Teacher: Mother Boniface in Year 5 at St Mary’s in Armidale;
Mr Alison and Mr Gilmore, Ross Hill Public School
Student: Marguerite Gloster, Teacher
How many tricks could I create so as not to be picked to read next? There was the coughing, sliding under the desk or into the desk desperately searching for something, or the exact timing to exit to the toilet. As the teacher would ask us row after row to read, I hid so that no one would know I couldn’t read. My plan was I needed enough of these excuses until I knew the story off by heart, to me that was reading. Then when it was my turn I would recite them. I loved the stories, the Aesop Fables, The Man the Boy and the Donkey, The Lion and the Mouse.
Then one fateful day, in Year 3, the teacher invited my father to school. I was asked to read and with all the joy in my heart I recited one of these fables. The teacher turned the pages sporadically and it became evident it didn’t seem to matter when she did this. I recall, she pointed to the word ‘the’ and asked me to read it. Of course I had no idea! I had skipped the class, in those days Transition, when you learned sounds and basic reading skills.
Not being able to read in school meant incompetence, humiliation, I was branded. That was until I had Mother Boniface in Year 5 at St Mary’s in Armidale. She turned the misery around, the incompetence, the failure, my view of myself and others perception of me. How did she achieve it? At maths time there were now two teachers in the class. She sat at her desk to help anyone and I was the new teacher at the blackboard. I always won the Maths prize. Then slowly she encouraged my Mother to buy comics for me and together they taught me to read. Now I was a bright shining star.
That was the beginning. From there I went to Ross Hill Public School and what a blessing that was I had Mr Alison, another favourite who inspired us all, he put in our heart a passion, an eagerness for learning. There was no hiding; there was no holding back. Watch us fly! I repeated Year 6 and had Mr Gilmore, he did more ground work with me. He played us Gilbert and Sullivan songs. The words I recall “He polished up that handle so carefully that now I am the ruler of the kings navy…” Keep going step by step, I thought.
At the end of that year my Mother was talking to our neighbour, a teacher from Ross Hill, as I was swinging on her wire gate, back and forth. She advised my Mother, “Don’t expect much from your daughter she will get into one of the lower classed in high school.” They graded the classes A to F. Back and forth I went, back and forth, “Just watch me” I thought with determination, “ Just watch me!”
Thanks to my teachers and the gifts they gave me, Mother Boniface for renewed confidence, Mr Alison for passion for learning and Mr Gilmore for persistency and determination, I went into the A class.
I dug into my bag full of letters of gratitude from the many students I have taught and share this one. It is from a boy who climbed a tree during the tsunami in Sri Lanka to save himself; he lost his sister at that time and came to my class to learn English. This is what he wrote and as I read it I think of my favourite teachers and thank them too. He constructed a little boat as a present for me.
“Thank you for being a good teacher. You’ve been like, say I’m a candle without fire on the top and you put the fire on the top because I say that if a candle doesn’t have fire then it can’t be bright.’
On the wool track
I have often said to my kids “…life’s not a rehearsal. You get one canter around the paddock and that’s it!” So grab it with both hands.
My canter round the paddock was very much shaped by a teacher at North Sydney Boys’ High School in the l950s. By name Mr R.B. Forster B.A. A modest man, a good teacher and an even better career counsellor. I have a photo of him sitting staunchly in his suit looking suitably stern among the masters (and two mistresses, including Sir John Kerr’s later wife) at the time.
I had arrived at the Intermediate Certificate and though at a selective high school I wanted to do the unthinkable and leave school to become a wool classer. My time spent in the bush, as a child, had taught me that the guys in the sheds with the white coats and little pork pie hats had the job I really wanted, close to the action I loved. I would have preferred to be a shearer, at which I was by then quite competent, but there was no way my parents would wear that. But no one left North Sydney High to do a trade course, you got into a selective high school to go to university, or that was the assumption.
When this came up as my plan Mr Forster was horrified and set about subverting it quite subtly. I always enjoyed his history classes and he knew I liked science, particularly natural history. He insisted I stay at school until the Leaving Certificate and matriculate. By that time I had found a degree course at university called Wool Technology which seemed to hit all the right buttons, and of course R.B Forster was right.
I am pretty sure, though it is not an easy experiment to replicate, that a science degree combined with quite a few humanities subjects set me on my erratic but interesting course through life. I am quite certain that while I did not love being at school I certainly owed the odd trajectory of my life, in part to R.B. Forster. of North Sydney Boys’ High School. He even instilled in me a passion for history which continues. He was the model “good teacher”, not a mate but someone who made you think learning seemed like a good idea, and the more of it the better.
Max Bourke AM has been a jackaroo, scientist, science broadcaster, public servant (CEO of the Australian Council for the Arts and the Australian Heritage Commission), and established farming businesses and organisations. He has had a lifetime interest in conservation and history.
My Favourite Teacher
Gothic buildings were in short supply in suburban Moorooka in 1956, so the classical splendour of Brisbane Grammar School came as a cultural shock to this new boy. At the first morning assembly, the entire school packed into the Great Hall where we found ourselves being scrutinised by 'the Masters': a group of serious, black-robed and apparently humourless academics.
