A Ladder of Mobility: Bob Leach

Bob Leach grew up in Wynnum and came in to Kelvin Grove in 1958 after taking the Senior examination. After one year here he went out into the primary teaching service, eventually ending up in the Wynnum State High School when the final year of primary school became the first year of high school. ln 1972 he received a Commonwealth Scholarship and went to the University of New England to take a Master's degree; he tutored there at the same time and in 1974 accepted a lectureship at Mt Gravatt; from 1979 to 1983 he was Head of Department, when changes to the system again moved him, back to Kelvin Crove, where in 1990 he is Senior Lecturer in History. He has an interest in Spanish and is Coordinator of the Centre for Pacific Basin Studies.

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Funnily enough, I have a very limited 111c1110ry of my time at College, so can give an impressionistic view only. It was incredibly poor. I was lzcre for a year-you know, it was a one-year job and I was a primary teaclzing student.

Secondary training was done at the University of Qucenslmzd in those days through a graduate diploma.

There was not a big demand for secondary teacher students because in tlzat partirnlar period we were still in the old grip of the A WU/ALP Queensland mode which was to keep Queensland as a primary producing State.

Education was a very low priority - Queensland at the time was in a grip of a Catholic social doctrine - what was necessary ·was basic education for tlze masses, because

if

they got any sort of real education they might end up like Victoria.

This College was a primary institution and it was run very much on the old elevated high school model - the British lower middle class respectability model. You had to sign in of a morning, you had people taking rolls, you had to wear tics and white shirts (public service model), girls had to wear stockings and decent dress. Nothing like the kids of today. Girls were not allowed to smoke, consequently smoke used to pour out of the toilets just under A Block. There was all that farcical culture where people did everything - snigger, snigger - at night. That hypocrisy broke up in the sixties.

I did my primary training here in 1958. At the time there were two types of students - the fls and f2s who were people who went to Junior at school.

Then they signed up, accepting a bondJor the next two years while they did their Senior here. Then they did a year of teacher training - so they were herefor three years.

Bob Leach

Students such as myself, who went through to Senior at school, came here on a teaching scholarship - we were the majority of not more than five hundred people at the College.

You have to remember the socio-economic culture of the time. I come from a mining family, my father went to war, then came back from the Western desert, met somebody in the Army and got himself a job as the manager of a hotel - so I grew up in a hotel. Then he ran a shop for a while, then he went back to working as an ordinary worker, as a nightwatchman. Most of the people I remember here came from a similar background. Remember, we also came from the depression generation and the war generation.

Security was an issue impressed on us. I really did not want to become a teacher - nor did most of the kids who were here.

Consequently, scholarships were provided. You had to work the bond out - only a year in my case. I must admit, however, that teaching really grew on me, particularly the secondary level, and I grew to love it.

The College made very little impression on me and my friends and I lost touch with it immediately. When the kids now go out to prac they hear teachers say "Forget everything you learnt at the College and just listen to me". To my mind it is partly anti-intellectualism, but it is also the experience of many of those people, in their forties and now in management levels in schools, who really hated the College.

Some areas of the College were good. For instance, Phys Ed was great - it was tops, you could not get better.

The social life was superb. Of political life there was none, but the social life was very active. There were dances every week down here in the old shed behind the Art block. There was lots of intermixing of men and women that way, even though they were segregated during the day- unbelievable isn't it? But that's the fifties for you.

In 1958 Castro was up in the hills of Cuba - it was in the papers every day.

I tried to get a discussion going on that, through the Students' Union. One or two turned up but the President said "Look, it's just not nice to talk about these things".

I think the word "nice" was dominant of College philosophy. What we had was a respectability factor dominating the content of courses - so that a kind of invisible ignorance crept in. I remember Social Studies was mainly hands-on utilitarian things, how to do things not what to do. I was appalled at that.

Controversial issues were not on; first of all you had to look toward the God inspector, then the Regulations, and finally the parents - low on the totem pole, parents were. It was extremely bureaucratic, the whole thing.

I think this is why I was disillusioned and very doubtful

if

I wanted to be a teacher. It was only later when I got to the secondary level that I realised a freer atmosphere was possible- the sixties came in and things were changing

rapidly. A great era, I love the sixties, I wish they would come back!

In the fifties a lot of the lecturers and staff were veterans of the war. I don't think it was a military camp; it was more like an inefficient public service institution - little black books and student records.

Intellectual areas were neglected. I remember we would walk down towards the Art block and keep on walking, through the windows, across the golf course, and disappear to the pub. There was so much pub-oriented culture - still the same with students, I notice- maybe that is the Australian scene.

I have been sometimes with students to the pub since 1974, and it is interesting to see that what is happening to girls is that they are becoming more like boys. This is very interesting to me. In order to break into the cult you have to become like the males so you get these female/males. In our day it was very much meeting the girl in the lounge and they were very ladylike and it was extremely rigid. I don't think they have picked up anything, I think they've lost a bit actually. It's a bit sad really.

There was not much difference between country kids and suburban kids in those days. Brisbane was just one big country town. Country kids coming in, however, were in the big smoke and often they were the ones that got into trouble.

I remember one fellow got expelled. We went on a train up to the Glasshouse Mountains to look at the pine forest (on Arbour Day) and coming back, of course, people would go wild in the train. The culture of that period was very conformative on the outside, anarchic on the inside. Anyhow, one bloke got into trouble for something or other- vandalised the train or something, and the Railways complained. I remember him getting drummed out of the College - almost with a roll of drums.

