Tanunda+Primary+School+history

When you have read the histories and reminiscences on this site, what questions or topics would you like to research?
Suggestions:
 * How has schooling for girls changed across the years at Tanunda Primary School?
 * What was school life like during the two world wars?
 * How did school dress change across the years?
 * Look at the subjects taught in different eras. Which of these are NOT taught today? Which of these would you like to learn? Which subjects, methods or ideas do you have in your learning that you think should have been taught long ago? How might these have made a difference in the lives of students long ago?
 * Which Principal you would like to have had as your own Principal?
 * The Prince Of Wales sent a letter to schools in Australia (not just to Tanunda Public School) after a visit in 1920. Why do you think he wanted to contact schools and children in this way? What would children have thought of his letter? What would YOU have thought? (NB The page with the letter says that he visited in person. The Prince did not actually visit the school. He came on a train from Western Australia via Port Augusta and Gawler to Adelaide.)
 * The school bus accident in the 1950s injured several girls. What happened to them afterwards? How has the accident affected them today?

Records of State Schools are kept at the State Records of South Australia. The city library is at 26 - 28 Leigh Street Adelaide (just off Hindley Street) The actual records are kept at 115 Cavan Road Gepps Cross. Mail to GPO Box 2343 Adelaide SA 5001 Website: www.archives.sa.gov.au

Research enquiries: Ph. 08 8204 8791 email: srsaPublicAccess@saugov.sa.gov.au

To access the records for your school, you need to enrol and obtain a research membership card with number and password. This costs nothing. Then if you are going to read the records at the Leigh Street library, you need to contact them in advance and they will bring in the records from Gepps Cross. The courier goes twice a day, first thing in the morning and then at lunchtime.

Records are freely available to members for their research. However, records of the last thirty years are unavailable for reasons of privacy You could also interview elderly Tanunda residents who attended Tanunda Public School for their primary school education.

Please click below to read

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The Early History of Tanunda Public School (1864 – 1900) by R. E. Teusner, with Endnotes by Angela Heuzenroeder ====== Bibliographic details: Teusner, R. E. //The Early History of Tanunda Public School (1864 – 1900).// Tanunda, private publication, 1974. Notes by A. Heuzenroeder, 2013.

Please click below to read: = Memories of the Old Tanunda Primary School 1864 - 1998 = = Nineteenth-century Pages =

Compiled by Jenni Kingsley, Karen Wiebrecht, Barb Garwood, Linda Barclay, Margaret Heidrich, Janice Fechner, Ros Telfer and Jane Ray, assisted by Ian Langley
(Material for these links comes from a folder at the Barossa Public Library, which can be read in the library's history room. The folder's pages are photocopied and are not of the best quality, as will be evident from the scanned pages, but they are legible and will I hope be useful.) = Memories of the Old Tanunda Primary School 1864 - 1998 Pages from 1900 to the end of the Second World War (1945) = (Compiled by Jenni Kingsley, Karen Wiebrecht, Barb Garwood, Linda Barclay, Margaret Heidrich, Janice Fechner, Ros Telfer and Jane Ray, assisted by Ian Langley) = Memories of the Old Tanunda Primary School 1864 - 1998 Pages from the end of the Second World War (1945) to 1998 = (Compiled by Jenni Kingsley, Karen Wiebrecht, Barb Garwood, Linda Barclay, Margaret Heidrich, Janice Fechner, Ros Telfer and Jane Ray, assisted by Ian Langley)

Tanunda Public School and Headmaster's house, c. 1913. The cut-off caption reads: "View of Tanunda looking South: Gerhard Graue" (He was the photographer. He was probably standing on the roof of the newly-built Tanunda Institute, now the Soldiers Memorial Hall.) Note the school "dunnies" between the telegraph pole and the roof of the house. They remained there until the 1970s. In 1981 Mr Ben Schiller, a retired farmer living out on the Adelaide Road near St Hallett came to Tanunda Primary School to be interviewed by the Year 6/7 class. Three generations of Schillers had attended the school. Later that year, Mr Schiller repeated his reminiscences in a recorded interview with Angela Heuzenroeder. The following passage gives selections from the interview that relate to his school days at Tanunda Public School from 1906 to 1910.
 * Interview With Ben Schiller 1981 **

