Catherine Jean St Hill (left) with members of her extended family Rachel and Enid. Photos: Marion Williams.
People’s eyes lit up and the years fell away as they shared happy memories of their time at Bermagui Public School.
While current pupils were bursting with excitement at the prospect of dunking school principal Henry George into a tub of cold water, former pupils laughed and smiled as they recalled tall tales and true.
People came from as far as Perth to attend the school’s 150th celebrations this month.
At 96 years of age, Catherine St Hill is thought to be the oldest former pupil of the school still living.
Her family had a farm at Baragoot Lake and her father Les had attended Cuttagee Half Time School. He was the postmaster at Bermagui South for several years. He and his brothers Bruce and Stanley served in World War I. All three returned.
Ms St Hill attended Bermagui Public School from 1937 to 1939. She said back then all the kids walked to school. There were no buses, no uniforms and the boys “seldom wore shoes”.
“My first teacher was Miss Ryan, then Miss Barlow and then Mr Hamilton, the principal,” Ms St Hill said. “I think he was a good teacher. He wasn’t keen on the cane. He would bang it on the desk.”
Ms St Hill excelled at maths and the teacher would send her the little ones who were crying because they could not do their sums. “I was only eight or nine and I would get all these little ones who the teacher couldn’t pacify,” she said.
The children kept their exercise books and pencils in an old lolly box in the school. “The wind would come up through the floor,” she said. “They moved that building to the school at Box Hill near Cobargo.”
The oldest photo available – school pupils about 1880.
Wilma and Errol Masterson attended Bermagui Public School in the 1950s. Errol was a class ahead.
“Tunics came in the last few years at the school,” Wilma said. “There was no canteen. Mum would pack our lunch and we caught the bus to school or you walked or rode your bike.”
Wilma lived next door to the bus driver, Bob Bollard. Her grandfather kept goats at the school to eat the blackberries. One child who did not like crusts would throw them into the blackberries.
Both Wilma’s father and her husband Errol copped a lot of punishment while at the school because they were left-handed. Errol and Wilma recall their first teacher, Miss Black, as a “bit cranky”. Miss Black would crack Errol across the knuckles with the edge of a wooden ruler for writing with his left hand.
Errol started at the school when he was four years and eight months old. The principal had to let him leave school before he turned 15 as he got a job as an apprentice mechanic at Bermagui Motors. That was October 1959. Errol started work at the Clyde Sawmill in 1961, aged 17.
He was caned once. Every boy in the school got caned that day because they were throwing their pens into the classroom’s wooden ceiling to see if they would stick. “The pens would fall off but the nibs would stay there,” Wilma said.
At the time Bermagui Public School was also a high school. Some of Errol’s siblings did their HSC there. “The school went to Year 9 and then you could do it by correspondence to Year 12,” Wilma said.
Wilma Masterson (right) and her sister Lynette. Their grandparents were married in the Murrah Hall.
The school’s “Big Tree” is etched into people’s memories. Every child climbed the Monterey cypress, originally from California.
Wilma said the tree had always been there. “It was growing at the back of the pub when my grandparents were kids,” she said. “We used to hit the ball into the prickly bushes around the tree and you would get a lot of runs while they were trying to get the ball out.”
The tree’s exact age and origin at the school are unknown. Local stories suggested it might have arrived as a seed with Californian gold diggers or was planted by Peter Engstrom around 1883 or 1884 when he moved his hotel “The Diggers Retreat” from the nearby Montreal Goldfield to Bermagui.
Historically, the hotel stood nearby and horses were tethered around the tree while their riders visited the hotel.
Jillian Taylor who taught at the school for 21 years before she retired in 2007 had many memories of the tree.
“How many Kindergarten students dug around the bottom of the tree with their Matchbox toys,” she said. “Some found bottles, a reminder of the tree’s former life.”