I worked far harder in Senior - far harder. This is being quite blunt and honest. There was a lot of assignment swapping, taking out girls who had good note books, and all that sort of caper.

A lot of university students who had failed came into the College - born again engineers, something like the old remittance men of England; they

"In future, Miss Peeples, you do not close the school in honour of a visit from a District In- _ __...,. spector . . . . "

"Can you tell me one redeeming feature about your work APART from the fact that you're my only daugnteri'"

. . . . t.rv hard . ·,, . pretend not to notice me . . . .

would turn up here and float through. It was truly dreadful. I'm sounding bitter, but I'm being honest.

Equipment and library facilities were terrible, absolutely terrible. The library was one room, up in A Block somewhere, used by everyone on campus. The Education Department controlled us, so the College was an outpost of the Public Service - got very little money, very little indeed. So I don't blame the College at all.

As I recall, we had plenty of sports gear, I must say that, but equipment, like desks, were very old - a lot of them were throwouts from schools. We had an ancient ¹⁹³⁶ cinematograph - flickering lights, and all.

Lectures were fairly utilitarian. I don't think they could be anything else, given the public service domination, even if the staff had wanted it otherwise.

I really enjoyed going to prac. Prac was where I learnt most. I think it was six weeks. I went to Coorparoo State School - it was a very old school with some good teachers, but very rigid. The classic incident was my sitting down on a chair in the staff room and an old woman started to flutter around me.

I looked over my shoulder and asked if anything was wrong. "Yes, I have been sitting in that chair for forty years and you come along and take it."

The rituals of her life had been disturbed and she was in tears - the surface clements arc important to many people because underneath they are in a state of chaos.

The College never provided us with an intellectual way of looking at education and ideas in order to provide a profound philosophical commitment to virtue, which I think education is. It did provide us with a veneer of respectability - what was expected. When I go out and rnix with principals of schools, I know exactly what to do and what not to say.

But it never provided people with an inner questioning or certainty and that is the great loss of Queensland education. My most important times in schools have been teaching economics or history and it1lking about the values of economics or history.

Most of the teachers here at College had also come from the Depression, they wa.rited security. Questioning "the Inspector" or questioning the Principal meant getting little comments about how 1 would have to pull my horns in.

We would take some things for granted these days, like telling a headmaster that I did not appreciate his just walking in and taking over the class, without knocking.

An Inspector pulled me up in my first year and said that I had too much of an Australian accent. I told him that I was an Australian and he wrote in his little black book, "Lad, you've got to learn to respect authority".

Inspectors were public service appointees. The ones we had were terrible - one or two were very helpful, I must be honest, but they were outnumbered by the ogres. I will never forget the Inspector turning up at my first school - the headmaster went into a spin - he had been through the Depression, had his wages chopped after the Premier's Conference in 1931. He came to school in his little pepper and salt suit and his tie and he dashed around, really in a tiz. You would have sworn that Atilla the Hun was coming!

These days they have got out of that, now they are facilitators. That was one good thing that came out of the sixties and seventies. We have been through a revolution although some threads of that culture still remain here, I think.

I came from a pretty radical family who discussed things and in the pub too, you saw life- in the Wynnum pub you would get the Salvation Army versus the Communists, all that sort of thing. So take all that into account.

It was most interesting to come back to the College as a member of staff, as I did in 1984. It was such a change. Well, it was the Whitlam period and vast amounts of money were coming in, new ideas were flooding into curriculum, and a young staff- most of them in their early thirties. I think what is going to happen now is that you are going to find an ageing of the staff such as I experienced back in the fifties. It was a fairly militant staff which had been mobilised through the sixties - I had been involved in the setting up of the South Brisbane Secondary Branch, the radical branch, of the Queensland Teachers' Union, from which most of the later secretaries and presidents of the Union came, like Ted Baldwin and White.

There were new courses. We used to meet together and discuss courses and we had Heads of Department who were very good. There was one thing wrong, however, and that was the calibre of the kids.

They had changed in the sense of socio-economic class. There were a lot more middle class kids coming through, based on the pass rate in the Senior examination, the TE score-we were taking the bottom scorers and the cream was going to the expanded universities.

Amalgamation came in 1981. Mt Gravatt's response was not positive. We felt that we had fewer management problems than at Kelvin Grove. In my department we had an elected head of department, we had personal budgets, and were much freer. The image of Kelvin Grove that came across was that you had to check with the head of department to get even fordigraphingdone!

"Now, now . . . no panic . . . j~st l?ok ~.n me as a 'father figure . . .

"I could not agree with you more . . it was a most unfortunate acci- dent !!¹¹

'Enough . . enough of this high drama and Wagnerian presentation . . . just plain humdrum teaching will do me . . . . "

"The Inspector Calls", Queensland Teachers' faurnal, September 1964

"Inspecting the Ranks", Queensland Teachers' Journal Courtesy of the Queensland Teachers' Journal

Most of us were very loathe to move but the whole secondary programme moved to Kelvin Grove so we just had to follow the market. I really liked the staff at Mt Gravatt, we used to have a bonny time - in fact we still have reunions of the old Mt Gravatt staff They were funny, they were intelligent, they were hard working, the majority of them.

Kelvin Grove always had, and still has a little, an image of being a public service outpost, whereas the newer Carseldine and Mt Gravatt campuses have an image of being new, progressive. Kelvin Grove really has not lost that image and in fact it still seems to continue in that mode.

This is from an interview with Denis Cry le in 1989.

Peter Wilson

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