Bibliographic details: Schiller, Ben, taped interview: extracts, Tanunda, 1981. Interview and transcript by Angela Heuzenroeder. Albanus, he came from Germany. He was the public school teacher. Then there was Carola Sperber. She was the English one. She used to teach the junior class. First class, second class, third class, fourth class and fifth class. And you couldn’t go any higher than fifth class. You would have had to go another year in school learning the same things over, so I decided I wouldn’t go another year. I had my fifth class certificate. Every year we had the inspector come up and then we had the certificate to show that you had gone right through and you had qualified. [This was the Qualifying Certificate] But I decided to go to the factory to work. I didn’t want to learn the same thing over [for the Progress Certificate the following year]. There was no high school. The only way to go on was to go to college. Well my parents couldn’t afford that, not those days. I wouldn’t have minded going to school yet, but I wanted to earn a bit of money and buy a bike. [That was just before 1913.]

I went working at that time and of course we used to go to a lot of parties, birthday parties, tin kettling and all of that, and that’s where we did a lot of singing. At parties we used to sing – you don’t see that any more – we used to go to the organ and sing a lot. And dance. They don’t do that any more. I always think that TV spoiled a lot of that.

As a boy I used to play the mouth organ. Hawkers used to come around. They used to have mouth organs. He had his goods in a bundle. He had a van afterwards, too, with one horse. They used to sleep in their vans. That’s how I learned mouth organ. You had to make your own music. Afterwards there were phonographs.

Those two teachers, Carola Sperber and Miss Jacobi, she was Mrs Eddie Juttner, from the tanner down there, the third and fourth class and Albanus had the fifth class and Carola Sperber had the second class and the juniors. Carola Sperber and Miss Jacobi had to talk German because a lot of the children could not speak English. Well I learned to talk English from my elder sisters. But none of us, well very few could talk English when we went to school. The second eldest they learned it from their older brothers and sisters. I’ve got my doubts whether there would have been one pure English family when we went to school. So one of the songs in fact was a German song. Here it is:

Hopp, hopp hopp, Pferdchen lauf galop Über Stop, und Über Steine Aber brinch dir nicht die Beine Immer in Galop Hopp hopp hopp hopp hopp!

Good morning to you, Good morning to you, Good morning dear teacher, We’re pleased to see you.

Oh little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep, She doesn’t know where to find them, Leave them alone and they will come home All bringing their tails behind them.

A little ship was on the sea It sailed along so pleasantly And all was gay and bright, and all was gay and bright, It sailed along so pleasantly and all was gay and bright.

Three blind mice, three blind mice See how they run, see how they run, They all run after the farmer’s wife, She cut off their tails with a carving knife, Did you ever see such a thing in your life As three blind mice.

Albanus would teach you Latin if you wanted it. I loved school…Albanus was that way with nature study too. On Saturdays he’d take the children who wanted to go up in the hills for nature study. Not in school days. Every Wednesday an hour after school he’d teach the Latin writing for those who wanted to learn German. Charge us nothing for it. Anybody who wanted to go. Of course quite a few went. Some of them didn’t go.

I wore short pants and socks, even for confirmation. Always high boots and there were hooks on there. Three hooks on the top. Through polishing I tore one of my nails on them on one occasion. I couldn’t write for about a month at school. Even a lot of the girls used to wear high boots. Going to school and coming home we used to take the boots off, carry them with our school bag and go barefoot. On a Sunday then to wear shoes they wouldn’t fit because our feet grew wide from going barefoot. Girls wore a smock and long stockings, and mostly shoes not boots. There were very few dressmakers and the mothers made all the clothes. They had sewing machines with a handle to turn. Then a treadle machine. I could never understand how my mother could sew black cloth with black cotton thread just by candle light.

We used to walk to school [about 4 km] and there were no houses along there. If it was too wet we had difficulty crossing Bethany Creek. .. When I went to school I knew where everybody lived in Tanunda but now I wouldn’t know.

The first time I went to Adelaide was in 1910. There was an exhibition every five years. I bought a glass as a keepsake. It cost me sixpence. From Tanunda Public School all of us children who wanted to go went. The railway to Tanunda was only built in 1912, so we had no way of getting down by train. There were three spring wagons which took us to Gawler and from Gawler we went down [by train] to the Exhibition. On each spring wagon there would have been about twenty-five to thirty children. We left at half past six in the morning to be down at Gawler at about nine o’clock. I had never seen Adelaide before, I had never seen the sea before and I had never seen a train before. The night before, I couldn’t sleep for excitement. First we went to the Exhibition and then after wards we went to Glenelg to see the sea. I really enjoyed that trip. We got home at about nine.

