known as the Hicks Siding School. This was later replaced by a canvas tent and then in about 1913 by a ‘portable school’ (with weatherboard walls and iron roof) and it was now re-named Gwambygine School. With the first building came the first teacher, completing the establishment. It was located in a small clearing in the bush within the reserve now known as Gwambygine Park. Gwambygine School operated until 1947, when it closed and the district’s children were taken into York by school bus.
Gwambygine School, circa 1915
No teacher’s accommodation was ever provided. The first teachers (mostly young women) were expected to find their own accommodation on the neighboring farms and then to make their own arrangements for getting to and from school, including in some cases crossing the river in winter-time without the benefit of a bridge. At that time, the Education Department frowned upon, and would not permit, a single woman teacher to live alone. During the War years (1914-1918) most of the single teachers in the bush were women, as there were not enough male teachers to go around.
As with most small, isolated schools, pupil numbers fluctuated greatly from one year to the next, and it was a constant battle to keep their numbers above the magic figure of twelve which the Education Department demanded as justification for supplying a teacher. When numbers dropped, teachers were withdrawn or were shared around the other schools. On a map of southern WA showing one-teacher schools published in 1920, Gwambygine School was classified VII, which indicated the average attendance was only 10 students.
Gwambygine School in 1920 was classified VII. Interestingly, the map shows there were ten one-teacher schools in the area bounded by York, Greenhills and Beverley. Copied from Berson (2006)
The early teachers at Gwambygine School, like their colleagues in one-teacher bush schools all around the State, had many a battle with stock straying into the school yard, hard weather conditions, especially during summer and mid-winter, and professional isolation. They were generally young and inexperienced (usually the one-teacher bush school was a first appointment after Teacher’s Training College) and they had no communication aids such as the telephone, or even the telegraph. To and from Hicks Siding, all communication was by ‘snail mail”, via York. The teacher’s only professional guidance came from an occasional visit from the district school inspector, who was located nearly 100 kilometres away at Northam, and who had about 200 schools to inspect.
The teacher at a one-teacher school had a demanding job. She had to cover simultaneously the needs of all pupils, ranging from infants (aged 6) to 14-year olds completing their primary schooling, and to provide for physical as well as mental education.
Geraldine Egan
The schoolteacher was also the local face of the Education Department. The Department made all the rules about the way schools were run, and the senior officers lived in a bureaucratic world-apart down in the city. The teacher was frequently forced into defending her Department, or herself, against the ire of local farmers and parents.
A good example of this occurred in 1910. Low attendance numbers led to the teacher at Gwambygine being put onto part-time, and being asked to share her duties with Qualen School, whose teacher had been transferred due to low numbers there. The Qualen School was located approximately 10 kms and across the ranges to the west of Gwambygine. This new shared-teacher arrangement infuriated the parents in both districts. In July 1910, a settler signing himself “LH of Qualen” wrote to the Education Department to complain. His letter is preserved on the file (as is all subsequent correspondence quoted in this story) to this day:
I for one of the settlers of Qualen signed a petition to have the Qualen School opened for full-time, but so far we have had no alteration; in fact, we had no school last week at all, and teacher came at half-past ten this morning, and the children were home at two o’clock; the teacher was really too ill to teach till quarter past three, owing to getting wet travelling.
The Department sent a typed-up copy of this letter to the teacher concerned, the remarkable Geraldine Egan. She was the designated Gwambygine teacher and boarded with a farmer on the east side of the Avon River (that is, across the Avon River from her school). Miss Egan was asked to comment on the letter from LH of Qualen, which she did on 15th July in a lengthy handwritten letter to the Department’s Inspector General. In this letter, like most of those reproduced below, the writer’s personality shines through the stilted 'official-ese' jargon required in official letter-writing of the time:
Sir,
I beg to acknowledge your letter of the 9th inst. and inform you that the arrangements I have made for travelling between Hicks and Qualen are now very satisfactory. I have my pony stabled at Gwambygine and I am rowed over the river at Riverside and walk to get her. Now that the weather has cleared up I will have no difficulty in getting to Qualen in time either every alternate day or week.
