(To the melody of "CLIMATE") The tram for Newmarket pulls up at stop 8 We walk through the bush till we come to the gate
And through it or round it we enter with glee The Queen of all colleges - our TTC.
Too-ra-lee, too-ra-lay, to the Deen ... ..
Then into the classrooms for lectures we go There are 6 rooms above and there's 1 down below
But the one down below lying next to Room 10 Is close, far too close, to the Principal' s den.
Too-ra-lee, too-ra-lay, It's close, far too close.
Rooms 16 and 13 are out on their own They resound to the sounds of a sick gramaphone
With both rooms in action on Thursday, ye Gods The welter of discord is over the odds.
The desks in the classroom are narrow and small And O.S. and X.O.S. are no good at all And when we barge in with a grunt and a squeeze We squat there in rows with our chins on our knees.
Room 15 - the room for Art for Art's sake And you'd be surprised at the gadgets we make
Sure is a let up in Method I'll say
To fool round with pastels and paint brush and clay.
Room 20 is next to the staff room for men Whence gurgles of laughter intrude now and then
And then we all know it's time for a spell When the signal booms out from the truncated bell.
The Science Room 19 abounds in a store Of pickled goannas and spiders galore And under the microscope there you will see
The penultimate hair on the leg of a flea.
The cooks and the dressmakers toil down below They cook and they fry and they stitch and they sew
We peep through the portals and stand there agape At the buxom young maids pushing pies into shape.
You may think that here is all work and no play With sweltering drudgery day after day But just cast your eye on the plateau below
I remember Dad's last question. "Mr Robinson, is it necessary to wear long pants at the College?"
"Our ITC"
(to the melody of "Climate") Courtesy of Phil Cullen
And I remember Rocks Robinson's answer as
if
it were yesterday. "Ur"(Rocks normally began his sentences with an elongated groan that gave the impression he was suffering from a bad stomach-ache) "Ur, no Mr Diefenbach. About half wear short pants."
What an unmitigated lief
Time -Keeper
Nurse
I had a number of pairs of short pants not yet showing signs of wear so, wanting to save Dad money, I duly turned up in shorts - with tie, of course - despite the fact that my landlady expressed some doubts about it. But I assured her that I had permission from the sacred oracle to arrive in short pants, and that I would not be the only one to do so.
How terrible it is to be naive and trusting! Only those who have arrived naked at a party where all others are wearing morning suits will understand the agony I went through that first day. I tried to brazen it out, but found it very difficult to persuade myself I didn't care. And while I put as brave a face as possible on the situation, I felt as Henry Lawson must have felt when he wrote, "You are bound to look men in the face when your pants begin to go!"
The day came mercifully to an end.
Such then was my introduction to Kelvin Grove. All the "trainees" were new to the place, even those who were JII's (second-year juniors), since the previous year the College had been located in Turbot Street. They were going to pull the old building down, so the College had moved from the beginning of1942 to the site of the North Brisbane Intermediate School at Kelvin Grove.
The only building on the site at that time was the present A Block. The North Brisbane Intermediate kids occupied the lower floor of the building, the Head Teacher having his office at the right side of the front steps. We never met these kids, since their breaks came at different times to ours. Not that we wanted to meet them! We were a cut above them!
I found myself in /IA, a male group of first years who were entering the College after having passed the Junior examination. I seem to remember that Juniors far outnumbered the Seniors. Indeed, we mixed very little with the Senior group, whose courses ran for one year only, while ours were supposed to span two years.
We learnt a lot of rules - in fact, that is all we did for weeks, since the intake seemed to be proceeding in dribs and drabs, new faces being added to the group from day to day. Every now and again a lecturer would turn up in front of us and go through the motions of keeping us busy, but on the whole we were left very much to our own devices, the main requirement being that we had to be present at all times.
In the meantime we played, ruling up sheets of paper and sinking submarines, destroyers, cruisers, and battleships with great skill.
And, yes - the rules! After I was privileged to witness some cringing new trainee being given a severe, loud and sustained tongue-lashing for daring
to trespass on the front stairs, I learnt that they were completely taboo to the great unwashed like us, and were reserved for the sole use of great people like lecturers and visitors. The plebs were to enter the building by the back stairs only.
I must confess that I secretly cherished an overwhelming desire to graduate to the ranks of the front-stair users, and even, for one moment of madness after my appointment to a school halfway through 1943, entertained the notion of dashing up the front stairs in full view of everybody. Luckily for me, sanity prevailed, for I am convinced my appointment would have been cancelled if I had succumbed to temptation.
I used the front stairs with my father on the day Singapore capitulated. I was to use them next when I was nearly 40, on the occasion of my secondment to the College in 1967. And even then my feeling of achievement was short-lived, for by then even the students were using them.
