Newstead School 1899 Newstead Historical Society Photographic Collection
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92 Newstead School 1899 Newstead Historical Society Photographic Collection Welshmans Reef School 1924 Newstead Historical Society Photographic Collection 93 Other denominations with smaller congregations demonstrated similar zeal erecting church buildings. The Presbyterian Church of Victoria formed in 1859, the year of the first Presbyterian service at Newstead in McPhee’s barn. The congregation moved quickly to erect their church, St Andrew’s, on the west bank of the Loddon in 1860 and today it is one of Victoria’s ‘older surviving brick churches’. Fryerstown’s Presbyterians erected their wooden church opposite the Anglican Church in 1861. The Roman Catholic communities at Irishtown and Guildford built brick churches; the small community at Irishtown collected £400 to build St Patrick’s in 1865. In the west of the Shire, Roman Catholics erected a ‘fine brick building’ on a rise at Sandon in 1883, the district centre of Roman Catholicism, and another at Newstead in 1910.33 Churches for Baptists at Newstead and Bible Christians at Campbells Creek and Belle Vue have not survived. Population decline and improved transport made it more difficult for congregations to retain their clergyman or maintain their building. Only a few of the many churches built in the Shire survive intact as places of public worship. Some wooden churches, like the Methodist Church at Welshmans Reef, were relocated for other uses; others, such as the Presbyterian Church at Fryerstown and a church at Strathloddon, were demolished. Expensive brick churches either were demolished, as was St Patrick’s at Irishtown in 1956, or sold to become private residences.34 EDUCATION When Victoria separated from New South Wales in 1851, it inherited the parent colony’s dual system of education. Public education was divided between the Denominational Board and the small National Board. The government changed this unwieldy and expensive dual system with the Common Schools Act of 1862. The Act imposed strict conditions on schools wanting to be eligible for State-aid. The direction of this reform found its fullest expression in the Education Act of 1872 with its provisions for free, compulsory and secular education, and the new Education Department’s construction of State Schools throughout rural Victoria.35 The dramatic increase in population brought about by the gold rushes and the lack of educational facilities on the gold fields caused concern. Church schools in 1855 educated 80 per cent of the Colony’s children. Small private schools under National Board supervision also flourished. Beginning in September 1852, the National Board promoted education on the gold fields with wholly funded tent-schools. One was pitched on Adelaide Flat, near Chewton, another at Fryers Creek and a third at Campbells Creek.36 In 1854, a Board inspector established his headquarters at Forest Creek. Schools and Buildings Several townships in the Shire experienced the three phases of public education. At Campbells Creek, Margaret Miller established a private tent-school south of the Five Flags in September 1853 where she taught forty-nine children whose parents paid between 1s 6d and 2s 6d a week. The National Board registered the school the following February. In March 1856, the Board partly funded a weatherboard building. Churches established 33 Martin, ‘Writings’, pp. 5, 10; NME, 3 April 1907, 10 April 1907, 10 August 1910, 14 December 1910; Bradfield, Newstead, pp. [9, 11]; ‘Back To Newstead’ (1968), p. 21; Miles Lewis (ed.), Victorian Churches (Melbourne: National Trust of Australia (Victoria), 1991), p. 139; Brown, Reminiscences of Fryerstown, pp. 107-8, 110; Ebsworth, Pioneer Catholic Victoria, pp. 373, 377-8; Ellis, ‘History of Newstead’, p. 3. 34 NME, 3 April 1907, 31 July 1907; Bradfield, Newstead, p. [10]; Bradfield, Campbells Creek, p. 22; Brown, Reminiscences of Fryerstown, pp. 108, 110; ‘Back to Newstead’ (1968), p. 23; James, Echoes of the Past, p. 46. 35 Blake, Vision and Realisation, vol. 1, pp. 28, 30-1, 41, 46; B.K. Hyams and B. Bessant, Schools for the People? An Introduction to the History of State Education in Australia (Melbourne: Longman, 1972), p. 49. 36 Blake, Vision and Realisation, vol. 1, p. 33. 