French Island communities

There have been, so far as I know, four schools on French Island, rather a high number for a place with only two or three hundred people on it and, for much of the time, even fewer.

There were seven very small village settlements created on French Island under the Village Settlement Scheme during the great depression of he 1890s. These were Callanan’s, Energy, Grant Homestead Association, Industrial, Kiernan’s, Perseverance and Star of Hope. Perseverance and Star of Hope State Schools were built to serve these, but none of the seven could ever have been called villages.

Tankerton is the nearest thing to a town on the Island today but you would look in vain for a Tankerton school, though there was a Tankerton Post Office from 1890 until 1994, closed then reopened in 2001 as French Island PO. Tankerton is the area inshore from the jetty more or less east across the water from Hastings.

There was also a Fairhaven PO from 1911 to 1957 – Fairhaven is about halfway up the west coast of the island. State School 4769, French Island North, opened near Fairhaven on 24 May 1955, under HT Terry Godfrey. Ten years later, in March 1965, it closed for lack of pupils.

Three of the five have gone.

For those unhappy settlers under the settlement scheme, on their allotments of 20 acres, life was unbelievably hard. The lack of educational opportunity for their children was just one of many difficulties. For the first year none of their children could not attend school at all, for there simply was no school on the island. One might wonder where the planning for the settlements broke down.

Complaints and requests brought the Education Department to act swiftly and prepare to open schools at the Star of Hope and the Perseverance settlements, toward the southwest of the island.

The Energy and Kiernan settlements were on the north of island and well separated. Parents and children there simply missed out. The other three settlements never really got going and were never considered for a school.

There is, though, one surviving school. SS No. 3261, Perseverance State School, survived all manner of disasters and is the only French Island school open today.

State Schools 3261 and 3262, Perseverance and Star of Hope respectively, were to be opened in June 1896, but there was a delay. The schools were to be in houses abandoned by the settlers and now owned by the Lands Department – that abandoning should have been a warning – and when HT Frank Pizzey got there on 17 June 1896 he found that the Star of Hope building had burned down the previous week and was rapidly being rebuilt by the remaining settlers.

Of Perseverance SS he wrote that it was “not quite ready. The school “being fitted with haste there was no door fixture and the window space was only partly filled, the roof being in parts broken…”

Star of Hope was rebuilt, by the settlers in less than three weeks but was described by them as a ‘substantial’ building. However one John Ratford wrote to the department saying “we are in need of a chimney (or material for a chimney) and widows…” It can’t have been too substantial.

Still, the schools were opened and Pizzey worked Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays at Star of Hope, and Tuesdays and Thursdays at Perseverance. There was a totally unsurprising complaint that the Star of Hope kids had school six days a fortnight while those at Perseverance had only four days. That was balanced up before the end of the year.

The Education Department’s 1972 history “Vision and Realisation” includes an 1896 description of the two school buildings. They were both “wattle-and-daub huts with thatch roofs; Perseverance measured 21ftx10ft6in (6.4m x 3.2m) and Star of Hope was 24ft6inx12ft6in (7.46m x 3.8m).” In 1897 the Education Department supplied flooring materials and the parents built the schools’ first-ever floors.

In 1900 more repairs were carried out at Perseverance. A Mr Bond re-plastered the inside of the building with mud and repaired the thatch roof and did a good job for the agreed fee of fifteen shillings.

Attendances fell as the settlements failed and in 1904 both schools were closed until April. In March the parents agreed to pay twelve pounds a year toward the teacher’s salary and the schools were reopened.

On 16 June of that year HT Walter Scott wrote to the department that the north wall of Perseverance had blown and “I could not hold the meetings today”. He said some other abandoned huts were nearby and he could use one of them until Perseverance was repaired. Obviously he had a fair bit of perseverance himself.

The department’s response was close Perseverance for the time being and make Star of Hope full-time until late in the year when another hut had been obtained.

In February 1907 things improved greatly. With two grants of 30 pounds each the two schools were opened in new buildings built by the parents, on two better sites.

Perseverance Primary School is now a bright, happy school in good facilities, and still with strong community support. Star of Hope has long gone; just how long I do not know.

Those who complain about school facilities today might often have good cause, but they should also celebrate how far our schools have come. Well, those that survived, anyway.

The one school I haven’t yet mentioned is, or was, State School No.4729 French Island, also known as the McLeod Training Centre, a very unusual school in every way. It was part of the McLeod Prison Farm and offered education to prisoners. It is a lack of education which landed many prisoners in the ‘slammer’ in the first place. It offered courses from basic literacy and numeracy tight through to matriculation and trade skills.

It was fairly limited in that it was a one-teacher school (the prison farm usually had less than a hundred prisoners) and operated in two “association cells” when it was opened in 1954. The first HT was David Biles, who went on to become a lecturer in criminology. The Centre got a proper school building in 1955.

The prison farm opened in 1916 so the school was only about 38 years late. It began in tents and the permanent buildings were not opened until after the Second World War, Ironically, after closing as a prison farm in 1975 it spent twenty years as a holiday camp, then became an ‘ecovillage, and was bought by Chinese interests in 2017,