Molly Woodward grew up in Coorparoo attending the local State primary school and then the Brisbane Girl's Grammar School. From there she took a teacher's scholarship to the Queensland Teacher's College, then located in Turbot Street. In 1927 she went out into the teaching service, spending some twenty years at the Central Practising School in Spring Hill, teaching infants.
Her interest in speech and drama stems from primary school days and performances with her sisters. She has travelled overseas to keep up-to-date with developments in teaching in these fields. To keep up with her younger staff she completed her studies at the age of 60 by taking the examinations for the Fellowship of Trinity College. In 1948 she came to Kelvin Grove as a lecturer, remaining here until her retirement in 1972, just before the opening of the campus theatre that is named for her.
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Molly: When Dr Edwards, LD, asked me to take a position at Kelvin Grove I didn't know what to do but I decided that perhaps the change from teaching small children would be very good. I had just got my LASA and AMEE and it was in the paper because years ago it was very important - these days it does not matter a bit - I can remember him ringing me and congratulating me on it. The Speech and Drama Association at tlzat time was very keen to have somebody representing the subject at the Teacher's College and I think they did some pushing- that was how I came to Kelvin Grove. I had to take two subjects, "infant method" and what they called "speech training" - awful stodgy sort of title! I liked both of them - but conditions were poor.
There were over forty in those groups and, as far as speech training went, there seemed to be a block as far as the men were concerned. They were in groups the males and the females in those days and I think they connected me with that old fashioned" elocution". It is not a disparaging term because it is the act of speaking out, which is very good, but it had come to be associated with an exaggerated type of speech and second rate material.
Interviewer: It does not quite fit the more stereotyped Australian male image of himself does it, to speak clearly?
Molly: I feel that in the present training of teachers the pendulum has swung very much the other way and even I think in the drama field too. We notice it, don't we, on our television, rather poor diction in some Australian drama?
Interviewer: I am not so much aware of diction but I am very aware of poor grammar. It raises my heckles to hear people describe something as "rather
unique". It is very difficult though to express disapproval of poor diction or shoddy grammar without being labelled a snob!
Molly: That's right. I can remember one student in an adult class was very much against my correction.
Interviewer: Do you think the women were different?
Molly: Oh yes, and I think that when the combination of male and female in the groups happened it was all for the good.
Interviewer: Do you think it was part of a general feeling in Australian culture that things like art and music and craft work and drama were for women.
Molly: That's right. After all -you know what might happen to a boy in a drama group!
Interviewer: You said you taught infant method. Can you describe how you taught that?
Molly: Well, in lecturing I had to concentrate, of course, on the reading. It was very difficult in those days because somebody had published what were called the phonic readers, which I was very much against - "Ned set the red hen in the pen". I don't know what sort of books you read when you were at primary school?
Interviewer: Pretty much those ... "The cat sat on the mat".
Molly: That's right. Well, I had tried to overcome that, but it was difficult because my predecessor in the job had published those books. I had quite a champion on the staff at the time in Ezra Wyeth - a former student of mine from the Central Practicing School - and we tried to approach reading from a sensible stance, where the sentences were things that people might naturally say. Of course, it was difficult because the books were still in existence!
Interviewer: Did you teach what student teachers had to teach, or how they had to teach it?
Molly: Mainly how. For example, I did some craft work with students and I can remember in New South Wales there was a great to-do about creative work and a new approach to infant teaching. I had to go down on my hands and knees to ask the Department if could I go down there for a fortnight. So I went down and travelled around infant schools round Sydney with some of the lady inspectoresses and I gained quite a bit of knowledge. Again, all the time I had been at Central Practicing School I had read English
publications. There was one magazine in particular called Child Education
(I don't know whether it is current today); I read all the books that I could on new approaches to reading, which helped me a great deal. For poetry speaking, I would often take out a group and show them what to do. For example, I am very keen on the rhythmic approach to poetry speaking and I would set the students out - half a dozen here and half a dozen there - and let them make such movements as were appropriate. If I presented a poem to students and it was about the sea, I used to get them grouped possibly on a cliff top overlooking the sea. I know with the number in class it was pretty hopeless and I often did feel very frustrated about things.
