Historical Society - Blackfriars School
History Notes
This week seems to have been all about the main street history with every moment spent reading what has already been written, and searching for the relevant information in the Barraba town file. Hopefully I am near the end but there is quite a lot to go before the project is finished.
These very cold frosty mornings are not a good sign for the markets in a couple of weeks but we will have them if it is at all possible, hopefully everyone will be over their health problems by then. Watch for the signs to go up if we are in business.
During the week I have been wondering what to use in history notes this week and then I heard a radio program about the Black Friars School – there will be some readers that have heard of it but most readers will not know anything about it!
In the early part of the 20th century there were a few country schools scattered across the countryside but the population was so scattered that it was not possible for all children to attend school.
The Blackfriars School provided lessons by mail. Most children were enrolled at the age of six years and were often supervised by a parent, usually their mother. A book with the week’s lessons arrived by mail each week and the child had to do each day’s lesson and then at the end of the week post the book back to Sydney for comment and corrections.
There were three exercise books – one being corrected, one in the post and one at the pupil’s home and the earliest correspondence pupil that I know of was one of my father’s cousins who started in the 1920’s – there is a book of hers in the Historical Society collection.
In our case, being the eldest, I started first and my brother began three years later and I remember being set up out on the veranda to work through the days exercises with my brother supposedly doing his drawing while our young sister was under the table causing trouble. That was when our mother realized that she couldn’t do the housework as well as supervise the schooling! She had to have someone doing the housework while she supervised the schooling all the time!
Thankfully the Cobbadah School re-opened soon after that and we rode our horses three miles, across the paddocks, to school each day. When we reached high school standard we went to boarding school in Sydney. There must surely be other people in our town who grew up on correspondence school, we would love to hear about it or perhaps your parent’s old school still exists.