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² The State Education Department was not responsible for providing schooling for Aboriginal children, which was seen to be the brief of the Aborigines Department. However, in some country towns Aboriginal children did attend the local school, but there were often protests from the white parents-mainly about hygiene. Successive ministers of education found these protests to be reasonable, and fearing that the white children would be withdrawn from the schools authorised the exclusion of the Aboriginal children. Education Department briefing to Minister, November 1917. Cited in, ed. Marion Aveling, Westralian Voices: Documents in Western Australian Social History, (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, for the Education Committee of the 150th Anniversary Celebrations, 1979), 195.Google Scholar

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⁵ Banjo Patterson (1864-1941) was one of Australia's most renowned ‘bush’ poets. The Man from Snowy River, one of his other famous works, was the basis of the movie of the same name.Google Scholar

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⁸ Percival Cole, ed. The Rural School in Australia, Educational Research Series No. 49, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1937), 11. This publication was the result of a “systematic and scientific examination of rural education in Australia” (p. 11) as well as a “revelation of the experience and theories of a number of our leading educationists” (p. 12). The editor, Percival Cole, a distinguished scholar and educationist, was Vice-Principal of Sydney Teachers’ College, and a lecturer at Sydney University. From 1936 to 1937, he served as Carnegie Professor of International Relations in America, and was one of the founders of the Australian Council for Educational Research. Contributors to The Rural School in Australia were all notable educationists, academics and administrators, such as R.G. Cameron, Professor of Education at the University of Western Australia and Principal of Claremont Teachers’ College; Frank Tate, former Director of Education of the State of Victoria; Tas Lovell, Professor of Psychology at Sydney University and Christopher McRae, Senior Lecturer at Sydney Teachers’ College, later appointed as Principal.Google Scholar

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¹⁰ Hunt, Lynne and Trotman, Janina, Claremont Cameos Archive, (Perth, Western Australia: Edith Cowan University, 1990). The archive is located in the Edith Cowan University Archives. The initial step in the creation of the archive was generated by our indignation at the lack of acknowledgement of women teachers in an official ceremony held when Claremont ceased teacher training in 1989. Echoing our feelings, Alison White, herself a Claremont graduate, wrote a letter of protest to the local newspaper in which she pointed out the following: “Despite the fact that there have been more women trained as teachers during the College's history, and that women are the dominant sex in the teaching profession, not one woman was invited to speak!” (Claremont-Nedlands POST, 15 (46) 14 November 1989), 2. A small grant from the West Australian Women's Trust enabled us to start the project, which received further funding from Edith Cowan University. There are forty-seven interviews conducted by Hunt and Trotman with the assistance of thirty-two volunteer interviewers, all of whom were trained in oral history interview procedures. The interviewees, ranging in age from ninety-eight to forty-five, were not a representative sample of the women graduates. Some of them had responded to a newspaper advertisement we placed, others were nominated by people who thought the women's stories were important to record. We eventually had to close the interviewing stage because of time and financial constraints, but we were always finding ourselves being approached by people who would urge us to interview yet another particular teacher because they had been ‘so special.’ Making selections from the oral histories to publish in our book was very difficult. We did not want to focus solely on the women who had been high achievers—and there were many—because we wanted to acknowledge the backbone of the State's teaching profession, the “ordinary” classroom teacher. Seven of the interviewees had completed the Short Course for rural schools, but twelve had taught in bush schools. This article is based on thirteen of the oral histories in the archive. See also, Lynne Hunt and Janina Trotman, Claremont Cameos: Women Teachers and the Building of Social Capital in Australia, (Perth, Western Australia: Edith Cowan University, 2002).Google Scholar

¹¹ McKenzie, John, Old Bush Schools: Life and Education in the Small Schools of Western Australia, 1893 to 1961, (Perth: Western Australian College of Advanced Education, n.d.)Google Scholar

