Anne: My mother died when I was fourteen and we had to keep cattle, we girls, and everything. We had it hard. My brother, he did odd jobs, nothing was too menial for him to get a few shillings. ... We were willing to do anything. You didn't pick the job you wanted.
Anne: You see, I always found school interesting. Always. I always found learning and books and things because I come from that kind of a home though, just the same ...
Anne: I just think that perhaps they got, they got the wrong idea about me, they thought that I was sort of ... for instance, Les would drive up there in a great big flared car that was his father's, not his, and I had nice clothes. By that time, I was earning good money and I really think they ... I just think that they thought that you know I wouldn't fit in. They didn't get to the core of the apple. Only saw the shiny skin. And I was strict.
Les: She was strict on 'em.
Anne: Every school I've been at, they all remember. ... At Jetsonville or some place like that out near Scottsdale, I got a letter to save the school, it was in a bad way, you see, and I was a strong teacher and they were sending me there to try and pull the school back into shape. ...You know, the first day we went into the class. I took the kiddies into the school and they came in and said [about this notorious trouble making boy] he is not there and I'm well aware that he's gonna put up some [trick] and suddenly, you know the kiddies were sort of giggling and watching the game. I just sat there and called the register and said his name, Billy somebody or other, oh, a great big rough, you know, raw-boned fellow he was. And suddenly this noise happened on the porch outside - they're all built the same the schools were - he came rocking into the school without knocking or anything, hands on hips almost, in defiance. It was sort of defiant and I just had this cane ready in the cupboard and I pulled this cane with one hand and I said "Go back on the porch" and I shut the door with the other hand. And I didn't cane him. I slapped him all over. Anywhere I could get and I came back in and I said "Get to your place and never come to the school late again!" and I had the cane ready ... and the kiddies, you could have heard a pin drop. I never had any trouble, no trouble at all, but I used the cane but I don't remember using it at Lilydale. But it was there behind the cupboard.
Anne: The only way ... come Christmas time, each family would want some cash money naturally ... and the only way they could get cash money was the Council which would put them on to clean the table drain out along the roads and you'd see Bill Mathewson, and Jack Bowron and oh, lots of others, and they'd clean all the table drains for about eight shillings a day.
[...] George Bowron used to go along the side of the road and gather up all the grass that was in seed. He'd gather the seed and he'd sell it to Clements and Marshall and he'd get cash money that way. That's how poor they were. They were terribly poor. ... you know, and he had such nice ideas. The house was down [the hill, in a bowl] and he was trying to get a terrace garden round it. He had it partly established there before I left. He had lots of geraniums in it. And, you know, I used to think she had such a heartbreaking job keeping the kiddies so neat and clean which they were. Beautifully kept. And I don't know how she did it on the money she never got. And she'd admire everything, you know, George was to her just marvellous. It was a real love match. She thought he was wonderful. You could tell you know the way she spoke to him.
Anne: And all of those country children, I used to always consider, they were so tired before they got to school, that they were just in a state of ... they had to milk cows and feed fowls and do things in the stables. You see, it was time of horses then. There wasn't a tractor in North Lilydale when I was there. Everything was done with horses. .. . nobody had one [tractor] unless Fred Kelp had one, perhaps, the rich man in the district. Oh no, now, Mr Mathewson. The horses had to be stabled every night.
Phil: Mmm. He was very fond of horses, I'm told.
Anne: And the ploughs came out. There were no tractors. I can see them now at Bridestowe, with the horses, ploughing the long furrows. There were no ... nothing mechanical. And I used to think kiddies were tired before they even got to school. And they had long walks. Nobody had a bicycle to come to school. I don't remember one child having a bike. The roads were too unsuitable for one thing. [...]
Phil: But in general, from day to day, how would you decide what you were going to do, with the kids?
Anne: Well, you were given a ... you had a syllabus, of course, and, er, you trained the classes that you had in groups, say now the North Lilydale school, you actually had three groups. You had group one and two, three and four,
and five and six. And a child starting from grade one was lucky to go straight through to grade 6 in that order.
See, by the time they did their one and two, they might be doing four and three. Because it took two years. You had
to group those two classes and they were taught the same history, the same geography, in a two-year course. Well, they might ... be in the year they got there, they might .. what they were supposed to be learning in grade 4, they'd be learning in grade 3. ... And next year's they'd be learning what they should have learnt in grade 3 but half of them would have already done grade four. And that's how it was with five and six. That's the only way you could do it, the only classes that you could specialise in and give them individual classes would be in, say, arithmetic, spelling and reading. You couldn't skip grades in those. Naturally you had to keep those [in sequence]. You had to do it with a system of monitors you had trained. Now, Ruth Bowron would make a good monitor, you see, well while I was teaching a class something, she'd be taking, say, just ordinary reading with group one and two. That's the only way you could do it.
... [The boys would go in the bush and they gathered tons of fire wood for the school room] and get a long stick that had a hooked root in the shape of a hockey stick and they used to knock around, not a stone, I don't know what they used to knock around, a tennis ball they had or something else, a ball something like that, and I used to think it was a bit dangerous. The school was on a bank, you know, on a sharp bank and one day, one of them was hit with the stick and that this boy was I, right across there [forehead], I had to walk him about three miles up that Boultbees' Hill. There was a widow lived out there with two little boys - I can't think of her name - and one of the boys was the one that got hit, you see, and I walked up after school with the boy to the mother. I didn't like to do anything without her permission but I considered the bush nurse from Lilydale should come and stitch it and she was very much against it, and I thought perhaps she hasn't got the money and that was the trouble. I know I finished up going down to Denny's to use the phone to get the bush nurse to come and stitch it. I was too worried about it and he had two or three stitches put in and that was the end of the hockey game. [Phil note : My father Pat told me later that he had swung the home-made hockey stick and it was his mate Dan Cane whose brow needed stitching.]
One day, ... you had to put the fire out before you left and I put a log out on top of it, I thought it was right out. It wasn't right out, set the whole stack on fire. It set it on fire and burnt all one side of a home-made stable that parents had built for the minister's horse when he came to teach, church, and all the Bridestowe workers rushed up and put it out with tank water. ... I wrote it up and reported it all, you know praising the Bridestowe people, he [the Inspector] attached nothing personal but to me it was a disaster.
Read about Miss Keeling elsewhere in her career at the NLA Trove.