Then there was the matter of dress. It went without saying that we always wore a tie. In those days nobody was stupid enough to ask if it was obligatory.
We knew!
Within a day of our arrival we were introduced to a new rule - the rule of how we were to be addressed. I was fully fourteen and three-quarter years old, and was therefore astounded when some lecturer (I think it was Miss Julius) came in to call the roll: "Mr Diefenbach!" For one mind-numbing moment I thought she must imagine that my father had infiltrated the classroom, but managed to collect my thoughts in time to get out a strangled,
"Present, Miss Julius!"
It was also impressed on us that we were not permitted to smoke at College - everyone else could, but not JI' sf
And then at long last we were given a time-table and, about a month after the capitulation of Singapore, our lectures began. I suppose up till that time they had been wondering whether it was worthwhile starting, the way the Japanese were streaming down from the north.
But start we did.
As well as school method with Boxer Wyeth, we had music with Charlie Hall, art with Jemima (Mina) Laing and Clare Hunt, physical training with Jack Corkery, which were all just as examinable as school method. Besides this, we had speech, general science, and literature, the last taken by Phil
"Raddy" Radcliffe. These were not subject to examination. Later we had some sessions in Senior maths I, and those of us "lucky" enough to have
All-Round Athlete
Jam
tor
Teacher
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"Requirements of the Profession" b~
Paddy, Queensland Teachers Journal.
September 195~
done Latin for Junior also had some Latin sessions notched in later on - not examinable, thank heaven!
Beside Jenny Gilbert and "Greenie" Greenhalgh, the only other lecturers I remember seeing were the women's physical training lecturers. These were goddesses in short frilly dresses with whom we never came in contact. They were above and beyond us.
It wasn't long after lectures commenced before we had a break. Papers needed to be shifted from the old College in Turbot Street to the old Fire Brigade building diagonally opposite the old Canberra Hotel in Ann Street. (It was in this building that many of us were to attend night classes in our second year.)
First Year Juniors were allocated to the task. We were all old soldiers by this time, and knew all about how to make a job last while giving the appearance of extreme industry. I think we made it last a week or more.
Because of the possibility of air raids the College had all its windows criss-crossed with tape, and then we were set to work digging slit-trenches in the slopes surrounding the plateau.
Naturally we Junior I men were conscripted for the job, and we were not sorry. There were all sorts of lectures you could be excused from if you were handed a pick and shovel and given instructions to dig! A life in the open air was all right by us!
Of course, everybody knew that the digging was tough. We were digging through pure shale, and this couldn't be done in a hurry. There were no bullets flying to encourage us in our endeavours, so we didn't kill ourselves by working a great speed.
Every now and again Jack Corkery or another lecturer, even Rocks himself, would poke a head over the edge of the plateau to see how we were getting on, but our cockatoos generally gave us ample warning to enable us to raise a good sweat and puff for their benefit.
Then someone came up with the bright idea that if you broke off a small sapling near the edge of the trench, the remaining portion would serve admirably as a sort of catapult that was just great for the propulsion of ballistic missiles, which could be aimed at some suckers working at a distant trench. When they retaliated in kind, you cowered in your own half-finished trench till their fusillade had ended. Then you replied - and so on.
Our cockatoos kept us informed of the movements of authority while day after day we continued our war games.
Of course it followed that the trenches went down even more slowly than ever, since a sharp eye had to be kept out at all times for approaching missiles.
But all good things must come to an end. One twit finally miscalculated the range, and a huge rock ended up breaking a window of the toilet on the top floor. At least the tape did succeed in stopping the shattered glass from flying
in all directions.
Rocks wasn't amused, however. Nor was he in any way grateful that we had inadvertently proved the efficacy of his tape in the event of an air raid. We sank the rest of those trenches in record time. I think they were finished that same day.
Every now and again there'd be an air raid practice, and we'd all race for our allotted trenches when the sirens sounded. We'd have to stay there, laughing and joking-for we always knew it was a practice- till the all-clear sounded.
But once it wasn't a practice. I was out at Ascot practising school that day, and suddenly the siren sounded. Up till then there'd been the usual sounds of business as you'd expect to hear in a city - traffic and so on - which go unnoticed simply because they are normal. But as we ushered our classes into the trenches at the school, there was an absolute silence hanging over the city that was almost palpable. And this deathly waiting silence engendered a fear in the children (and in me) that I don't think any amount of noise would have. Some kids began to cry, and a couple of the poor little beggars wet themselves.
And I kept thinking of the proximity of the wharves to the Ascot School, and the American warships I'd seen tied up at those wharves as I'd passed them in the tram that morning.
