Jeff Shaw grew up in Yorkshire, attending the Grammar School in Dewsbury; he then changed to Leamington College in Warwickshire, where he took geography and art in place of Latin. To come up to Leamington's standard he went to the local art school, which pleased him because art had always been high on his list of priorities. He was more interested in horses and cattle, however, and for that reason came to Australia, at the age of eighteen, in 1951. After some time in northern New South Wales, then in Sydney in a screen printing studio and an insurance office, he returned to England.
Eventually deciding on a teaching career, Jeff found himself at Kelvin Grove in 1955 simply because Queensland's was the first Education Department to answer his letters of enquiry. He was chosen to take a two year Art course at the Central Technical College, before spending a year of teacher training at Kelvin Grove.
At the end of that he went out as a qualified Art teacher to various high schools and technical colleges, returning to Kelvin Grove in 1962 as a lecturer. By 1977 he was head of the Kelvin Grove School of the Arts, a position held until 1989. Since then he has been self-employed as a tutor, consultant, and accredited valuer under the Commonwealth Taxation Incentives to the Arts Scheme. In 1991 he was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to travel overseas to look at various aspects of distance art education.
Jeff is widely published on subjects such as ceramics and education and the arts, and has exhibited in both one-man and joint exhibitions. As well as being an examiner and serving on several educational boards and committees, he has given a great deal of time and energy to the promotion of the arts in the wider community. He has been a member of the Australia Council, President of the Flying Arts School for twelve years, and President of the Crafts Council of Queensland.
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Jeff: A few people each year were being offered the opportunity of two years on full pay as a sort of scholarship to go to the Central Technical College Art School in Brisbane to complete training as an art teacher. It was a recognised programme at the time, one year of Teaching College and two years at the Art College - so I completed that and then went out teaching.
Interviewer: What do you remember of your year at Kelvin Grove?
Jeff: I think the thing that impressed me was the earnestness and the experience of the staff They were probably a bit over-serious and almost frightened of the adult groups they were getting through. There were two adult groups and these were segregated into sexes and we had a good variety
Jeff Shaw
of people in the group. I was happy to be a primary school teacher and got on quite well in the prac school - we went to Ascot Primary School. There was one of the funniest incidents there- it was the time of the big scare about communism and my father was sending out the airmail edition of the Manchester Guardian. I had been reading this on the bus as I went up to school and the next thing I knew I was hauled in front of the Headmaster for reading communist literature - because some silly woman had got the Manchester Guardian confused with The Guardian, the communist paper. It reflects the sort of times and for me to be seriously taken in front of the Principal to explain my actions, probably indicates the kind of State it was and the attitude of mind of many of these teachers and lecturers.
Interviewer: Tell me about the teachers you remember in that year at Kelvin Grove?
Jeff: Well we had Laurie Grulke, who became the Secretary of the Teachers' Union. He was virtually our form master and he took it all very seriously but it was enjoyable - very formal and very starched and very capable. He was a stamp collector and had all kinds of other interests and strong principles and professionalism. We enjoyed the music staff- Hall, Morrison, and Mrs Woebke. For people who had never sung before nor played, the recorder music was probably the bit of freedom. I had always wanted to play the recorder but I could sing and they only gave recorders to people who were tone deaf I remember well the sort of frightening episodes when the fellows had to go and do their singing or play their piece so that they could be examined. The phys ed staff were very hard working and drove everybody into the ground, a bit like an army camp. But they had a good sense of humour - some people who had gone through the College and then become lecturers, like Kev Kehoe - were characters in their own right. I'd say the phys ed was one of the strongest departments.
Interviewer: Did you come out after that year feeling fitter than when you had gone in?
Jeff: Not really. I had a serious problem in that they did not pay me for the first three months when I thought I was going to be paid from 1 January and had borrowed money to fly out here. I was supposed to get eight pounds a week and I didn't get any, so I was just living on charity and what I could scrape together. In actual fact I had to borrow money from friends so I was walkingfrom Toowong, because I could not afford a tram, and doing without lunches. I ended up with pneumonia and didn't have a very good phys ed programme as a result of that.
Interviewer: Would there have been any possibility of a bank loan?
Jeff: Well, I got a loan of ten pounds from the College but it was hard enough to get a loan in those days
if
you had no property and I was already in debt to come here. So it was a difficult time and that sort of reflected rather badly in my eyes on the Department - what with their attitude about the Manchester Guardian as well!Interviewer: Was it not wanting to pay you or was it just a bureaucratic glitch?
Jeff: Well, the Department was like most of the public offices here, a monolitlz that admitted no mistakes and showed no sympathy to people that were not part of the brotherhood. It had its advantages and I saw that side too.
Interviewer: The material that you learnt in that year at Kelvin Grove, did you feel it was useful to you as a teacher?
