Along with my younger sister, Janelle, one Saturday morning sometime in the morning of 20 May 1966 in their charcoal grey 1963 Vauxhall Cresta, Hilary and Harry drove me from Oberon to Sydney's Kingsford Smith Airport to catch a fight to Launceston via Melbourne's Essendon Airport. This was my frst experience of interstate air travel. I’d been to Oberon's Howell Bros General Store to purchase my tickets – Trans Australian Airways (TAA), I think, and Phil Howell, the co-proprietor, had taken me into his confdence and shared with me his Tasmanian tourist experiences. In my own private manner, I was elated about this. At last, some people in Oberon were thinking about me in terms other than my being a timber worker and a troublemaker about town, ruining the reputation of good folk with falsehoods about their attending Jack's two-up den.

Although I did notice the other Howell brother, Jack, continuing to never take his eyes of me through the glass of the store's suspended observation point, where he continually stood alert for local teenage delinquents who might be in his shop for the wrong reason. For him, my notorious escapade with the 21st Division and my mistruth with Dr Robey's name lived on. I swear, even after what I had been able to achieve in the feld of public education, I would forever remain a target for his suspicion.

Architecturally, Kingsford Smith Airport in 1966 was still something like that out of the famous flm Casablanca: no separate international and domestic terminals, then; no jet aircraft. Moreover, just as is portrayed in that famous movie and in other airport/airliner movies of the 1950s and 1960s such as The high and the mighty, people were dressed ‘up to the nines’: suits, ties and so on.

Despite my patently failed attempt at building my education through formal schooling at Bathurst High, in a broader sense my education proceeded with an upward trajectory in the pine forests, timber mills and farms of the Oberon District. I had just turned 16 years of age and had a lot of learning in front of me. While Hilary more than played her part, my need for a strong father fgure, somebody who could ofer me advice and love, left a dreadful void in my life. But I shouldn't be too critical of my father. Because from his own childhood experiences, he simply didn't know any better.

Since my youth, I have been in many classrooms, but none as precious to me as the ones Laurie Evans provided for me during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Laurie was the younger brother of Irwin (Dibs) Evans who had married my mother's sister, Grace. Out of school and now working as a farm labourer and timber industry unskilled worker, my education now took a sharp turn. Laurie had a great impact on my life as a young person. He was a staunchly independent man, a man for all seasons – his own man – the like of which did much to bring the rural ideal a reality for me.

For me, Laurie's ‘classrooms’ came in many settings and forms – pea paddocks, potato paddocks, shearing sheds, sheep and cattle yards, harvesting hay, fencing, clearing scrub at his father-in-law's Black Springs property for peas, spotlighting foxes and rabbits, tickling brown trout and a thousand other tasks and activities, and most importantly, the rugby league paddock and the proud wearing of the Oberon colours of the black and gold in the Country Rugby League Group 10 competition.

Introduction

In the introduction to this exegesis, I noted my major theme of personal struggle with the subthemes. The purpose of this chapter is to explore more fully the literary merit of the major theme of personal struggle and the aforementioned subthemes.

Some people are born and raised in a small country community. Under the recently much-heralded banner of ‘tree change’, others move to a small community for work, work at home, family or other reasons. These days there are a plethora of TV programmes highlighting those who choose to live in small country towns appreciating the connection to nature and the freedom from city life, the beauty and quiet of it all. Looming large is the omnipresent and appealing sense of community. You know your neighbour and, indeed, along with most other folks in town, their parents and grandparents. The folk at the store know your name, people know your dog and, for the most part, everyone helps each other out. Or at least, that is the way the script proceeds. Of course, all this goes with a massive amount of backbiting and gossiping, along with ‘in groups’ and ‘The Other’.

But life in a small town can also be challenging: for example, even in the third decade of the twenty-frst century, mental health challenges in the country are very diferent from those in the cities. Everyone experiences these challenges diferently, but for me, growing up in a small New South Wales country town seemed to throw a thousand challenges in my path: perhaps some were of my own making.

In recent years, museums and other mnemonic sites not only assist in readjusting public history and pushing back on the doomed-race protective myth refecting changing points of popular views. This, however, wasn't always the case. Any single visitor to Australian museums over a 60- or 70-year period can only be struck by the vast changes in the form and intent of presentations.

In 1951, Hilary took Ray and me on a visit to Sydney's Australian Museum, and for me it was a memorable event. I was seven years old and remember being only mildly interested in the displays. That is despite my mother's best eforts to enliven the occasion with lively historical narratives. I remember the displays being chiefy about megafauna, and the remnants of a doomed race of Stone Age people who once occupied these lands. I remember the majority of displays were given over to the topic of the marvels and achievements of European colonization.

More recently, I visited the museum for the second time during 2021, 70 years following my frst visit. Here, I immediately was struck by the eforts the curators of the exhibition titled Unsettled gave over to acknowledging the contribution and their respects, dedicating the exhibition ‘to the people and other Beings who keep the law of this land; to the Elders and Traditional Owners of all the knowledges, places, and stories in this exhibition; and to the Ancestors and Old People for their resilience and guidance’.

Introduction

Furthering this book's core mission to establish the use of the memoir as a pedagogical tool in school education, teacher preparation and teachers’ ongoing professional development, this chapter begins with a section on how, internationally, the study of memoirs in a general sense in schools and colleges has become increasingly popular in use and their efectiveness as a pedagogical tool with younger students is well-researched by academics. It is one small step towards the use of the memoir pedagogy in school education, pre-service, postgraduate and teachers’ professional development.

Particularly looking at the general appeal of the memoir to the general population because of its appeal to our often-suppressed desires as secret voyeurs, this chapter then focuses on how this might be captured in the interests of memoir pedagogy in pre-service, postgraduate and teachers’ professional development: ‘We’re all secret voyeurs’, claimed one commentator.

