The following post has been written by a past student of Pakenham Consolidated School.
2023, a time for reflection and recall of our days at the consolidated School- an experiment whereby many small rural schools in the district were closed and students, the ‘baby boomers” were bussed to a central large school..
Pakenham
Upper State School’s last photo before closure in January 1952
Pakenham Consolidated School was large and
the classes many- double classes from prep to grade 6 and a senior section for
students in forms 1-4.
The buildings and the building of the
school have been described elsewhere on a blog and will be mentioned only as
anecdotal to our life within the school.
Firstly, we were bussed from as far away as
Mt Burnett and Pakenham Upper, and Army Rd to the north, Toomuc Valley to the
west, Rythdale, Cardinia and Pakenham South to the south, and Nar Nar Goon
North, Tynong, Tonimbuc, Cora Lyn to the east.
Our bus trip took half an hour from 8.30 for a school starting day at
9.00am until 4.00pm when we again caught the bus home.
Mt Burnett / Pakenham Upper bus circa 1955
In prep class, 1952,
we were housed in the Art room and taught by Miss Ahern for six months- an
elegant lady, clad in pale grey serge straight skirt to mid-calf, puce fine
knit jumper and long painted fingernails to match. High heeled shoes and
stockings topped off her formidable appearance. She used flash cards to teach
us the alphabet and after lunch, we all had a nap on our woolen mats brought
from home. Her beautiful piano playing whilst we napped was a welcome delight
–she played a ‘brown bird singing’ with her long fingers rippling up and down
the keyboard. Our reader for the year was
titled ‘John and Betty.’
Grade 1, 1952 The second half of the year was a much noisier
affair in the junior school - an area dominated by the old Pakenham State
School which housed the junior mistress Miss Glew, a strict woman who ruled
assemblies with a wooden ruler applied to the backs of the legs for lapses in
attention. Our teacher, Miss Pearce sported a cherry red/maroon swing back
coat. In grade 1 and all other classes, we sat in wooden desks that seated
two- boys in one half of the room and girls in the other half. The general rule
was, a quiet classroom- hands up to ask or answer a question, 'Hands on
heads’ to regain some classroom order and hands together fingers clasped and sit up straight to see which row
could go to lunch first. We read from the Grade 1 reader, played with plasticine
which had a particular pungent smell and was a marbled brown and streaked
composition of colours as it had been used by many classes before us. The
plasticine was rolled out on to wooden boards and stick figures made by rolling
pieces of plasticine to the required shapes, Finger painting was looked forward
to as a large dollop of blue/green coloured paste (like clag, the universal
sticking paste kept in glass jars and applied with a round quarter inch brush)
was applied to a sheet of cartridge paper. Our job was then to spread the paste
with our hands and draw wavy patterns with our index finger- a precursor to
writing possibly. We also had religious instruction by Mr Dyer who sang
heartily and told us to build our love on a strong foundation- as we did the
hand actions placing a closed fist on top of the other closed fist and repeating, demonstrating the strong
foundation.
Grade
2, 1953 We
moved over to the long classroom wing and grade 2A was housed in the room nearest to
the road. Here Mrs Joyce Hosking taught us by allowing us to see on excursions,
how food was made- We visited the bakery in Pakenham to see the loaves go into
the multiple tins for baking, Handsford’s dairy farm to see the cows being
milked and Hosking’s apple orchard to see how apples grow. In the classroom we
made a model of an orchard in our sand tray at the back of the room using gum
twigs for trees and rolled up little balls of red crepe paper for the apples which we pasted on with clag. Grade 2, 1953, saw the school perform a grand
scale concert over 2 nights at the Mechanics Institute and the Hall. The theme
‘around the world’ was apt, as we had more students arriving from Netherlands,
Poland and Germany.
Grade 2 students prepare for the concert
Grade 2A in 1953 with Mrs.
Joyce Hosking
This
was also the year of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, so a walk to the
station was undertaken to see the Royal Train - our big challenge was then to
make the crown from coloured paper (kindergarten squares.) It was also a year
for rife coughs and colds and absenteeism as we slowly recovered from pleurisy,
glandular fever and tonsillitis. We read from the Grade 2 reader and a primer
with coloured drawings. For craft work we made a pom pom blue bird in sky blue
wool with a red felt beak on a twisted wool red and blue cord by which to hang
it up. In Grade 2 we wrote with blue pencil- largish hexagon shaped shaft.
Grade
3, 1954- We moved to the next room in the long
wing with Miss Kathleen Gibbs- who wore a 6 gored grey flannel skirt and a sky-blue hand knitted jumper with a Fair
Isle yoke. Miss Gibbs had very neat small sloping Copper Plate handwriting and
her black board was artistic and neat. She was able to decorate the top of the
board in Spring with pink blossoms and leaves drawn with coloured chalk- It was
a work of Art indeed. Miss Gibbs taught us about the Trans Canada Railway and about animals called moose and beavers. We
read from the Grade 3 Reader and did arithmetic from a text called Arithmetic
for grade 3 and learnt to write- good work was rewarded with a rubberstamped
animal or a silver or gold stick on star.