If
ever there was a target that would make the enemy lick their lips, they were it!Boy, I'd have felt a lot safer in the trenches we'd dug at Kelvin Grove. But the kids needed cheering up, so a couple of us trainees poked our heads up above the trenches and led them in song. I don't remember what we sang, but I know it wasn't "Come away, bright and gay" - one of Charlie Hall's rounds! And our singing was still the only sound we could hear, until a Ione plane flew overhead. We ducked a bit lower, but kept singing.
At last the all-clear sounded. We never did find out for sure why the alarm had been sounded in the first place. Still, we were pleased we had completed the trenches at College.
The exigencies of war also gave us another activity to fill in our time. All the hat-rack areas were commandeered for the purpose of making camouflage
SoctAL L10N
"Requirements of the Profession (where "Paddy" left off>" by Chappell, Queensland Teachers Journal, October 1959
nets. We used to be given some periods off to engage in this useful occupation, and some of us more patriotic ones used the lunch hours also. I got quite good at it. Once Rocks came round and was quite impressed with my skill.
"Ur!" he remarked. "Very good! Ur yes! Your nose shows you're pretty sharp!" I didn't appreciate his reference to my nose, of which I was rather self-conscious at the time. I'd rather he'd kept his praise to himself
JI' s went to practising school one day per week, and I think we were expected at first to teach one lesson per visit, and write up observation notes for every lesson given by the teacher. Our lesson plans had two columns - one for matter and the other for method. The "matter" column normally had very little in, while the more detailed the "method" column was, the more likely one was to impress the teacher.
We shifted teachers every month or so, in order to get practice at all levels.
Some teachers gave a mark out of 10 for a lesson. That kept us on our toes.
Every now and again the head teacher would get us together and give us a talk about something or other. I particularly remember one talk that Bob Meibusch gave us at Ascot. He had a terrible throat, with a rasping tobacco cough, and his talk went something like this:
"Rasp! Rasp! Students. Rasp! It is ... rasp ... very important ... rasp, rasp ... that you never ... rasp, rasp ... develop any little ... rasp, rasp ...
characteristic ... rasp, rasp, rasp ... that the children can ... rasp, rasp ... get hold of Rasp! rasp! ... You can ... rasp, rasp ... be sure ... rasp, rasp ... that they will ... rasp, rasp ... mimic you ... rasp, rasp ... every chance they get.
Rasp! rasp! ... So watch out!"
Most of us took his point!
During second year many of us attended night classes in the old Fire Brigade building to study for Senior. Boxer had kept telling us we'd need a degree for promotion - ridiculous idea! But we knew we'd need Senior to get on.
And it was a drag to have to sit for three hours at the end of the day, with a small break for tea in the middle, but at least the break gave us some relief We'd sit in Anzac Square and stare fixedly at girls' shoes as they passed, to see if they'd blush. Or we'd just amuse ourselves sneering at the American servicemen, since they were overpaid, overdressed, and oversexed. But we were always careful to sneer gently, in case they came over to where we happened to be standing.
Another pastime we had in the break was to gather in the toilet on the top floor and whistle at the soldiers, both American and Australian, sneaking
surreptitiously into the blue-light facility below. They never seemed to be able to make out where the whistle came from, and would become even more furtive in their approach.
In the midst of all this - I think it was in May of the second year - we had to sit for our Class III exams. We wished Boxer had made us work more, as Greenie and Jennie had made their students work. Frantically we plumbed the depths of the syllabus, trying to commit to memory in a short week or two what we ought to have been working at for over a year!
But when the results came out, we were surprised to note that no more of Boxer's students had failed than Greenie' s. So Boxer mustn't have done so badly. One unkind person suggested it might have been that Boxer had marked the papers himself, but we refused to believe that that would effect our results.
So we were now classified, and could teach. At the same time, we had our nine days continuous teaching at practising school. The story was that, if we had taught for ten days the Department would have had to pay us full teachers' wages. Whether that was true or not, for nine days we muddled our way through with whatever class we had, to prove that we were fit to teach.
After the exams there seemed little left for us to work for. There were still the night classes, but the days began to drag a little as pointless lecture followed pointless lecture. I was fortunate in that Clare Hunt put in a good word for me, and I was allowed to spend my time rebinding syllabuses that were tending to fall apart at the seams.
Then at last came my appointment to a school - none too soon. I had been at College only eighteen months instead of the two years I was supposed to stay, and was just two months over sixteen when I received the news that I was appointed as an ATP (Assistant Teacher on Probation) to Maleny School.
I was only sixteen and a half when I was appointed at the end of the year as Head Teacher ofYaparaba School.
And why not? After all, I was fully trained. I could read a syllabus and prepare lessons, and do all manner of interesting things.
In 1989 Mr Diefenbach wrote this description of his student days at the College.