Girls Becoming Teachers: An Historical Analysis of Western Austra ...

This ‘miniature’ of the social and political landscape of the first century of Western Australia is an essential backdrop to an understanding of schools and teaching in the state. The heritage of the mix of bourgeois, patrician values, settler experiences, gold fever, and Anzac legend is the source of the many and sometimes contradictory discourses that shaped gender and education in the interwar years.

Teachers and Schools in Western Australia: The Early Years

Though the foundations of Western Australia’s state system of education were laid in the mid-nineteenth century, the state Education Department proper did not come into being until 1893, the era of Premier Forrest and ‘responsible government’. The early attempts to establish schools in the state have been chronicled by Mossenson.⁵⁰ The development of the education system had been, from the earliest period of colonisation, a venture in transplanting, to both private and state schools, British practices and pedagogies. Isolation, sparse population, and an infant economy were key influences in the development of schooling. Social and religious differences were also important factors. Such were the religious animosities that the establishment of a Roman Catholic school in 1846 precipitated the development of a system of colonial schools to parallel the Catholic enterprise. Mossenson maintained that on more than one occasion in the nineteenth century, ‘the government system was reorganised in attempts to surpass the progress of Catholic schools’.⁵¹

Until the gold rushes in the 1890s, Western Australia’s ‘largely inert society and the relatively stagnant economy’⁵² impeded the development of government schools. The influx of population in the 1890s put a strain on all government services, and the Education Department was no exception. The agent general in London was instructed to ‘seek a man of high repute and well qualified to handle the education system in its time of stress and strain’.⁵³ His choice was Cyril Jackson, who, though only thirty-three, already had an impressive record.