South Downs Primary School

A School on the Trust's Grid

South Downs Primary School stood among the brick-and-tile streets of Elizabeth, one of the government primary schools the South Australian Housing Trust's new town required almost as soon as its first families arrived. Like the suburb around it, the school had been built to a plan: a low, functional building of cream brick and bagged render, a bitumen quadrangle, a scatter of classrooms opening onto asphalt and a few hardy gums, and an oval that turned to dust in summer and mud in winter. It was unremarkable to look at, and meant to be — a place designed to take in the children of fitters and shift workers and assembly-line families and send them out able to read, write and reckon.

Its catchment told the suburb's story plainly. Most of the pupils who passed through its gates qualified for the school card, the state scheme that quietly subsidised fees and uniforms for families who could not manage them, and the proportion only grew as the decades wore on and the work at the Holden line thinned. The school carried, without ceremony, the particular character of an Elizabeth institution: short of money, long on the kind of teachers who stayed because the children needed them, and bound up intimately in the lives of households for whom it was often the steadiest structure in the week.

The days ran to a dependable shape. A morning bell drew the lines in across the quadrangle; a canteen sold the same few things at the same window; assemblies gathered the school beneath the flag on Monday mornings; and the afternoon let the children out into the long walk home past identical front fences. For those whose households kept no such rhythm, the very monotony of it was a kind of scaffolding.

Der, Die, Das

For a government primary in the northern suburbs, South Downs kept one unusual fixture: it taught German. South Australia's long German heritage, carried down from the nineteenth-century settlers of the Adelaide Hills and the Barossa, had left the language embedded in the state's schools in a way it was in few other parts of the country, and at South Downs the lessons fell to Helene Franciska Schmidt — Frau Schmidt to two decades of children who never learned, or needed, her first name.

She was a figure of pure order in a school that badly wanted one. Her arrival in a corridor announced itself before she appeared, by the measured click of her shoes on the lino, and a line of waiting children would straighten without being told. The German room itself was the most composed space in the building: desks in true rows, the blackboard wiped clean, the walls hung with posters of Rhine castles and snow-capped landscapes that bore no relation to the flat, hot suburb outside. A lesson opened with a chorus of greeting in the children's best approximation of the language and proceeded through the small machinery of articles and genders with a warmth that never loosened into disorder.

Where exactly she had come from, the children never quite knew. She belonged, in their imagining, wholly to the German room, as though she had no existence beyond its door — though in truth she was one of that scattered community of German speakers the state had absorbed across its history, and she taught the language less as a school subject than as something she wished to hand on intact. She was strict in the manner of a person who believed that structure was itself a kindness, and the children, even the ones who chafed at it, mostly sensed that the belief was sincere.

For some of them that order was merely the texture of a Wednesday lesson. For others it was something closer to refuge — a room where the rules were knowable, where effort produced predictable results, where an adult was reliably in command. Frau Schmidt likely never knew how much that steadiness meant to particular children in her care, which is the ordinary fate of primary teachers: to matter enormously and invisibly, and to be remembered long after they have forgotten the faces.

A Haven of Order

Among the children for whom the school's order ran deeper than its timetable was Luke Smith, who passed through South Downs at the turn of the 1990s. Born in 1984 and raised in a brick-veneer house in nearby Elizabeth Park, Luke came from a home that was steadily coming apart — a mother whose untreated illness made the household's weather unpredictable, a marriage moving toward its collapse in the middle of 1992, the police at the door more than once. Against that, the school's fixed shape was a daily reassurance. He took the front row in Frau Schmidt's class and held it, finding in the structure of the lessons a kind of belonging the house could not reliably give him.

It was the common, unrecorded service of a school like South Downs — to be the part of a child's life that stayed the same. For a boy whose home could turn frightening between one week and the next, the predictability of bells and lines and lessons was not a constraint but a comfort, and the classroom a place where he was simply a pupil rather than a witness to things he was too young to understand.

Two Boys

Luke's closest companion through those years had arrived from a long way off. Jamie Greyson came to Elizabeth in early 1989, a shy, watchful five-year-old whose family had left Tasmania for the warmer, drier air on the advice of doctors treating his younger sister's chronic chest complaints. He started at South Downs that year knowing no one, overwhelmed by the noise of the playground and the unwritten rules of children who all seemed to understand one another, and for a time he simply endured it.

Then he found Luke, and the friendship that grew between them became, for both boys, the centre of their small worlds. To Jamie, Luke seemed confident where he was uncertain, bold where he was cautious, a guide through the social weather that bewildered him. To Luke, Jamie offered something steadier — a grounded, practical companionship that anchored a boy whose inner life was already crowded with imaginings he could share with no one else. From roughly five to eight they were inseparable, at school and after it, each become necessary to the other in the complete way of childhood friendships formed when little else is dependable.

Much of that friendship was made of ordinary days. On one of them, the tenth of June 1992, a German lesson on the genders of nouns was interrupted by nothing more dramatic than a small boy needing to leave the room, and Frau Schmidt sent the two of them out together into the bright quadrangle while the class went on without them. It was the sort of unremarkable few minutes that no register records and no one expects to remember, and exactly the sort from which the bonds of childhood are quietly assembled.

It did not last. Jamie's father took a posting to Brisbane in the middle of 1992, and the decision arrived already made. The boys spent their final Elizabeth weeks in each other's company, trading promises about letters and visits that neither was old enough to keep, and then the Greysons were gone north and the friendship became a thing of distance. Luke's own family was fracturing in the same season. The two would not meet again for sixteen years, and the years between would reshape them both — but the place where their friendship had begun was a primary school on the Trust's grid, a teacher's orderly room, and a sunlit quadrangle on an ordinary winter afternoon.

Other Children, Other Years

The school outlasted that particular friendship, as schools do, and went on taking in the children of the north through the long contraction of the suburb's fortunes. A decade after Luke and Jamie, Taryn Novak walked through the same gates — a brighter pupil than her behaviour often suggested, quick to lose interest and quicker to bridle at authority. Her Year Three teacher, Patricia Oates, set down an assessment that would prove unusually durable: a child of considerable intelligence who struggled with authority and impulse alike. The school card still subsidised most of the uniforms in the yard, and the families had grown, if anything, harder pressed since the Holden line began shedding its workers.

By Taryn's time the German room and Frau Schmidt belonged to an earlier chapter of the school, but its essential character had not changed. It remained a modest brick building doing necessary work for children whose home lives ranged from settled to precarious, staffed by people who understood that for many of their pupils the school was the most stable institution they knew. The faces changed with the decades; the task did not.

What the School Held

South Downs Primary School never produced anything that would draw notice to it. It trained no prodigies the suburb boasted of, sat at the centre of no scandal, and kept to the unglamorous business of teaching the children of Elizabeth their letters and their times tables and, for a while, a little German. Its significance lay entirely in the lives that briefly passed through it, and in the particular weight a school of its kind carries for children who find in it the order their homes cannot always supply.

Its pupils scattered as Elizabeth's children tended to — Jamie Greyson north to Brisbane and a long, displaced adulthood, Luke Smith onward into a life that would carry him far from the brick-veneer house in Elizabeth Park, Taryn Novak out through the gates and eventually, against the odds her postcode had set, into a university lecture theatre. Behind them the school stayed where it was, on its flat block among the Trust's streets, opening its doors each morning to the next intake of the suburb's children and holding for them, as it had held for others, the simple and underestimated gift of a place where the day had a shape.