I had a vague idea that I wanted to be a writer. Since the age of ten, I had been tapping out bits and pieces on my mother's typewriter which were occasionally accepted by a publication called Junior's Journal. By the age of 13, when I found myself in Form 3H, I had outgrown Biggles and moved on to Bulldog Drummond and Edgar Wallace. The homework hours were spent reading thrillers and attempting to write one, not typing it out (a dead giveaway to my parents) but secretively scribbling down lurid plots in red ink. My schoolwork slumped.
Then two things happened: Memory tells me it was at the start of the second term (but I might be wrong) that a young man of Levantine appearance walked into our classroom and announced that he was our new form master (the previous one having decamped to Balliol, Oxford). 'My name is Mr Malouf,' he added with a self-deprecating smile, 'and I'll be taking you for English.' David Malouf was 22 years of age, a Grammar Old Boy who had been brought up in Brisbane during World War II (and about which he later wrote most movingly).
The second thing that happened was that I got a job as a casual reporter working for Harry Smith, sports editor of the Telegraph, Brisbane's evening paper. Every Saturday I covered a minor sporting event somewhere in the back blocks and phoned a few paragraphs to the copytakers in the Telegraph building in Queen Street for inclusion in the pink sports edition which went to press at 5 o'clock that evening.
This was interesting, paid work and as I progressed to more important assignments I found myself competing against real reporters such as the debonair Laurie Kavanagh of The Courier-Mail. I put aside the thrillers and borrowed Hugh Cudlipp's Publish and Be Damned from the local library and was soon dreaming of walking down Fleet Street and getting a job on Cudlipp's paper, the Daily Mirror.
Fortunately, David Malouf, who was more like a good-natured older brother than one of those fearsome, black-robed academics, injected a little realism into the situation. Having despaired over some of my work, he suggested it might be a good idea if I actually read the set novels, A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens), Vanity Fair (Thackeray) and Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte). So I put Cudlipp aside and picked up A Tale of Two Cities and began to read the adventures of Sydney Carton during the French Revolution. It was a revelation: not only was the story about one man's heroic self-sacrifice extremely exciting but I learned that Charles Dickens had also been a newspaper reporter and editor. My schoolwork improved accordingly.
Somewhere between the gentle ministrations of David Malouf and the professional requirements of Harry Smith, I managed to cobble together some sort of style that could pass muster for both essay-writing at school and sports-reporting in the Telegraph. By the time I left BGS, I had dozens of newspaper clippings neatly stapled in an old school exercise book marked 'English: Annotations'.
David Malouf later fell out with the BGS head, a lanky, difficult character called 'Shorty' Newell, and headed for greener pastures further south and eventually overseas where his English lectures inspired a generation of young writers and he became one of Australia's best (and best-loved) authors.
Teacher: Mr David Malouf
Student: Peter Alexander Thompson, author and journalist, b. Melbourne 1942, ed. Yeronga State School (1948-1955), Brisbane Grammar School (1956-1959), University of Queensland (1960-1962).
There were forty-four children in my class. I now understand her lack of patience. But I still haven't forgiven her that long year of violence and tedium. Because I could read when I was three. My mother inadvertently taught me because I was addicted to the point of monomania with a little golden book called Katie the Kitten and we used to recite it together and I learned the words on each page. I was fascinated with words, and as my best friend was Greek, with foreign words. I could talk about them at home. My mother knew Latin and my father spoke Calabrese. But at school all I got was another dose of Holidays and the wounding knowledge that my word was not believed. So when 1962 came along and with it a new teacher, I was not hopeful. Besides, he was a man, and seemed to be mostly composed of leg. I was prepared to be scared of him. But, ever hopeful, when he handed out that detested Holidays, I sneaked up to him, put the book on his folding desk, and whispered "Mr Witherspoon, I can read". And instead of scolding me back to my seat, he handed me his newspaper. And I read it aloud. Even the hard words. When I was about to begin on the criminal court news, he took it back and smiled at me. I must have beamed with vindicated pride. Then he undid a chain and handed me a key. "You can read whatever you like in that cupboard," he said.
Oh, bliss, oh, jewel of a man! No one has ever given me a better present. The book cupboard was stuffed with children's classics. Alice in Wonderland. The Wind In The Willows. Geoffrey Trease. Blue and all colours Fairy Books and Myths of Many Lands and Treasure Island and Kidnapped. Treasure indeed! Every day while the class was reading Holidays I could read whatever I liked. And he talked to me about words. He knew everything. When I imparted breathlessly my discovery that the Greek "zoo" meant "animal" as in Zoological gardens he told me to find as many Greek words in English as I could. I found lots. I delved into dictionaries. I plundered the library. He turned me from a sulky bored brat into a flying, dancing, diving intellect.
He rang the ABC when I was on the radio and I caught up with him, now that I am a novelist and he is retired. He remembered me, which was more than I deserved. He had 35 other children in that class. And he was so young when I met him, while I thought that he was a giant and terribly, terribly old. My only problem is that he wants me to call him BiIl, and I still haven't managed it. You don't call Genii who endow you with magic kingdoms by their first name. It just isn't respectful.
STORIES
In 1961 I was six and a half, and I hadn't enjoyed school. The teacher was cross and had even broke a feather duster around my best friend Themmy's legs. I hadn't taken to arithmetic at all. I was bored and forbidden to talk and only allowed to read a revolting little booklet called Holidays. I tried to tell my teacher that not only could I read Holidays, I could recite it, but she just accused me of learning it by heart and wouldn't give me anything else.