This year we had a wash bag with soap and a washer in a draw string
bag, which we proudly hung at the front of the room, but I feel wasn’t used too
much after the novelty wore off! Our
craft work was to knit a dark brown doll with clothes- a mammoth task as garter
stitch was time consuming – most of us struggled but one of our class members
completed the task with clothes- very neat and perfect like its horse-riding
creator from Toomuc Valley!
We also travelled by bus to Warragul to see
the Queen - a very hot day and a very long wait seated on the grass of the
showgrounds in our roped off section to see her drive past us.
Queen Elizabeth II at Warragul 1954
Grade
4 and 5, 1955-1956 with ‘skinny’ Mrs Warren ( there were 2 Mrs Warrens.)
Mrs Warren wore Fletcher Jones skirts
and twin sets- mostly her dark green tartan and fuschia twinset, but for best
when the Inspector, Mr. Holden came in his FJ Holden car, she wore her black
and white Shepherds’ plaid skirt with her scarlet twinset, her lipstick matched
and just before lunch she would open her lunch tin and look in the lid for a
mirror, apply fresh lipstick, and use the index finger and thumb to make sure
she had no ‘runs’ in the corner of her mouth. She was firm and fair and taught
us how to write in Copper Plate font, practicing until we ‘got it.’ In later
life we often were amazed by the similarity of the handwriting of siblings and
friends alike – all taught by Mrs. Warren. She taught us well, tables,
arithmetic operations including long division in grade 5- here we also
progressed to using fountain pens. We also learnt to prepare a page in our
exercise books each morning by ruling a margin down the left side, the width of
a ruler- no bumps. Perhaps the greatest pleasure was receiving the Greyhound pastel
box, new at the beginning of the year with colours we did not have in our
pencil set- Sea Green and Turquoise were favourites. (To this day my school
buddy and I both live at different locations with the Sea Green around
us all day.) Mrs. Warren was a perfectionist and for her we worked hard. We
learnt spelling from a spelling list issued by the Education Department- 10
spelling at a time to be learnt overnight and tested the next day. We also had
many tables tests until we knew all our tables to 12 times faultlessly. The
geography lesson was the Murray River and for history we learnt about early
explorers in Australia like Burke and Wills and Ludwig Leichardt. For Assessment, we kept a Test Book in our wooden
desks to be used when Mr. Holden arrived to test our learning. From time to
time, we did a writing piece in the test book to be shown to Mr. Holden. Music
was learnt from a song book and from the radio broadcasts- songs from around
the world – Dance the Hopak and the Maori Canoe Song. Our craft work for the
girls, was the making of a cloth cover for our Reader using red 1/8 inch
gingham cotton cloth with our name cross stitched in blue Broder cotton using
the squares for guidance. A 2-tone tea cosy for a tea pot was knitted, in
basket weave stitch- green garter stitch lining and gold basket weave outer
layer (patriotic for Olympic Games?) and from memory a knitting cotton face
washer in garter stitch,
For sport, we did lots of drills - cross ball
and tunnel ball where we competed fiercely with our other grade class. Lunchtimes we played rounders endlessly- a
game like baseball but with a little cricket bat with which to hit a tennis
ball. Skippy was big too. 2 students turned the big rope while the whole class
took turns to run or jump through the turning rope. My sister’s class were good
at double rope skipping, where 2 ropes were turned and jumpers ran and jumped
through without tangling in the ropes. Hopscotch was also big and the boys
played marbles and chasey around the school. The highlight of Grade 5 was of
course the trip by train to Melbourne to see the Olympic Games- we had a day at
the athletics and saw Vladimir Kutz run the 5000 metres. The whole school also
filed through the house over the road from the school to see a grainy black and
white image of the games on a very new television set- the only television set
at the school end of Pakenham.
Grade 6, 1957 and we moved to the
South side of the school- 2 grade sixes Mr. Bert Bailey in his navy well worn
pin striped suit, and Mrs. Joyce Hosking, rugged up on the school bus in her
orange and black, big collared mohair coat. Here we learnt to become efficient
and faster at arithmetic and read from Reader for grade 6 and from The School
Paper which arrived monthly. The school paper had articles, short stories poems
song on the back cover and could be used for transcription, comprehension
and spelling. We practiced writing,
knowing the ‘parts of speech’- Subject and then the predicate. The predicate
had adverbial clauses, adjectival phrases and correct tenses for verbs. We
learnt a poem by heart as we had done from grade 3 onwards. Social Studies was
a large part of the week and we travelled theoretically from England to Australia
learning the history, geography, journeys of discovery along the way.