Jeff: Very little, I suppose, of what I did, I applied later. I suppose the attitudes that I learnt and the contacts I made were of some help but a lot of what we went through was sort of records and how to fill them in - anybody
with half a brain could have done that and to waste our time on that sort of thing was a bit pointless. The phys ed was good and I was able to use some of that in the school situation and I think probably some of the classic lessons in English I was able to use. Some of the art, perhaps, was slightly helpful,
Milton Moon at tile pottery wheel
though it may have been a little antiquated. The advantage I had was having had two years of an art programme behind me.
Interviewer: And at the end of that year you got the scholarship to go to the Central Technical College?
Jeff: Yes, that was on full pay and for two years.
Interviewer: What in fact was the course there like? Did it complement what you had done before?
Jeff: No, it was even more antiquated than at Kelvin Grove. I suspect it was written in about 1867 when,following the Great Exhibition, it was decided to upgrade design in English Art Schools and they had not varied from that to any great extent- so it was an archaism and still perfectly preserved. That was 1956-57-there were some very good and very capable teachers but they were forced to stick within the bounds of the old syllabus and, for example, for the first two years drawing was virtually from a cast. When a cast wasn't available we were given a blue print - so for the first year drawing was in line and for the second year you had to shade it in. It was rather an odd situation and not many people really cared much. They said "Well we have to follow the syllabus, so let's follow it".
They had no idea of the revolution that had taken place in art and art teaching. There was one classic exam that I recall where the paper was handed out: "Draw the object set before you, finish in light and shade" - normally the group would be set up in the middle of the drawing room on a platform, but the cleaners had been in before the exam and there was a great heap of rubbish for us to draw - old waste paper baskets and whatever else had been thrown into the corners of the art studio. It was not the normal sort of geometric solids that people had been expecting!
I suppose I learnt a lot about technical drawing and perspective drawing and the mechanical modes. It was an interesting point that my two years in Britain weren't accepted because "generally we find that our standards are much higher than the English standards". And so I went along with them, receiving full pay to be down in George Street instead of out at Thargomindah, and doing what they wanted - it was an interesting time.
Interviewer: There was no content in that course to help you be a teacher?
Jeff: No, it did not relate much at all but the subject that some of us opted to do as an extra, screen printing, proved quite a useful one and I introduced screen printing into schools later on.
Interviewer: It would seem to me that they had offered you that training around the wrong way- it would have been better to send you to the Art School first and then into the art teacher training course at Kelvin Grove.
One would expect that by the time you had spent two years at Art College, what you had learnt about teaching at Kelvin Grove would have started to dim a little bit.
Jeff: Oh well, we did have an extra part of a programme that sent us down to the old Smelley's Building, the Industrial High School, and we taught one day a week down there. This was very good because you had the practical problems of facing up to large groups of boys and teaching. Then I opened up an Art Department in the Technical College and the High School in Cairns. I thoroughly enjoyed that, but it soon pointed out the deficiencies of the training programme. The secondary prac school at the Industrial High School was a big help - and that put me into contact with the system. So I was fairly well prepared by Mr
Applegate, who was the art teacher at that stage. And after a year in Cairns I was then sent to Ipswich to open up the Technical College and High School Art Department there.
Interviewer: When you say "open it up", do you mean you started it?
Before that they had not had an art teacher at all?
Jeff: They might have had some art at the turn of the century but the school itself had never had an art teacher. I was given English and art to teach and I was soon taken off English because they had to pay nze an extra fifty pounds a year as an English teacher, rather than "just" an Art teacher.
Interviewer: Alz, this is where we start to touch on that sore point with you?
Jeff: Yes. Well, I had been studying part-time or externally with the University of Queensland and English and history were nzy areas. It seemed natural that I should be given some of those classes, but then they had to pay me extra so they took me off them and I was left with only art teaching. I enjoyed that but there were very few people in my classes so they had to
Jeff Shaw stoking the kiln
invent evening classes and gave me some signwriting or something like that to teach. Normally an art teacher in a Tech College also got a lot of apprentices, like hairdressing, coach and motor body builders and painters, for freehand drawing- they did the centrally-established exercises from old Central Tech and when all the blueprints were sent around people were expected to copy them and this was part of their drawing course.
Interviewer: It must have been a very mixed bag of students.
Jeff: It didn't seem so at the time but I suppose it was very much like frontier work. You did what you could in a given situation, provided with nothing by the Department and all your own books and materials used up at a great rate. I have still some of the old books, quite knocked around. It was the experience at places like Ipswich Tech that forced us into developing new courses at Kelvin Grove when I got back there. From Ipswich I was then moved, in 1961-2, to Corinda High School which was comparatively new and I was the first ever full-time art teacher in the Department there - this was a very interesting and a very pleasurable time for me. I found that studying art for Junior and Senior examinations was fairly boring for the children, again, confined to a very limited examination structure- I felt that any normal person could pass those art exams with about six weeks hard, sensible work and that we might as well do something interesting in the meantime. So we decided to make pots, adopting Carl McConnell's advice to "make pots from the ground up so you discover everything".
