Schools of the District
Sue Speck and Margaret Morgan

The presentation opened with a timeline of education in South Australia. The Board of Education was established in 1847, requiring teachers to hold a licence. Previously, only private schools existed. From the 1860s every community in the region had at least one school.

Yankalilla had three schools. Yankalilla Wissanger School, between Yankalilla and Normanville, was established on land donated by Septimane Herbert. The first teacher, Jane Donnan, had previously established a school in Normanville. Mr Edward J Catlow, who had taught at Yankalilla Wissanger School, was the first teacher at Finniss Vale School in Second Valley. A talented puzzle maker, he devised a method for creating Sudoku-like puzzles called Magic Squares.

Reverend Morse, appointed in 1868, established Christ Church Day School in Yankalilla and remained in the district until his death in 1901. The school building still stands and now serves as the church hall. There was also a Roman Catholic School.

Between Yankalilla and Myponga was the Wattle Flat School and Myponga itself had three schools: Lovely Valley, Myponga and Myponga Jetty. Local students also attended Hindmarch Tiers and Mount Jagged schools, outside the township.

Inman Valley and Bald Hills also had early private schools. From 1871 to 1882, a school in Inman Valley township was known as “Princetown” because its schoolmaster, John Yates, disliked Pugtown, the colloquial name for Inman Valley, because of the number of pug houses there.

By 1865, Bullaparinga and Delamere (Glenburn) each had a school. In 1867, a single school was built at Delamere, on the corner opposite the Delamere store, and remained in use until 1990.

Other schools that operated across the region were Parkfield, Torrens Vale, Yoho Station, Rapid Bay, Cape Jervis, Silverton, Second Valley (Finniss Vale), Hay Flat private school and Spring Bank school.

Some scandals beset these schools over the years.

An early private school established in 1858 was run intermittently by John Tyson, who was continually running out of money. Over the years his mental health came into question, and he was sent to Adelaide’s Destitute Asylum where he died in 1888.

In 1878 Frederick Boys, who had an exemplary record as a teacher at Myponga Jetty and Dairy Flat Schools from 1867 was found to have indecently assaulted three of his school children, all under 13 years of age. He was sentenced to nine years’ jail.

In 1883, a teacher at the Delamere School, John Fletcher, fled after being severely rebuked by the brother of one of several young women he had been seeing. It then emerged that he also had a wife and three children in Western Australia.

After the talk, there was time to explore a display of schoolbooks and numerous photographs from the YDHS collection.