This photograph was published in a book entitled "The Barossa District: Angaston Railway Opening" published by The Barosssa News Limited, Angaston and Tanunda, 1911, p. 90. Mr Albanus is standing at the left of the students. They are saluting the flag, a practice that continued into the 1950s. Note that here it is the Union Jack of Great Britain. Note also that the windows on the western wall of the school building have not yet been bricked up, and that the Headmaster now has a house (pictured in the background).


 * Vera Remembers **


 * Reminiscences about Tanunda Primary School in 1917** by Vera Bockmann, formerly Vera Hoffmann, of Tanunda, from her memoir entitled “Full Circle”. She is remembering a time when she was at school and people in Tanunda were experiencing ill feeling from the rest of South Australia because of the First World War and the German background of so many families.

Bibliographic details:

Bockmann, Vera (née Hoffmann), //Full Circle: An Australian in Berlin 1930 – 1946.// Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1986. P. 23-24.

At our school we had a good fife and drum band. We had practised in order to compete against other South Australian school bands at the Adelaide show grounds. Everything might have gone smoothly and we could have remained incognito if we hadn’t won hands down. On leaving we were pelted with rotten eggs which by some irony of fate hit the few children who had an English background. Almost eithout exception there was no ill-feeling coming from our neighbours or local people. It was when travelling further afield that we had to be wary, especially if people suspected we came from Tanunda.

** Recollections of two schools in Tanunda during World War I ** ** by Mrs Vera Bockmann née Hoffmann ** This is a résumé of an interview conducted by Mr Lamshed’s Yr 4 and 5 class at Tanunda Primary School in July 1988.

Bibliographic details: Bockmann, Vera, interview, Tanunda Primary School, 1988. Interviewers: Mr Lamshed’s Yr 4 and 5 class. Transcript résumé by A. Heuzenroeder ……………………………………………………. When Vera was a child, Tanunda Lutheran School was run by Miss Emma Geier whose father had been a teacher there before her. Miss Geier’s school had a very good name, and children of prominent families were sent there, regardless of religion, mainly so that they could be instructed in German and learn German grammar.

Vera was seven when she began school. Her teacher was Miss Geier’s assistant, and her schoolroom was the small annexe, divided from Miss Geier’s main schoolroom by a large curtain. Among Vera’s friends were Reg and Ritter Heuzenroeder, Frank Jüttner and Norma Habel.

On Vera’s very first day, she and Frank hid someone’s umbrella. Frank put it down the tank and it was never found. Vera was in terrible trouble, much more so than Frank. It was not a very auspicious beginning to her school career.

Lessons every day began with songs accompanied by the harmonium. The singing was very good. Reading and Writing were taught in German and children wrote on slates. The slate pencils squeaked and children deliberately made them squeak more loudly than necessary, especially during dictation and spelling. When a new pupil came on Vera’s third day, Vera was asked to assist her with spelling, and when she went home she announced that she had become a teacher.

During recess the children played in the yard. Most of the girls wandered around in white starched lacy pinafores which they had to keep clean. Some even changed into clean ones when they went home for lunch, but not Vera. She was never made to wear one, perhaps because her mother hated ironing. So, during recess, unencumbered by white embroidery, she liked to help feed the chooks belonging to Keils, the next door neighbours. She would feed them bran from an old cracked enamel bowl. She seemed to have a craving to eat the bran herself, which she munched by the handful, finding it quite delicious. It made her feel good inside, too. As a result, the fowls were kept hungry whenever Vera was entrusted to feed them.

One day something terrible happened to Vera’s brother which upset her very much. Behind the curtain, sitting in her annexe-schoolroom, she could hear someone being caned. She knew what would be happening: the teacher would be striking the child’s hand, giving him the ‘cuts’. She could hear the gasping sobs and knew from the sound of the indrawn breaths that it was her brother. For the entire day she sat stunned and upset.

There was bitter rivalry between the Lutheran school and the Public school. Every day, children from both schools would have to go to the Post Office in the main street to collect the mail for their parents. Tanunda was a small town, and the children from both schools knew each other quite well, but that did not stop them from standing on the street corner shouting names at each other.