The letter written by one of the parents to the Department is not quite correct. I arrived at school at 9.30 am, but as I was suffering from a cold and had lost my voice I dismissed the children at 2 PM. The morning in question I had to ride my pony into York and from York to Qualen as there was no other way of getting her across the river. The distance was 16 and a half miles [25 kms] and though I left home at 6 am I never reached Qualen until 9.30 am. I have almost every day been drenched riding either in or out, but we have had some dreadfully wet weather and I expected that. It was through the bank of the river giving away one day that gave me the dreadful cold I had, as I was 9 and a half miles from home and it was some time before I changed.
The attendance at Qualen has been very low lately owing to the bad weather and the children having colds. Last week average attendance was 9.2.
I have the honour to be,
Sir,
Your obedient servant,
Geraldine E Egan
To the everlasting shame of the Education Department, no reply was ever written to this wonderful letter!
The Avon River in full spate at the Riverside crossing where Geraldine Egan crossed on her way to school
The saga begins
The saga of the broken windowpane at Gwambygine School began innocently. We first hear of it in a letter (hand-written, with a nib pen dipped in ink) from the schoolteacher Miss Ruth Grant to the Director of the Education Department in Perth on August 20th, 1915:
Sir,
I beg to inform you that on the 19th inst., Jessie Young, one of the school children, broke one of the window panes in the school.
I have the honour to be,
Sir,
Your obedient servant,
Ruth E Grant
This seemingly innocuous event gave rise to no less than 25 pages of correspondence on the file, and eventually involved (in addition to Miss Grant), the Director of Education and sundry staff at the Education Department’s Head Office, the Department’s District Inspector at Northam, Jessie’s father JM Young, the State Solicitor General’s Department, the Minister for Works and the Public Works Department. The windowpane, in the only window in the school, was not replaced until July 1916, nearly a year later.
To take up the saga, on the 24th August 1915, the Director of Education wrote back to Miss Grant. Having begged to acknowledge receipt of her letter of the 20th inst. they then advised her to:
apply to the parents of Jessie Young to have the window repaired immediately.
A month went by and the Director (no doubt triggered into action by a ‘bring-up’ on the file) wrote again to Miss Grant. The letter drew attention to his previous letter and asked her to advise as to:
whether the window broken by Jessie Young has been repaired.
Miss Grant replied briskly a few days later (30th September 1915):
I beg to acknowledge your letter of September 20th inst. and beg to state that I have previously advised Mr. Young that he was expected to pay for the window. On receipt of my letter he called on me and flatly refused to do so.
This information seemed to have the same effect on the Director of Education as the sound of a bugle cry on an old war horse. Within days, he had written a furious letter to Mr. Young which (after recapitulating the circumstances of the breaking of the window pane by his daughter Jessie) threatened:
This is to inform you that if the pane of glass is not replaced immediately by you, the work will be done by this Department at your risk, and steps will be immediately taken to recover the cost.
This letter was mailed to Miss Grant, with a covering letter to her, requesting that she deliver it by hand to Mr. J.M. Young, describing him (un-necessarily it seems to me) as ‘the parent of the child who broke the window’.
The indomitable settler J.M. Young of Rosebank now enters the scene. On October 18th, 1915, he wrote as follows to the Director of Education:
Re the alleged breaking of a pane of glass at Gwambygine School.
The children and teachers were instructed some time ago, by one of your inspectors, to play ball cricket and other games in the playground of the school, as he objected to them hanging on the wire fence watching the trains pass by. Owing to the playground being very small, and mostly occupied by gardens, previous teachers had not allowed playing with balls owing to the danger of breaking windows.
I have always, since that date, informed teachers that if my children played ball, the Department would have to take the risk, as it is impossible to play inside the school yard without breaking the windows.
Yours respectfully
JM Young
The Director turns immediately to his District Inspector for confirmation. In a letter written on October 12th, 1915, to “Mr. Inspector Gladman” at Northam, the Department sought his views on Mr. Young’s account. Within two days, Inspector Gladman replied, with a lengthy handwritten letter, the salient points of which were:
Mr. Young’s letter contains an element of truth ... but it is pure fiction of him to state that the children were instructed by me to play ball cricket ...
He claimed that there was ample room for ball games without fear of damage – but if the children play ball games under the only window, and teachers permit the same, they should take the responsibility.
