Chapter 5

WORKING DAYS

After I realized that nursing was not for me, I got a job working in the Victorian Government Tourist Bureau in Collins Street Melbourne. I was on the counter and it was a pleasant job booking travel and accommodation for people but like many government departments there was an overabundance of staff so every now and then there would be six or eight girls standing behind the counter and no customers in front so our manager would send us off to shop or have coffee. As we were right in Collins Street under the Australia Hotel that was no hardship but the job was not much of a challenge either so after about six months, I went to the State Vocational Guidance office and had a full day of tests. This was a free service offered to people who felt they were not in the right job.

At the end of the day, I had an interview with a psychologist who said that I should go to university to study journalism but I explained that I had no money and that my mother could certainly not afford to send me there so he then suggested teaching. I had never even thought of that but when he told me that my training would be free and I would be paid £5 a week I agreed to try it. I went to Melbourne Teachers’ College for an interview a few days later and was accepted into a primary teaching course. This was the last year of the 1-year course and was offered only to people who had previously worked somewhere else, nobody straight from school, so there were a lot of interesting people in the group – some ex-servicemen, a widow with children and other people who like me had done a few different things since leaving school. I made a very good friend on the first day, Val Cowan. She lived in Caulfield so we traveled on the same tram to town and I would often get on at my stop and see that Val was already there and that we were dressed the same. We spent a lot of nights at each other’s homes and became very close and this relationship continued until Val died in 2009. Strangely enough two other good friends were Adrian Carr who was to become my brother in law and his friend Dick Carr (same name but not related). As our names were all close alphabetically we often went out on teaching rounds together and the boys who each had a car whereas Val and I did not, were always generous with rides.

My time at Teachers’ College was enjoyable and interesting. The lecturers were all friendly people and excellent teachers and we learned subjects as diverse as psychology, principles of education, teaching methods, infant school methods, singing, crafts of many kinds including puppetry, blackboard drawing, literature, maths and physical education – with square dancing at lunchtimes - and every six weeks we would go out on a teaching round for a month. We would be attached to a classroom teacher and for the first couple of days we would just observe, then we would be given small groups to work with and we would finish up teaching a whole lesson while a lecturer from the Teachers’ College watched and assessed us and then discussed our methods at the end and gave us a mark. Val and I were usually on teaching rounds together and sometimes we would give puppet plays together – our piece de resistance was Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby , we used to borrow the glove puppets from the College and it was always a great hit with the kids and staff alike.

One of the Social Studies lecturers used to take a group of students away on a Social Studies trip in the term holidays. He liked Val and me and we got picked for both trips and had a wonderful time – the first time we went to Wangaratta, Bright and Porepunkah and the second time to the Kiewa Hydroelectric scheme. We would camp in the local school buildings and each day there would be an excursion to some place of interest, we would be expected to take notes and turn in a good full report at the end of the trip covering everything we’d seen and done. The trips were a great learning experience as well as being a lot of fun.

Because we had had free training and been paid a small salary, we were all bonded to teach for 5 years and as the year went on it became apparent that unless we got on some sort of special staff everyone would be going to country schools – most of the men went to one-teacher rural schools and the women would go to two or three teacher schools, usually in slightly larger centers. Val had already been invited to join the Physical Education Staff as an itinerant teacher in Melbourne schools. I was helping to support Mum by paying board and was hoping not to get sent away from Melbourne. The Social Studies lecturer who had taken us away on trips told me one day that a friend of his was the principal of the School for the Deaf in St Kilda Road and was looking for another teacher, and would I be interested in a job there? Would I ever! I went for an interview, got the job and went straight to the library to get a book on teaching deaf children, a subject about which I knew absolutely nothing.

Above is a photo of The School for the Deaf, I am in the third row, 8 from the left. The in-service training system there was a very good one. By teaching full time at the school, attending several vacation schools, submitting a number of papers and teaching for a day every few months in front of an examiner, it was possible to become a qualified Teacher of the Deaf and I did that. I learned sign language and taught a range of different age groups from beginners to senior girls. The teachers were all hard-working and the principal of the school was excellent, a fair-minded friendly good-humored man, popular with staff and students alike. Altogether it was a very happy place to work. There was a boarding house there too as a lot of children came from the country and lived there during term time. Many of the city children were from deaf families so they had deaf parents, siblings, uncles, aunts and cousins. Occasionally there would be one hearing child in a family of five or six deaf children. The deaf community was a strong and self-sufficient one in Melbourne and school leavers could be fairly sure of finding paid work because the girls were employed as copy typists and the boys learned various manual skills and did well at carpentry and building jobs.

It was rightly believed that it was good for the children to go out on excursions so it was never any problem to get permission to take our classes out for a day and also when any special event was on in Melbourne the school would be given free tickets. When the ballet dancers Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn danced in Melbourne, we had free tickets and took our classes – similarly for the 1956 Olympic Games – and on that occasion the Queen visited Melbourne and we all took our classes and stood at the gates of Government House to see her as she arrived. She slowed right down and gave our kids a special wave and they were all delighted. Quite often I would have them out somewhere on an excursion and passers-by would see us all signing to each other and would stop and give me 10 shillings and say `Please buy the poor little dears an ice cream’ which I would always do but the kids would gleefully sign to each other `Free for the Deaf’! They did not regard themselves as being disabled, they simply used a different language; sign is a beautiful language but I was never as fast or as fluent as some of them, particularly the children from deaf families who had grown up in the signing environment.

Sometimes I took one or two of the boarders home to my house for the weekend as some of them lived too far away to go home more than a couple of times a year. Reg was a very good athlete and had been the Victorian Discus Champion and runner-up in the Australian Athletic Championships in 1955 so when the National Film Board made a film to publicise the upcoming 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games, he was asked to throw the discus in the film which was called Melbourne Olympic City . It was released at the Regent Theatre in Collins Street in Melbourne as the supporting film to the musical Carousel which came out the same year. I happened to have one of the boarders staying with me the weekend it opened so Reg took us both to the matinee. I’ll never forget when Reg’s image came on the big screen; Edith let out a scream of excitement that made everyone in the theatre jump!

I certainly found my niche there and loved the job but in my fourth year at the Deaf School I married and almost immediately became pregnant with our first beautiful child so I gave up teaching at the end of that year and didn’t work again (well I did work of course but not for money!) for fourteen years when the last of our six children started school. By then we were living in Canada but that’s another story.