Children from Miss Geier’s Lutheran School were called Geierites; children from the Public School, run by the teacher Jack Albanus, were called Jacobites. “Geierites!” “Jacobites!” they would shout.

But little by little more Geierites were being withdrawn from the Lutheran School and sent to become Jacobites. Miss Geier herself went for a holiday to America and decided to stay there. Vera’s parents decided to do the same as other parents and send their children to the Public School, the reputation of which was growing at the same time as that of the Lutheran School was diminishing after the departure of Miss Geier.

Vera was quite happy to make the change. She and her brother Erwin already knew well many of the children at the school. On her first day she was nervous, but a girl called Helen Bogner soon became her friend. Besides, there were the Heuzenroeder boys and Frank Jüttner, and Frieda Nettelbeck, a very clever girl who won prizes for arithmetic.

Jack Albanus was the Principal at the time Vera began going to the Tanunda Public School. For those children who spoke no English before they came to school, he was a kindred spirit, being a native-born German speaker himself. He was a fiery, energetic man with a terrible temper but an excellent mind. He was a great walker. On weekends, he frequently walked up to the top of the Kaiser Stuhl and back before breakfast, and occasionally he even walked to Adelaide.

In 1914 World War I began, changing the lives of people around the globe. The presence of a German-speaking community in the heart of pro-British Australia germinated fear and suspicion which festered into hatred. Tiny little law-abiding Tanunda aroused so many fears in the community at large that the State authorities sent two policemen to keep the people under surveillance. One of their duties was to close the Lutheran School. Those children still there joined the others at the Tanunda Primary School and the Lutheran School remained closed for many years until 1938. Even Jack Albanus at the Public School was a subject of suspicion because he was German. Before long he was transferred to a posting out of the district.

On her first day at the Public School Vera was welcomed into the third class by her new teacher. “Third clath,” said the teacher, “thith ith Vera Hoffmann. Thay Good Morning. Thit. After thinging we will do Arithmetic.”

Vera hated Mental Arithmetic. Figures which were too difficult to be counted on ten fingers bewildered her. But she was a good actress and knew a thing or two about teachers’ expectations. For each mental problem called out by the teacher Vera would shoot up her hand with a bright, expectant look on her face. As Vera had anticipated, the teacher always assumed that she knew the answer and passed over her for some less alert student.

In the playground, struggle for survival continued on a different plane. The morning began in an orderly enough fashion. The children would arrive fresh and clean and even though many had walked some distance – Vera and her brother walked 1 ½ miles from Hoffmann’s Winery[i] – there was still some polish left on their boots. The seven children in the Kraft family from Vine Vale, in particular, always looked immaculate, even after their long walk.

The formal school day began in the yard with the saluting of the flag. A whistle was blown and children would line up. Facing the flag on the flag pole, they would chant: I love my country I honour the King I salute the flag I promise cheerfully to obey the law.

During the recess break and lunch hour, however, the playground had its own laws, in which older, stronger children dominated. Vera soon learned to protect herself. When boys like Frank Jüttner her old friend twisted her wrists and gave her a ‘Chinese burn’, she retaliated with a good, strong uppercut. When the big, beefy girls in higher grades were marshalling children into games, Vera would take a book and hide with it up in a tree. It was her only defence. She was very small for her age and the big girls tended to push her over quite a bit. Besides, she hated netball and the relay races which the others tried to coerce her into playing. Hiding was her only escape.

The years passed, and Vera moved into the upper classes held in the big schoolroom. From blackboard and chalk used in the junior class, she graduated to pens and ink and inkwells. Her friend Frank Jüttner was quite mischievous, and would sometimes dip her single, long, thick plait into his inkwell when she sat in front of him. The mess this made of her clothes often made her mother angry.

Now Vera had Mr Bentley as her teacher and this man imparted to her a love of books and reading which caught her imagination and continued to enrich the rest of her life. Now, too, she began to shine at History and Geography, although reading books and writing stories remained her first love. She never won a prize however. Prizes were given for Arithmetic, regular attendance and good behaviour. It was Frieda Nettelbeck who won the prizes. Vera was too much of a live-wire, doing and saying things in class to make people laugh ever to win a prize! On one occasion, the way she pulled a face saved her from and awkward situation. Besides being a lover of literature, Mr Bentley also had a fondness for a sip of whisky, and was in the habit of making a quick visit to the Victoria Hotel [ii]during morning recess. At the end of the break, the subject was mathematics. Vera’s page was full of mistakes, as usual, and her heart sank as Mr Bentley approached to check her work. As he bent over, Vera received the full blast of his whisky-laced breath in her face and she screwed up her nose in eloquent disgust. The embarrassed Mr Bentley withdrew in haste, neglecting to mark Vera’s page of work. She was saved!