On the basis of this stab in the back, the Director of Education decided to switch his attack from Mr. Young to Miss Grant. On the 18th of October 1915, he wrote a long, typewritten letter to Miss Grant which goes over the whole history of the incident, provides Inspector Gladman’s assessment of the situation, and then concludes that she should be the one to pay for the window:
The [letter from JM Young] has been referred to Mr District Inspector Gladman, who states that he did not give permission for ball cricket but for organised games to be played in the ground. It appears to me that if the teacher grants permission for cricket to be played under the only window in the building, then she must take responsibility if any damage is done to it. I would be pleased to have your comments on this matter.
But if the Director of Education thought that Miss Grant would be a pushover, he was sadly mistaken. Within the week her reply was back on his desk:
In reply to your letter of the 18th inst. re broken window pane, I beg to inform you that I have never given permission to any of the school children to play cricket in the ground, nor to play ball games near the window. Nor have I ever received permission from Mr Inspector Gladman to allow the children to play cricket in the school yard.
The morning on which the window pane was broken I had told the children not to play anywhere near the window, but at the extreme end of the yard. Jessie Young was deliberately disobedient in bringing the ball near the school window.
The second part of Mr Young’s letter re having given the teachers warning that the Dept would take the responsibility in the event of his children playing ball under the window is absolutely false. Mr Young has been to the school three or four times since I was appointed to Gwambygine and has never either before or since the window pane was broken told me that I would be responsible. The only remark of that kind that he made was on the occasion of his visit to me after I had written to inform him he would have to pay for the window. He then blamed the Department for not making a larger school yard and said that had the yard been larger the accident to the window would not have happened.
You will, I hope, realise from the above that I fail to see why I should be held responsible in this matter.
I have the honour..etc
The Director, wisely, decided to regroup at this point, and tackle Mr. Young again, writing to him at Rosebank, Gwambygine on 28/10/15:
I beg to inform you that inquiries have been made with regard to the statement in your letter of the 8th inst. The District Inspector states emphatically that no such orders were given as those stated by you. The teacher bears out this statement and says that on the morning on which the window pane was broken, she told the children not to play near the window but at the extreme end of the yard. Your daughter was, therefore, deliberately disobedient in bringing the ball near the school windows. You will therefore be held responsible for the cost of repairing the damage done.
But Mr. Young was also made of stern stuff and was not to be bullied by some bureaucrat from the city. On November 11th, 1915, he sent this reply to the Director:
You evidently did not read my letter. I did not say the present teacher. You change [them] so often. Work back three or four and you will find my statement correct in every particular. You evidently have never seen the school ground or you would know that you could not play ball in any part of the yard without endangering the windows, and if I pay this time, I might be run in for a broken window every day. As I have the largest family mine would get the blame.
If your Department guarantees to pay me the 1/6 [15c] value of the glass and putting in, I will see that the pane is replaced.
Yours respectfully,
JM Young
These were fighting words, and the Director of Education gladly took up the challenge. Within hours the following letter was travelling back by train and pony express to Mr. Young at Gwambygine:
I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 11th instant and point out that, as you were previously informed, on the morning on which the window pane was broken, the teacher told the children not to play near the window, but at the extreme end of the yard. As your daughter was, therefore, deliberately disobedient in bringing the ball near the school window, the Department must insist upon repairs being carried out.
Mr. Young’s response to this (at least as far as can be gathered from the files), was to maintain a dignified silence – or perhaps he was harvesting at this time, and too busy during the day, or too tired at night to write. However, with no especially exhausting summertime work in open paddocks down in Perth, the staff of the Education Department were keen to keep the pot boiling. On the 17th December they again wrote to Mr. Young:
I will be glad if you will let me know whether you have yet arranged for the necessary repairs to the window, broken by your daughter, at the Gwambygine school.
And again on the 18th of Jan 1916:
I shall be obliged if you will inform me if you have yet arranged for the repairs to the Gwambygine School window which was broken by your daughter.
But by now, the Department must have been considering the cost/benefit of its campaign. A last-ditch effort was called for. So they referred the issue to the Crown Solicitor’s office for a ruling on whether the Department would succeed under our by-laws in a prosecution for damages for broken windows.