Occasional light relief came with The Gould League of Bird Lovers Colouring
competitions and the use of Derwent pencils to get the colours of the ‘blue
crane’ correct. The grade 6s also had the pleasure of delivering a crate of
milk to each class by morning play time. We formed pairs of 1 boy and 1 girl
and then had races with the full crates to see which pair could deliver the
most crates- clatter bang across the yard... Sometimes out the classroom window
you could count the carriages of a coal train from Yallourn- 48 springs to mind. Miss Walke taught us singing with challenging
songs like Peter Dawson’s “Stockriders’
Song” with the lyrics ‘We’ve been up
Queensland way with the cattle many day.’ Art was taken in the Art room- a
dedicated room with Miss Dot Barr and
Miss Ruth Butler in charge. We learnt the rudiments of water colour painting,
attempted guache by mixing egg yolk into pigment paint powder, stitched a rag
doll and wove a basket base with gingham fabric draw string beach bag, knitted
a cardigan and the senior school made macramé belts with plastic tubing 1/16
inch in diameter. The canteen stocked the plastic by the yard and the plastic
‘craze’ consumed the school. On the school bus, we macraméd key rings, wrist
bands and kept eternally busy watching our patterns emerge.
We
also played 'cats' cradle’ on the bus with a length of wool and the person
sitting beside you working the patterns in the wool. The excursions this year
were to Grant’s Picnic ground at Kallista in the Dandenongs to see the forest
and see the crimson rosellas. Another excursion was to Melbourne where we
climbed to the top of the Nicholas building to see the sights- 6 floors from
memory!
The management of the whole school was
overseen by the Principal Mr.Charles McKenzie Hicks who had a rubber stamp with
his name in French Garabond font- no doubt to stamp the hundreds of reports
written on small sheets of paper about 10cm by 8 cm- just enough room to put a
score out of 10 for each subject and a small comment of how the student was
going. His secretary was Mrs Bowyer for whom my buddy and I did her flower arrangement
for her desk each Monday morning – to be handsomely rewarded with a tin of toffees
at the end of the year. Each day we marched into school to the march ‘Imperial
Echoes’played over the loudspeaker. Each Monday morning we had an assembly
where we pledged allegiance to Country and to the Queen and promised to
‘cheerfully obey our parents, teachers and the law’ – the boys stood at attention with their right hand over their hearts as they chanted the oath. The flag
was raised each Monday and we all sang the National Anthem ‘God Save the
Queen’. The school also had a Fife and Drum band and a Bugle and Drum band,
introduced and supervised by Mr. Frank Walsh who also was the band leader for
the Pakenham and Citizens Brass Band. Many students who began in the Bugle and
Drum Band moved on to play brass in the Pakenham band and for some it became
their careers.
Mr. Frank Walsh conducting the Pakenham and Citizens
Brass Band at Sale circa 1953
Music lessons were available at the school
and also nearby at the St Patrick’s
convent under the watchful eye of Sister Eugene where many students learnt
piano and violin.
School Sport in the form of athletics was
conducted by dividing students into the 3 houses, red for McMillan, blue for
Strezlecki, and white for Bennett. We ran in white shorts and t-shirts on the
ground beyond the shelter sheds. A few times we travelled to Poowong
Consolidated for higher level competition and Poowong came to Pakenham
occasionally for ball sports contests.
Our school uniform, for girls, was a blue
and white 1/8 inch gingham frock, with white collar and cuffs. The frock
buttoned to the waist and had a buckled belt and 6 gored skirt. (Madame Weigall
pattern- our mothers stitched our frocks). Our underpants were grey airtex
fabric- no fancy knickers!- grey socks and black lace-up shoes. The school
jumper was grey with bands of maroon and royal blue. We wore a white shirt and
maroon tie. In grade 6 we also had a grey blazer and a school badge with the
motto ‘to thine own self be true’. The boys wore grey pants above the knees
with long grey socks.
Mostly we brought our lunch of sandwiches
and fruit from home but the canteen was run firmly by Mrs. Jackson and Mrs.
Burnett – where a hot pie for 1/6d was a luxury on a cold day. Any leftover
coins could purchase a variety of bagged lollies of which knock-knocks were a favourite.
At the end of grade 6, some students
remained at PCS to complete forms 1-4, whilst others travelled to Dandenong
Technical School, Koo Wee Rup, Upwey and Drouin High School.
Note: Photographs of Mrs. Hosking teaching in her classroom and the Art
room are available on a previous blog by Heather- Casey Cardinia- Pakenham
Consolidated School.
All photos and information written and provided by Private Donor.
Class photo student names are available
at the archives.