Although she received no prizes, Vera did have one moment of glory. A state-wide school magazine was published in those days, called “The Children’s Hour”, and children were encouraged to send in contributions. An incident seen by Vera, where somebody threw a stone at a cow, aroused her anger and her imagination as well. She decided to write a story about kindness to animals and the work of the R.S.P.C.A. In secret she posted it to the Children’s Hour magazine. Some weeks later, Mr Bentley summoned her to his room. Vera trembled as she went, wondering what she had done wrong and why she was to be punished.

”Vera,” said Mr Bentley, showing a Children’s Hour magazine to her. “I did not know that we had a talented author in our midst. I have just read your story in the latest Children’s Hour and I want you to know that I am very proud of you.”

Vera shared her love of reading and writing with her friend, Helen Bogner. The other, older girls understood nothing of this. Already becoming young women, they spent their spare time huddled together having cryptic conversations about boys. They were passionately interested to know what people did with their weekends. Who visited whom? And Vera and Helen, why did they go to each other’s houses on Saturdays or Sundays? A certain amount of teasing went on, especially when the older girls found out that Vera and Helen’s fondness was directed towards poetry, and that they spent the time on those weekend visits reading Australian poetry aloud together!

Now that Vera was in a higher class, she was a member of the fife and drum band – the “spit and dribble band” as the children called it. The children all seemed to be musical and practised their pieces hard. The person Vera envied most was Vic Kappler who played the side drum. How she longed to be the drummer instead of Vic! She was sure that she would be just as good as he, but it was deemed that the side drum was no instrument for a girl: the leather support straps could not be worn by someone in skirts: it was not practical.

Rehearsals intensified in the weeks leading up to a state-wide competition to be held at the Wayville showgrounds. There was the long journey down to Adelaide, almost a world away, or so it seemed, a world in which the war against Germany seemed uppermost in people’s minds. There were hours of waiting and then the performance. Finally, the judge’s decision was announced. The band from the Tanunda Public School had won! But the children had no chance to enjoy their victory, because as they left the showgrounds, they were pelted with rotten eggs for being German. The irony of it was, though, that the unfortunate children who were hit by the eggs and had to suffer the indignity and discomfort were all children of Anglo-Saxon origin: not every child in Tanunda belonged to a German family. Suspicion and fear in the wider community taught people from the Barossa Valley to be careful not to flaunt their German background and the result of this was that people no longer spoke German on the train or in any other public place.

The year came when twelve-year-old Vera was in the top class of the school. Now one of the senior girls herself, she sat at the back of the schoolroom where the desks were on a raised tier, and from her desk she could look out of the window onto Bushman Street below. Soon it would be time to leave Tanunda Public School for good and venture into the wider world. Whatever was in store for her certainly did not include any secondary education. There was no local secondary school and no private Lutheran school in Adelaide with boarding facilities for girls. If only her father would send her to one of the other private schools in Adelaide! The students she had seen from some of these looked so dashing in their blazers and straw boaters! But her father had decided against it. He had observed for himself the high-handed manner of Vera’s cousins, who attended one of those schools, who refused to touch a broom because it might make callouses on their hands. His daughter was not going to be stuck up like that! Besides, in a few years she would be able to obtain a driver’s licence. A motorbike was what she would really like to ride.

The hands on the schoolroom clock were drawing close to the minute when she should start listening for the sound of horses in the street outside. For, any minute now, around the corner would come that young policeman in his smart uniform. He would see her give a furtive wave from the second window on the left, and, as he did every morning at exactly the same time, he would return it with a brisk salute. Here he was now! Quickly wave, before Mr Bentley caught her and forcibly returned her attention to his lesson, to the mysteries of mathematics and to the imminently-looming Qualifying Certificate examinations.

[i] Now Peter Lehmann Wines [ii] Now The Valley Hotel

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