94 two denominational schools in the township by 1857, one by Primitive Methodists and the other by Presbyterians and both became Common Schools. The National School became a Common School in 1862 and, after the Education Act a decade later, it absorbed the two former denominational schools. The suddenly overcrowded classrooms signalled the need for a new building, but parents disagreed about the site until they voted in 1877 for one on the main road. The government erected a new brick building, that could accommodate 300 children, and it survives substantially unaltered and still in use.37 Goldfields Commissioner Wright reported in October 1853 that although children comprised over 13 per cent of the population in his district, their elementary education was scarcely provided for by the few tent-schools and too few teachers.38 Furthermore, education was not compulsory, and the itinerant nature of the goldfields population counted against a stable learning environment. Private schools were established at Fryerstown in the early 1850s, Pennyweight Flat near Yapeen in 1858, Guildford in 1858 and another in 1861, Tarilta in 1860, and at Newstead in the mid-1860s. There were Denominational Schools at Fryerstown in 1853, Spring Gully in 1855, Vaughan in 1856, Sandon in 1859, Joyces Creek in 1860 and Strangways in 1862. National Schools were formed at Fryerstown in 1852, Pennyweight Flat near Yapeen in 1858, Newstead in 1859, Churches Flat and Guildford in 1860, Tarilta in 1861, and Green Gully in 1863. Common Schools were created at Yapeen, Spring Gully in 1862, Welshmans Reef and Strangways in 1864, Glenluce in 1865, Captains Gully in 1866, Joyces Creek in 1870, and Muckleford South and Werona in 1871. After 1872 most existing schools converted to State Schools, but two new schools were built at Strangways in 1873 and others were established at Sandon in 1875, Newstead and Welshmans Reef in 1877, Yandoit Hill in 1878 and Strathlea in 1924.39 The standard of school accommodation varied greatly. Some tent-schools had blue cotton linings that made them dark in winter and hot in summer. The Churches Flat school opened in 1860 with ‘no floor’, although ‘the building was a neat wooden structure.’ Many single teacher schools like the one at Glenluce were one-room timber buildings that were unlined. Guildford’s one-room school was lined, with calico, but it was replaced in 1868 by a more substantial structure in brick. The school at Captains Gully was built with slabs lined with canvas and it had a shingle roof, ‘the most miserable State school I have ever been in’ wrote a visitor.40 Building designs after 1872 promised better conditions. In the new brick school at Newstead, ‘Each room is amply provided with window light and ventilators, so as fully to conserve the comfort and convenience of the children.’41 The opening of a new school was a great civic occasion. Thomas Martin recalled the Tea Meeting that opened the Anglican school at Strangways in April 1862 when ‘the school was Packed with People’ and the Newstead Brass Band played.42 Two parliamentarians arrived by train to open Newstead State School in October 1877 and afterwards attended a banquet in the mechanics’ institute.43 No secondary school was built in the Shire. Children went to Castlemaine after the founding of the high school in 1910 and the technical school in 1916. Bill Hamilton, aged thirteen in 1924, caught the train from Newstead; six years later Verne Hooper walked the six miles from Spring Gully. Yapeen children rode their bicycles. Often there was a headwind and one former student recalled she failed French because it was always first lesson and usually she was late. By 1947, a school bus service connected the two 37 Blake, Vision and Realisation, vol. 2, pp. 624-5; Winkleman, Historical Sketch of Campbells Creek, p. 12; Bradfield, Campbells Creek, pp. 49-53. The sources disagree about several factual details. 38 Bradfield, Campbells Creek, p. 49. 39 Blake, Vision and Realisation, vol. 2, pp. 611-853; Brown, Reminiscences of Fryerstown, pp. 112, 115, 184-5; Ebsworth, Pioneer Catholic Victoria, pp. 364-5, 371; Bradfield, Newstead, pp. [40-2, 50, 51, 52]; Bradfield (ed.), Guildford, p. 8; NME, 6 November 1907; Lewis, ‘Strathlea’, p. 8. The list is not exhaustive. 40 Quoted in Blake, Vision and Realisation, vol. 2, p. 752. 41 MAM, 9 October 1877. Blake, Vision and Realisation, vol. 1, p. 33, vol. 2, pp. 752, 774; Brown, Reminiscences of Fryerstown, p. 115; Bradfield (ed.), Guildford, pp. 8-9. 42 Martin, ‘Writings’, p. 15. 43 MAM, 9 October 1877. 95 Castlemaine secondary schools with Newstead, Strangways and Guildford. Children at Campbelltown, meanwhile, travelled by bus to Maryborough. The Shire’s seven remaining schools had a combined enrolment of less than three hundred. After further closures at Welshmans Reef in 1965 and Fryerstown in 1967, a threatened merger of Yapeen with Guildford and Campbells Creek in a cluster in 1993 was avoided after parents protested.44 Mechanics’ Institutes The mechanics’ institute movement long preceded the gold rushes. Its origins lay in the English liberal middle-class ideal of achieving social harmony by encouraging intellectual, social and moral self-improvement among the masses. Mechanics’ institutes flourished in Victoria. In many places the institute’s library was the only source of publicly available reading matter and their halls were centres for social activities.45 The importance of a mechanics’ institute to a township’s sense of progress is illustrated by Newstead’s institute being established within a year of the first land sale in 1854.46 Its members met in the longroom attached to the Bridge Hotel.47 By 1864 the institute evidently no longer was functioning.