Wage slaves won’t change the world
Life and Times
Working dutifully from nine to five will never change the world, Townsville Grammar headmaster Maurie Blank warned final year students in 1953
AVOID the nine- to- five mentality if you want to change the world, hardworking Townsville Grammar School headmaster Maurie Blank told final year students at the school’s 1953 speech night.
Mr Blank, who first joined the school in 1939 as a 21- yearold science teacher, challenged wage- slave thinking in a speech reported by the Towns
ville Daily Bulletin on December 3, 1953.
“There is abroad a very strong feeling that one ought to do just what one is told to do ... that self- denial, unselfishness, and service to the community are somebody else’s responsibility,’’ he said.
“I trust that you realise the utter falseness of such an attitude, and that in your lives you attempt to do what ought to be done, that you attempt to give the best in service, that through your life the world may become a slightly better place in which to live.’’
Maurice William Blank, born in Rockhampton in 1918, had a strong academic record, having passed the state high school entrance exam aged 12, finishing third in the state senior exam and graduating as a Bachelor of Science aged 19.
He worked at Townsville Grammar School from 1939 to December 1942, when he quit to join the RAAF as a wireless operator/ air- gunner.
Headmaster T B ( Tommy) Whight paid tribute to his versatility when farewelling him in 1942, noting that he had taught physics and geography to junior and senior students, chemistry to seniors and bookkeeping to junior classes.
“He has had the heaviest burden of us all – his versatility is amazing,’’ Mr Whight said later in the school’s official history.
“In his spare time, he ran the cadet corps, the school’s book room [ and] was officer commanding the school’s slit trenches.’’
Mr Blank returned to the school in 1946, left at the end of 1947 for the Kings School Sydney, and returned a few months later, appointed headmaster in place of the controversial Mr A Campbell Logan.
By then he had a young family, having married Amy Kearney in 1940, but still found time for weekend working bees to clear playing fields used as wartime holding paddocks.
This was groundwork for a major reconstruction project in memory of students who served in World War II, fi- nanced by £ 1600 from the school’s war memorial committee.
During his 17 years as principal, Mr Blank is credited with having salvaged the school’s precarious financial position and restoring its purpose and direction.
Enrolments grew from 78 in 1948 to more than 300 when he resigned in 1965 for a new career in higher education.
Secretary of the Caulfield Institute of Technology in Melbourne, from 1969 to 1983, he made his mark as a founder of the Association for Tertiary Education Management – a guild for previously neglected middle- managers.
He died in 2003, aged 87, remembered in the Townsville
Bulletin as an education hero whose life had been well- lived.