¹² There is considerable amount of scholarly work which addresses these questions. See, for example, Susan S. Friedman, “Making History: Reflections on Feminism, Narrative, and Desire,” in The Postmodern History Reader, ed. Keith Jenkins, (London: Routledge, 1997), 231–236; Marjorie Theobald, “Teachers, Memory and Oral History,” in Telling Women's Lives: Narrative Inquiries in the History of Women's Education, in eds. Kathleen Weiler and Sue Middleton (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999), 9–24; Joan Sangster, “Telling our Stories: Feminist Debates and the Use of Oral History” in, The Oral History Reader, eds. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, (London: Routledge, 1998), 87–100. For an elaboration of the methodological and interpretive positions we took, see Janina Trotman and Lynne Hunt, “Whose Story is This? Claremont Cameos and the Dilemmas of Working Within a Feminist Framework,” From all Quarters (Journal of the Oral History Association of Australia) 25 (2003): 37–43.Google Scholar

¹³ Altenbaugh, Richard, “Oral History, American Teachers and a Social History of Teaching: An Emerging Agenda.” Cambridge Journal of Education 27: 3 (September 1997): 313–330.Google Scholar

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¹⁸ Damousi, Joy, “Marching to Different Drums: Women's Mobilisation, 1914-1939”, in Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation, eds. Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans (Sydney: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 362; Connell, R. Bob, Masculinities (St. Leonards, New South Wales: Allen and Unwin, 1995), 84.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Blackmore, Jill, Making Educational History: A Feminist Perspective (Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1992), 33.Google Scholar

²⁰ Holmes, Katie, “‘Diamonds of the Dustheap'?: Women's Diary Writing Between the Wars,” in Wallflowers and Witches: Women and Culture in Australia 1910-1945 ed. Maryanne Dever (St Lucia: Queensland University Press, 1994), 43. The early decades of the twentieth century witnessed a cultural reconstruction of femininity. This was the Jazz Age during which several factors combined to “create a notion of what the modern, feminine woman was, what she did, and what she looked like…. [she] had to be attractive to men: her appeal was sexual and sensual, she was young and mil of life, slightly daring, and ready to embark on the adventure of romance.” But as Katie Holmes concludes, the end result was still marriage.Google Scholar

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²² ibid., 16–17. Unclassified teachers had passed an entrance exam, and had satisfied an inspector of their ability to teach a small number of children: “A very elementary test of their knowledge and teaching capacity”.Google Scholar

²³ See, for example, Sari Knopp Biklen, Schoolwork: Gender and the Cultural Construction of Teaching (New York: Teachers’ College Press, 1995); Weiler, Kathleen, Country Schoolwomen: Teaching in Rural California, 1850-1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Carolyn Steedman, “Prisonhouses,” in Teachers: The Culture and Politics of Work eds. Martin Lawn and Gerald Grace (London: Falmer Press, 1987), 117–129; Rosemary Deem, Women and Schooling (London: Routledge, 1978).Google Scholar

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²⁷ Walkerdine, Valerie, “Post-structuralist Theory and Everyday Practices: The Family and the School,” in Feminist Social Psychology: Developing Theory and Practice ed. Sue Wilkinson (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986), 72: “In many cases, the power of girls in the classroom is given precisely through their operation as sub-teachers [they] are displaying the requirements necessary to join the caring professions.”Google Scholar

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³⁷ Angela Brazil was arguably the most successful early twentieth-century English writer of schoolgirl fiction. Her stories of the boarding school adventures of middle-class girls became the model for the content of the burgeoning market for girls’ magazines in the early decades of the last century. Deborah Gorham, “The Ideology of Femininity and Reading for Girls, 1850-1914, in Lessons for Life: The Schooling of Girls and Women, 1850-1950 ed. Felicity Hunt (Oxford: Blackwells 1987), 39–59.Google Scholar

³⁸ A small holiday island a few miles off the coast of Perth. Very popular with families, but also known as a place of fairly unrestricted social and romantic activities for students.Google Scholar

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