Interviewer: Did you do anything officially to have class numbers reduced?
Molly: Oh no. I used to complain, I suppose-but in the beginning, I don't think I would have complained against the first Principal, Colonel Robinson.
I was younger in those days and I didn't have the fire that I had later. My memories of Colonel Robinson are not all positive, but there were times when he championed me. We used to have awful concerts in the City Hall or the Rialto, and we had to perform. I can remember him being quite pleased with the efforts of the Speech Department.
Interviewer: Why do you say those concerts were awful?
Molly: Well, we had to do them out of College hours and I always had to do a verse-speaking choir and something in the way of drama. Now, you can imagine that City Hall stage. I had to do it between microphones. I can remember doing scenes from Christopher Fry's The Boy With a Cart and we trundled mud in wheelbarrows right down the centre aisle and up a ramp and then we had to get them set.
Interviewer: It is a pretty vast area to fill, isn't it?
Molly: Yes, and the acoustics were bad, particular for amateurs; I would not have been able to fill that City Hall anyway, without a microphone.
Interviewer: No. Did you ever feel that you wanted to go back to the ordinary classroom?
Molly: Yes, I did. Something pushed me on - I wanted to get something done at that place. You would possibly be interested in the time when something wonderful happened -we acquired a wire recorder. We had a film centre fairly handy and luckily the men there were most helpful when I got into trouble with the wire recorder (which was often) because the wire would snap, to the great amusement of the boys in the group, and the coils come off the spool, almost leg-roping me. That would have been in the early fifties.
Later on the tape recorder came - that was quite a thrill too - and with a
tape recorder, believe it or not, we acquired a little room for individual tape recording. Of course, not sound-proof Even later, when Dr Greenhalgh was Principal, he allowed times for speech correction on the timetable.
Interviewer: You were doing speech correction for teachers?
Molly: I was not a speech therapist. Nobody on the staff was a speech therapist, so anything that was difficult would be referred to a speech therapist. But any simple speech corrections we were able to deal with. I don't know whether the speech therapist thought we should even have done that but I felt that it was generally the way one did it.
Interviewer: Apart from correcting speech defects, what were you teaching the students?
Molly: Well, in the beginning, voice speech for the classroom and then, as the enrolment increased, I was asked to choose between infant method and speech, and I kept speech. I felt I was a lot happier then because I was able, with the increase of time to two periods per week, to go into the oral communication area.
Interviewer: What do you mean when you say "oral communication area"?
Molly: Well, in the oral communication area we did speech making and all types of speeches. In the early seventies Wyn Colvin, a member of my staff who later moved to Mt Gravatt, and I wrote the oral communication and drama section of the language syllabus. Whether it has been implemented in the schools, I would not know exactly, but we put in some speech making, debating, a little bit of interviewing, and drama for the primary school. In the meantime, in 1960, I had spent my long service leave in London and done quite a lot of work with a wonderful woman there called Maisy Cobby, who was the drama adviser for the London County Council schools. She took me under her wing, so to speak, and I went around to schools and a few teachers' colleges there, watching as she conducted workshops. That was a great spur, as far as I was concerned. Eventually I prevailed upon the
Education Department to allow Maisy Cobby to come to Kelvin Grove on her Australian tour. She came for a week; we bought in teachers and the children from Kelvin Grove State School and she demonstrated with them.
Interviewer: What did you look for when you were choosing staff?
Molly: I didn't choose staff They were chosen for me but I was able to recommend - but I was never able to interview. The Principal and the Department made the choices - which was sad really. I always felt that a Senior Lecturer should have had some say at staff interviews.