We had some very good firings and the children all enjoyed it and it was not surprising that they all did well in their public exams later. But before we were really properly set up I was transferred to Kelvin Grove.
Interviewer: Was it during that period that you started agitating the Teachers' Union for better pay for art teachers?
Jeff: Well, two things occurred at that time that I think precipitated my move out of Corinda. One was that I complained to the Union that it was unreasonable to expect us to teach when graders and bulldozers were working alongside the room and that that work should be done outside of work hours if it was to be done at all; and that was one of my issues.
Interviewer: But you did see some benefits?
Jeff: Yes, well we mixed with a very good group of people at Kelvin Grove - many of the lecturers were from overseas; so on staff at about that time, late 1962, there were Betty Grulke and Van Homrigh and Merv Muhling, who were Australians - and then there were Brian Dean, who was trained at Birmingham and had been in the Army Education Corp, and Jim
Aitkenhead, trained in Scotland and also the Army Education Corp. Later on we acquired Coll Portley, a Warwick boy, and Allin Dwyer came in from Mackay - it provided a good capable and stable team. And we were keen to develop our own courses to replace the Tech College sort of programme.
Interviewer: Were you specifically told that you were replacing the Tech College programme or was this something that you took upon yourselves?
Jeff: Well, I think Van Homrigh had been keen to do this for some time because he had had a number of complaints about the quality of the programme people were undertaking. So what we did eventually was offer people one year of general teacher training and one year of art teacher training. And it was certainly much more suited to the needs of the school and the individual.
Interviewer: What specific part did you play?
Jeff: I think my skills with screen printing and pottery were useful, but really we'd all turn our hands to anything in those days.
I then developed an Associate Diploma course, because other people in the community wanted to join our courses for the craft and art components.
Then we were told we couldn't have a degree programme nor a diploma - because that was rivalling the College of Art - so we went to a two-year Associate Diploma, as the only admissible solution, and it was extremely successful. Pam Magdefrau was one of our early products from that course and there were hundreds of others - extremely successful. The pressures were on, however, for us to develop that further into a degree programme and perhaps the rot has set in now, towards elitism and thinking of painting as the only sort of legitimate art programme- overlooking the very practical demand and expectations of potters and textile workers, jewellers and silversmiths and leather workers, and so on.
Interviewer: Do you think that is so? I would have thought the craft courses over the last fifteen years had proliferated?
Jeff: Yes, but they're craft courses with a difference - dominated by the gallery set, which regards display as being more important than content, and the public is gullible, often buying simply bad techniques. It is good to have expression - but not if it is at the expense of techniques and materials.
That would be the distinction I mean between the real craft course and a crafty courses.
Interviewer: You were at Kelvin Grove when it moved over to being a College of Advanced Education, in 1975?
Jeff: I joined the College in late 1962 and by 1970 I was getting ready for a change - the changes I wanted to see were not happening rapidly enough, so I joined Longman Publishing for a while. Then the College was about to become autonomous so I tried to get back in, hoping I could make the changes needed more effectively. By 1977 I was Head of the School of the Arts and we have developed a BA programme across a large range of art areas. We also developed BAs in music, in drama, in dance - it was a good run of change and some very worthwhile and necessary courses were put in.
Interviewer: What were the biggest difficulties in making those changes?
Jeff: The intransigence and jealousies of entrenched educationalists and their attitudes were reflected in the structure of the institution. Campus Principals were an anachronism which office holders clung to because it was the prestigious thing, not recognising the incongruity of the appointment - all that we needed really was a campus manager who could look after cleaning duties and things like that. The conservatism I am describing is that of the corporate group of educationalists rather than particular individuals - we discussed it freely and everyone disagreed with me, specially the Heads of Schools and Campus Principals!
So the Teacher Education School was able to get an extra amount in its lap that was not available, say, to a School of Health or a School of the Arts.
There are certain things which reflected past attitudes rather than the challenge of the future.
Possibly the biggest boost to the development of the School of the Arts was when Peter Batsman came in with a healthy attitude to the arts and drama.
He had seen the work I had been doing through the Board of Secondary Studies, setting up new syllabuses under the Radford System - introducing dancing, music, film and TV - I think we were ahead in Australia in those developments and Batsman agreed that we should be doing the same thing at Kelvin Grove. So gradually, increasingly longer and better courses were set up at Kelvin Grove in music, dance, and the visual arts. The College has produced a number of very talented students in the arts.
Not all have become so famous but I think many capable people went through the courses. Many decided to stay in teaching and I think one of the unfair comparisons when you are looking into teaching the arts is to say "Well, they have not made a name". Most of these people decided to become teachers as a career path, and to say they have not exhibited is not always a fair approach.
Recent examples: Pat Hoffie has done extremely well in her painting- Kerry Kennedy went lecturing over at the Central School of Design in London -