Heather Forsyth was the youngest of six children and started kindergarten student in 1932, right in the middle of the hard times of The Great Depression, which was affecting conditions at Inverell Public School as well as everywhere else.
“We called it Belgravia then, but it is Inverell Public, my older sisters would have gone to school there too… my oldest sister (Bertha) was 14-years-older than me; then 12 (Madge) and 10 years older (Marion) than me. Then Jack and Jean and I,” Heather said.
“Jean, who was two years older than me, wasn’t allowed to start (school) until just a year before me because there weren’t enough spaces in the kindergarten for her. There weren’t enough teachers, you see.
“The older girls…were away nursing at that stage. Bertha trained at Prince Henry, Madge at Prince Alfred and Marion at the Children’s Hospital,” Heather said.
Across the time Heather still remembers the very first day of her long association with schools.
“… the teacher walked me into the classroom and she said ‘Is there anybody here who would look after Heather for the day?’ and Joan Simpson, who lived behind us, put up her hand... that made it very nice to me,” Heather recalled.
“I could read before I went to school because I had older children in the family…then the headmistress came in and she gave us all dictation and I was put straight up from kindergarten into second class.
“That was all right because there were other children there who I knew too,” Heather said.
Life as a student at Inverell Public those days was a bit of a ‘mixed bag’ for the students of the time.
“It was hard times, but you don’t notice it as much as children.
“The children didn’t have a uniforms, they could just wear what they could and several came along barefooted all the way from south side or somewhere else,” Heather said.
“We only lived half a block away so we ran home for lunch. Things were pretty bad in some parts of the school, so the parents got together…they built a little round building and they used to make sandwiches (and I think they cooked soup there) and gave them to the children who didn’t have any lunch and to the parents.
“Mrs McKenzie was there, she had been a teacher (ladies didn’t teach after they were married then). She organised everything and my mum used to go along and she used to cook soup to take along too,” Heather said.
Heather remembered many good teachers at the school in those days.
“We had a Miss Campbell from third class to sixth class and they used to call me Miss Campbell at home, she was really good…She taught us singing and a bit of music and things, and read lovely books,” she said.
Strangely enough teaching was not Heather’s first choice of career, that decision was made for her by others.
“I wanted to be a nurse. My four sisters were all trained nurses and listening to their stories; and they’d trained in Sydney…And I thought ‘Oh, that sounds very good to me I’m going to be a nurse!’ But they just said to mum and dad ‘No. We’re going to have one lady in the family, Heather’s going to be a school teacher!’ And I was never sorry,” Heather said.
“I trained at the teachers college in Armidale…and my first appointment was at Tingha. I was there for three months and it is the only school I’ve ever been to where the children brought me mushrooms!
“…the infants mistress at Inverell Public asked me one day if I played the piano, I said yes, and in the May holidays I got a telegram from the department to say to move to Inverell,” Heather said.
Inverell Public had grown since her own days in kindergarten there, as Heather quickly found out.
“I didn’t know then that there were 75 in that class!” Heather said with a laugh.
“The primary teachers used to laugh at me because you had to take the kindergarten children to the toilet fairly regularly. If you had them in twos holding hands you spread the line back forever. So I used to take them in threes and we’d walk down to the toilets before the other classes got out.
Two classrooms with the wall knocked out in the middle was used to cope with the size of Heather’s class; but change arrived with the new headmistress.
“At the end of that year I’d heard about this teacher at Ross Hill, Mary Mitchell… we all knew that she was tough, and that she was coming,” Heather said.
“It didn’t really worry me though because I had enough to do teaching my class without worrying about who was above me. Well, she came into me and said ‘I’m not going to enrol any more than 50 into your class!” Heather laughed.
There were lot of them and the young students all had different personalities.
“We had wall blackboards all the way around because we didn’t have much paper, and we used to have it so the kids could get up and draw these blackboards all the way around,” Heather said.
“One of the jobs they liked to do, I’d say ‘Would you like to clean the blackboards for me today?’ and they’d say ‘Yes Miss McBean.’ But one little boy said to me one day ‘I’m not going to do that for you! My father’s going to take you out into the bush in the boot of the car and horsewhip you!’
“That just showed me what he was putting up with at home…we finished up great friends, but that day I had to stand at the door so that he wouldn’t run out of it and I taught from the door for a couple of hours,” Heather chuckled.
But Heather said the majority of her students enjoyed their time in kindergarten and often showed it.
“The kids, they knew I loved flowers so they’d bring along flowers, but I didn’t have an hour to spend putting the flowers in vases. But there was a little girl (Janet Stevens), she could arrange flowers better than I could, in kindergarten!” said Heather.
“My mum was pretty good; we didn’t have any duplicators so she used to sit up with me at night and we used to draw pictures for them to fill in the next day. I kept them busy, we used to hand draw the pictures and even write a few words on the bottom of the page.
“The kids loved stories and we didn’t have a library at school at that time as far as I can remember at that stage. So the first thing in the afternoon I used to read them stories, they loved those. I got those from the town library and books that I had as a child,” Heather said.
After three years of teaching at Inverell Public Heather was recommended by Mary Mitchell for the demonstration school at Armidale, which was a part of teachers college there, but though she may have thought so at the time, her ties with education in Inverell were not over.
“I got married and had a couple of children and then all the teachers were going off to Canada because the pay was better there and Canada was wanting more teachers. So I got a ring from the inspector one day to ask if I could possibly fill in,” Heather said.
“I filled in at my old room for a term and then I thought ‘Well that’s that.’ And then (we’d moved here by that stage and Keith was all right by then), I got a telegram from head office to say ‘Please report to Ross Hill.’
“And they paid me. Because I’d been at the top range for teaching, they paid me for all the holidays at Christmas time and you know the Department of Education never does that with casual teachers,” Heather said.
The decision to return to teaching full time was an easy one to make.
“…I found that I could teach and my two girls were just going to school so that was all right,” Heather said.
“I Taught at Ross Hill for 12 years and was about 26 when I was first head mistress at Ross Hill,” she said.
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