Glenelg Primary School

A School in the Birthplace of a Colony

Glenelg Primary School opened its doors in 1881, in a suburb that already regarded itself as the cradle of the colony. It was on the sands of Holdfast Bay, a short walk from where the school would stand, that Governor John Hindmarsh had proclaimed the Province of South Australia in December 1836, beneath the gum tree that the colony afterwards made a monument. By the time the school was founded, Glenelg had grown from that ceremonial beginning into a thriving seaside town — a place of jetties and sea baths, of grand villas along the foreshore and humbler cottages set back from it, linked to the capital by the railway and, later, the tram that ran down to Moseley Square. A government school in such a suburb inherited a particular sense of itself: it belonged to a place that believed it had been present at the beginning.

The school occupied a heritage building near the commercial heart of the suburb, close enough to the water that the sea air reached the classrooms and the rhythms of the beachside town set the rhythm of the school year. Generations of Glenelg families passed their children through it, and many of those children, grown, sent their own. For all the changes the decades brought to the suburb around it — the rise and decline of the seaside resort trade, the coming and going of fashions in education — the school remained a fixed point, an institution against which the community measured time.

A Cross-Section of the Suburb

What made the school distinctive was less its age than the breadth of the community it gathered in. Glenelg was never a single kind of place. The streets nearest the beach held professional families in comfortable houses; the streets further inland held working people on tighter budgets; and from the post-war decades onward the suburb received successive waves of migrants, families newly arrived from Europe and beyond for whom English was a second language or barely a language at all. A state primary school took all of them. In a single classroom a doctor's child might sit beside the child of a labourer and the child of a family three months off the boat, and the school's daily work was to make something coherent of that mixture.

This was the quiet civic function of the place. It asked no fees and turned no one away; it taught the children of the whole suburb together, whatever their circumstances, and in doing so it did some of the unspectacular work by which a community holds itself together. The range of need in any class was wide — children reading fluently beside children still mastering the shapes of letters, children secure at home beside children whose homes were precarious — and the teachers who did well there were those who could hold that range without letting any of it fall.

The Work of the Classroom

Teaching at Glenelg Primary was demanding in the way that primary teaching has always been demanding, and more so for the size of the classes. A teacher might face twenty-eight children at once, seven and eight years old, and be responsible for every one of them at every moment — their learning, their squabbles, their safety, their widely differing abilities — while also preparing lessons, marking work, supervising the yard, and satisfying the administrative demands that consumed time without ever reaching a child. The reality of it bore little resemblance to the theory taught in the training colleges, and the first year in particular tended to exhaust new teachers in ways they had not expected.

Those who lasted developed the craft that the colleges could not teach: the structured routines that gave anxious children security, the patient strategies that reached a struggling reader, the consistency that managed behaviour without resort to harshness. The school's character, in the end, was made not by its heritage building or its place in the suburb's history but by the accumulated work of such teachers, year upon year, in classrooms that smelled faintly of the sea.

Elizabeth Jenkins's Years

One of them was Elizabeth Jenkins, who arrived in 1974 as a young woman not long out of teacher training and was given a Year 2 class of twenty-eight. She had grown up in working-class Norwood, the daughter of a postal worker and a seamstress, and had reached teaching by way of a scholarship and a great deal of careful budgeting; the security and respectability of the profession meant a good deal to someone of her background. Glenelg was her first posting, and it became the place where she learnt her trade.

She learnt it, as most do, through exhaustion — arriving home each afternoon emptied out, then facing the evening's preparation and marking — but she proved to have an aptitude for the work, and particularly for the teaching of reading. She built the structured routines that steadied her classes and the creative approaches to literacy that reached the children others struggled with, and within a few years the administration had noticed. In 1980 she was made a Year Level Coordinator, taking on the mentoring of beginning teachers and the coordination of the curriculum across her year level, the first rung of a leadership career that would eventually carry her to a principalship elsewhere.

She did all of it, through these years, while raising small children of her own. Her first child had been born in 1975, the year after she started, and two more arrived during her years at the school; her mother minded the little ones through school hours, and Elizabeth lived the particular double exhaustion of the working mother who teaches other people's children by day and tends her own by night. She was present, too, for the school's hundredth year: the centenary of its 1881 founding fell in 1981, marked with the commemorations such occasions invite, a published centenary history among them, at a moment when she stood squarely in the middle of her time there.

She left in 1985 for an assistant principalship at Brighton, carrying with her the methods she had worked out in the Glenelg classrooms. In that she was entirely typical of the place. Teachers came to it young, learnt their craft in its demanding rooms, and moved on to other schools and other roles, seeding what they had learnt across the wider system — so that the influence of Glenelg Primary reached well beyond the children who actually sat in its classrooms.

The Centenary and the Long Continuity

The centenary of 1981 caught the school looking both ways. Behind it lay a hundred years of the suburb's children — the sons and daughters of fishermen and shopkeepers and resort-trade workers, of post-war migrants, of the professional families along the front — and ahead lay however many more the next century would bring. A school that has stood for a hundred years in one place accumulates a peculiar kind of memory: families in which three generations have sat in the same rooms, teachers remembered across decades, the small institutional traditions that outlast any single cohort. Glenelg Primary had become, by its centenary, less a building than a continuity.

That continuity was its real achievement. Few of the children who passed through it became notable, and the school asked no such thing of them; its work was the ordinary, foundational work of teaching the young of a suburb to read and reckon and get along with one another, done well and done again, year after year, for generation after generation. The teachers who gave it their best years — Elizabeth Jenkins among many — were mostly forgotten by the children they taught, which is the common fate of primary teachers and no measure of what they did.

A Cornerstone of Local Identity

For the suburb, the school remained what it had long been: a cornerstone, taken for granted in the way that essential things usually are. It stood near the water in the birthplace of the colony, gathered in the children of the whole community without distinction, and handed them on, a little more capable than it had received them, to the lives they would go on to lead. It was never a glamorous institution and never tried to be. It was simply, and durably, a school — and in a suburb that prized its own long history, it had become one of the quiet fixtures by which that history was carried forward.