After due legal consideration, the Crown Solicitor’s office replied. They advised on the 3d March, 1916 that the Education Department cannot recover for windows broken by children if the parents object.
This must have come as a severe blow to the Department, but a note on the file simply states “If window has not yet been repaired, ask Works [Public Works Dept] to arrange”.
This called for yet another letter (dated March 4th, 1916) from the Director to Miss Grant at Gwambygine:
Adverting to my memoranda of the 21st September and the 2nd October last, I shall be obliged if you will let me know if the window broken by Jessie Young has yet been repaired.
To which she replied on the 10th March, 1916:
I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 10th inst. and to inform you that the window broken by Jessie Young has not been repaired.
On receipt of this advice, the Director then wrote to the Under Secretary for Works and Industries (March 16th, 1916):
I beg to inform you that a pane of glass in the window at Gwambygine School has been broken. Will you please arrange for the necessary repairs to be affected?
At this stage, neither Mr. Young nor Miss Grant had any idea what point the saga had reached. She decided (no doubt sensing that winter was approaching) to take matters into her own hands, as seems to be confirmed by her next letter to Head Office on April 19th, 1916:
I should like to know if I can engage a tradesman to [repair] the broken window pane and if so, who will be responsible for the payment.
On the 28th April the Department replied to Miss Grant, begging to acknowledge receipt of her letter of the 19th inst. and informing her that the Public Works Department had been asked to arrange for the necessary repairs to be ‘effected’.
The delay at the PWD was apparently caused by them having to refer the matter to their Minister for his approval. But at last on 25th May 1916, the Under Secretary for Works wrote to the Director, Education Department and advised
I have to inform you that the Hon the Minister has approved of the above mentioned work [repairs to windows] being executed at a cost of 5 shillings and the Chief Architect has been advised accordingly.
Miss Grant had the final word. Writing to the Director of Education on 5th July 1916 she begged to inform him that Mr Hepworth put in one window on the 1st inst. It had taken 11 months, and untold hours of letter writing, officer time, paper, disruption to farming work, cost and expense, to fix one window pane worth five shillings.
If Miss Grant showed herself to be a determined young woman in the events of the window broken by Jessie Young, she showed herself subsequently to be no fool (or at least, a quick learner). On 28th August 1916, six weeks after Mr. Hepworth finally repaired the window pane broken by Jessie, she wrote again to the Director of Education:
Sir,
I beg to inform you that one window pane is broken. I have no knowledge as to how it was broken, as it was done during the weekend.
I have the honour to be,
Sir,
Your obedient servant,
Ruth E Grant
The files contain numerous reports of broken windows at the school over the next thirty years. None was ever again attributed to a pupil. I like to think that Miss Grant left behind her copies of the Jessie Young correspondence with a 1916-type version of a yellow sticker on them, with a message for subsequent teachers “read this!”
Miss Ruth Grant (about 1916). Photo courtesy of Mrs June Hicks, daughter of Ruth
I called in to the site of the old Gwambygine School recently. Nothing remains. There is a stone with a plaque, set up a few years ago by the local community which commemorates the students and teachers. I was pleased to read the names of my heroines R Grant and G Egan among the latter.
Gwambygine School site today: a plaque in the bush, overgrown with York gums, jam and wild oats.
It was a hot, still day. As I stood before the memorial, the only sound in the bush was the easterly breeze rustling the York gums and jam wattles. But faintly I thought I could hear the chatter of schoolchildren (maybe playing ball cricket, or hanging on the wire fence to watch a locomotive steaming down the line), and the scratch of Miss Grant’s steel nib as she put the ball firmly back into the Director’s court with all the resolve of a determined young woman alone in the bush, battling the elements and the bureaucracy, and giving in to either.
References:
Education Department Files: FO 77915, F297915 and FO58328, now located in the State Archives.
From Early Beginnings. A History of York’s Schools (1981). York District High School Parents and Citizens Association.
Berson, Michael (2006): A Fair Chance in Life – Primary Schools and Principals in Western Australia 1850-2005. Western Australian Primary Principals Association publication.
McKenzie, John (undated): Old Bush Schools – life and education in the small schools of Western Australia 1893- 1961. WA College of Advanced Education, Doubleview, Western Australia
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