This chapter closes with a brief examination of the special role of the bildungsroman literary subgenre, or more generally, the coming-of-age memoir subgenre as a pedagogical tool. This section also reminds readers of the advice provided by Marion Roach (n.d., n.p.) in her online article: ‘frst of, memoir is not about you. It is about something, and you are its illustration.’

The study of memoirs as pedagogical tools has become increasingly popular in schools and colleges: the universality and uniqueness of experiences of patriarchy, racism, colonialism, culture, and capitalism […]

During the frst 22 years or so of my life at least the major factor shaping my early life in my coming-of-age quest was one of personal struggle, the major theme of my memoirs. There were, however, four related factors, the sub-themes of the memoirs:

• • social class and government-provided school education;

• • the efect of adolescent sexual abuse on an individual's life chances;

• • the lifelong disadvantages and benefts of correspondence/distance education; and

• • untangling the insidious long tentacles of racism.

I spent several years considering how I should present these in written format to an audience of paraprofessionals, student teachers, postgraduate students and practising teachers participating in professional development courses – and maybe just community-based and interested folk. Slowly, the idea of writing my memoirs formed. Somehow, over the decades working frst as a teacher and school principal and later as an academic, the idea had formed in the back of my mind that a memoir was not so much about the memoirist per se, but rather larger issues, issues shared by many folk. And quite pleasingly, my research for this exegesis confrmed this.

Perhaps, it is a necessary condition for any octogenarian to refect on how he/she came to be what he/she is in a personal and professional sense, where he/she came from at their birth – the vagaries of life's chances – what some have called ‘the examined life’. I reckon, now, that for me at least these determining factors come down to the weight and nature of one's childhood and adolescent social/cultural/economic conditions during the frst 22 or so years of one life.

Maybe […] just maybe, I had escaped life on the razor's edge. I could never, however, escape being born on the wrong side of the fence – a working-class kid, with working-class country mannerisms which were hard to shake of. But although I was unaware of it at the time, that escape from the razor's edge remained a few months away; and it concerned my meeting with a very special person. It would come from the most unexpected direction and would have little to do with academic excellence. Indeed, some boys are born twice, but my full birth was a few months away, yet. Often, during these frst weeks at college, I had to stop and pinch myself. I had made it […] fnally? Hilary Rodwell and Dr Robey, I’ll be forever grateful to you. But I knew I couldn't fool myself: I had been forever psychologically, or even emotionally, scarred

– indeed, riddled with self-doubt and at times, a terribly persistent low self-esteem. The efects of adolescent sexual abuse, I’m sure now, stays with you, all your life – as does the working-class ‘boy-from-the-country’ syndrome. Headmaster McKinnon's liberally dispersed sixers? Maybe it was a combination of all these factors which knotted my mind to undertaking such a smorgasbord of doctorates later in my life.

I remember the frst morning of college – a fog-enshrouded, typical winter's Launceston morning – when we gathered outside a college room waiting to be addressed by College Principal Mr Cliford. As we moved into the room, I looked about at the other 35 students in the group.

Teaching several generations of trainee teachers in fve diferent Australian universities and before that with 20 years’ experience in Tasmanian schools and six as a principal, at some time or other I would impress upon the students an old truism about not confusing poverty with a perceived lack of intelligence. Generally, New South Wales public schools were tough places for working-class kids from relatively impoverished homes. Through most of my years at Oberon Central, according to my school reports, I was way down the list of academic achievement, caused in part through the handiwork of teachers who continued confusing poverty with stupidity and whom I suspected harboured a disdain for working-class kids.

‘Don't worry, Grant things will work out’, Hilary encouraged me.

I threw my head back in agreement. I had other things to worry about.

Thanks, Mum. One day, I’ll do you proud.

As an adolescent, I sat squarely on the razor's edge and terribly and, for me, apparently irrevocably positioned on the wrong side of the fence. Although much of this mindset started during my schooling, there was much more to come.

Throughout my school days at least, working-class kids attracted low expectations from teachers, which in turn resulted in low self-esteem for these kids. My school reports refected old class-conscious attitudes by middle-class teachers.

One cannot spend over 50 years of a life being frst as a student teacher, then a teacher, a system-wide science curriculum consultant, a vice-principal, a school principal and fnally as an academic at various levels in four Australian universities, ending with an invited appointment at the prestigious G8 University of Adelaide, without some refection: time giving over to some thought to the many challenges faced in – or escaping from – my life as an adolescent who at 15 years of age had been sexually abused, sufered in-school social-class discrimination and then drafted into unskilled labouring work.

After being denied a high school education, then seemingly locked in a regional timber industry as a labourer, for me, life was hardly coming up roses. Becoming precariously positioned on the razor's edge and becoming increasingly aware that I was born on and had been living on the wrong side of the fence in a small New South Wales country town, I had some hard decisions to make, and with the help of two marvellous people, I was fortunate enough to be born twice. Particularly, now in my retirement, thinking how I might understand this and then how I might pass these experiences onto paraprofessionals, student teachers and teachers in the school education profession of subsequent generations became almost an obsession.

These memoirs were written with academics, lecturers, student-teachers and senior secondary students undertaking such courses as English Extension in mind.

A fragment from:

Mike Ketch (2024). I shoulder the departed as manuscripts in stained glass: memoirs thrown up on gothic arches. Write Under the Moon (17 June 17). Published in Medium (30 June). Retrieved 30 June 2024 from https://medium .com/write-under-the-moon/i-shoulder-the-departed-as-manuscripts-in -stained-glass-c4f67a71f2e6.