The Story of a Disadvantaged School

To an ordinary mug Australian, concerned about his country’s present terrible educational lameness, it is reassuring that all the clever people seem now to be agreed about the single simple cure for it: more money. Labelled by the federal government as the “Gonski Report”, a conspectus of our educational shortcomings has been displayed for public consideration. All our weaknesses will melt away in the face of great buckets of money, we are told.

Everything from leaky school roofs to truancy; from classroom misbehaviour to incompetent and subversive teachers; from head lice to shortages of personal computers; from a boring Left-skewed curriculum to the numerous dullards who proudly present each year to receive their dubious degrees.

From ancient times, the education of youth has engaged society’s wisest writers and philosophers, and much they wrote upon it. In the eighteenth century, an English predecessor of David Gonski said: “There is now less flogging in our great schools than formerly, but then less is learned there; so that what the boys get at one end they lose at the other.”

This was the great Doctor Samuel Johnson, deploring the decay of learning in 1775, and prop­osing a remedy even simpler, more “stripped down”, shall we say, than Gonski. What heaven when education could pursue its hallowed mission untroubled by high finance or governmental intervention! Perhaps then the Royal Navy needed to be charged with keeping the East Indian navigation open, to ensure at all seasons the plentiful supply of slim, resilient canes from Malacca, but that would have been all.

Stepping down from the high policy level (whether of the financial or of the flogging persuasion) the temptation is irresistible to consult one’s personal experience. What did getting educated mean to me, and do to me?

An abiding conviction remains that family involvement is vital—that home and school should mesh fruitfully. Taught at home, through tried and trusty phonics, I could read quite well by the age of three or four. This gave me the confidence to face reading (and all that follows it at school) in an optimistic spirit. Whatever still puzzled me I could discuss that night with Mum at home. The anxiety of other kids whom I knew lacked this sort of support was sometimes plain to see. Parents who leave their children’s education entirely to bureaucrats and “educators” abandon them.

My whole school-level education—through to Matriculation at Year 11—took place at Malvern Church of England Boys’ Grammar School (Victoria). It was probably the humblest of the similar Anglican foundations. With an enrolment never much above 200, it was an educational battler. It offered a real-life allegory of The Vanity of Human Wishes, and a demonstration of sic transit gloria mundi.

The school, for so humble an entity, was housed in splendour, occupying the Land Boom mansion of one of the most corrupt and odious of all the swindlers of Melbourne’s 1890s, J.M. Davies. The life of this leading member of Victoria’s Legislative Council could certainly have pointed a moral for schoolboys, had the teachers cared to use it. At the moment of completion of his palace, he went broke, dodged prison, and lived shabbily in a few rooms of his own unoccupied servants’ quarters. The gorgeous (and unimaginably costly) ballroom parquetry floor, patterned with star symbols in many-coloured timbers, gradually vanished under the droppings of intruder birds. Later, scraped clean, the area was used for the school’s daily assembly and morning prayers, conducted by Headmaster “Joe” Marsden, standing on a lower step of the sumptuously carven staircase. The rough boots of 200 schoolboys, scuffing daily over such glory, was another symbol of “How are the mighty fallen”.

In Gonski-speak, schools may be classed as either “privileged” or “disadvantaged”. In my day at Malvern Grammar, a casual caller at the school might well have called it privileged. A visitor who stayed longer and looked deeper would certainly have said disadvantaged. There was no library whatever; the “laboratory” was a reclaimed scullery in the old servants’ quarters equipped, as I recall, with one Bunsen burner and a mysterious stoppered glass jar of iron filings. The “gymnasium” was a disused barn or fowlhouse, one side fully exposed to the elements, except for the cosy shelter of a wall of wire-netting. There was one tennis court. For anything like serious footy practice or aths training we trotted over to Central Park.

With one notable exception, comment on the teaching would best have been entrusted to the waspish young Mr Evelyn Waugh, then of rising fame. Not that some of the teachers weren’t characters. The one who taught Commercial Principles was tall, white-haired, thin and bow-legged, a veteran lighthorseman of the South African wars. “Go on, sir. Tell us about the Boer War. Go on, sir.” Unable to resist the temptation, he would often forget Commercial Principles entirely, and devote a whole lesson to wonderful real-life stories of campaigning.

The “notable exception” was the senior master who taught English, History, Geography and Economics. He was a magical master of the pedagogue’s art, and although it is nearly eighty years since I left his classroom, I remember him constantly. This, of course, was the famous “Cactus” Connell, whom I’ve mentioned here so many times before that you’ve probably heard quite enough.

If you think Malvern Grammar sounds a bit of a dog’s breakfast of a school, you’d be right. But it had a sort of grace—helped perhaps by its small size, in which every boy knew every other boy. I was happy there, and never once repined that family finances forbade my going somewhere grander, like Melbourne Grammar or Scotch.

Malvern Grammar early touched the lives of at least a few of our men of later worth or eminence. That most serviceable and gracious Australian, athlete and viceroy John Landy, spent his earliest school days at Malvern. I saw his handsome mother deliver him on his first day: a little fellow with cherubic face closely encircled by long blond curls. Within a few days they had been replaced by a no-nonsense “short back and sides”. I wonder why?

I was puzzled (then) by what seemed to be the almost excited interest shown in Mrs Landy by the senior boys (that is, the ones now promoted to long trousers). She was, I later realised, a “bit of a dish”.

On my own very first day I noticed a slightly older kid—very blond—lying face-down on the parquetry floor, poised over a pad of drawing paper upon which he was making the most wonderful sketches. Before my eyes there appeared, for example, the visage, instantly recognised, of the Infant Mistress whom I had met only minutes earlier. This was the young Robin Boyd, to become after the Second World War the architect and pre-eminent cultural critic. We became the closest of friends, and I had the honour of publishing some of his lively books.

For my last four (I think) years at school, my companion in the next desk was Frank Hughes, a tough-minded and down-to-earth scholarship boy from Murrumbeena State School. Bushwalking was our weekend pleasure, but we prided ourselves that we did not merely stroll aimlessly round the pleasanter countryside. Our excursions were “expeditions”, requiring full skills with prismatic compass and maps and sophisticated bushcraft. There was often a spice of real danger which our parents would never have approved. Frank and I parted on School Speech Night of (I think) 1939, not to meet again for forty years. By then, with DFC and Bar, he had become one of the most decorated aircrew of the RAF’s legendary Pathfinders and, as a genius in mining exploration, he had enriched Australians by billions, by his discoveries of uranium in South Australia, of Mary Kathleen in Queensland, the stupendous Tom Price iron ore deposit, and diamonds in the Kimberley. Typically of him, we celebrated our reunion with an only mildly hair-raising week of helicopter visits around the wild, high mountains of Papua New Guinea’s Huon Peninsula.

Yes, little Malvern Grammar made its contribution. It is a sadness that so many of its pupils perished in the Second World War, before their latent powers matured. Many of my school mates never returned from their service.

The grand house at the centre of all this still stands four-square in Willoby Avenue, East Malvern. Go and look, and wonder.

And now—sigh!—back to Gonski.