Noted Newcastle teacher and activist Joan Dawson recalls her mother with a mixture of gratitude, awe and admiration.
Ivy Lavinia Oliver was six in 1911 when her family moved from Cornwall, England, to settle on a small property at York Lea, near Casino, on the NSW North Coast. Her mother died when Ivy was 15. Ivy’s teacher at York Lea encouraged her to sit a test for a scholarship to Hawkesbury Agricultural College. She was offered a scholarship but it seems her parents didn’t let her accept it. When she was about 20 her family was invited by friends on a holiday to the seaside town of Evans Head where she met a man who was working a stint as a chemist in the sugar mills near Kyogle. She fell head over heels in love, but unfortunately the object of her affection was – in his daughter Joan’s words many decades later – “a rotter”.
The sugar mill chemist was Albert Howard Young (he was mostly known by his middle name), a dashing charmer who bowled young Ivy over when they met on the beach at Evans Head. The couple married and moved to Sydney. Soon, however, Howard quit his job and bought a farm – off the plan – in an area called Kalang in the hills behind the North Coast town of Bellingen. It was, in retrospect, a rash and poor decision. The “farm” consisted of four titles, of former World War 1-era soldier settlements – a program notorious for settling ex-servicemen on marginal and poor-quality land. “This so-called farm was totally unsuitable for farming, least of all dairying,” Joan said. “My parents slaved on that farm and all they produced was children.” As Joan recalls it, her father was bad-tempered and violent, particularly with his elder sons.
When World War 2 came, Albert wanted to join up. Ivy prevented him for a time but he soon prevailed and, in Joan’s words, “went off to be a hero”. “He was educated, so that worked in his favour and he went into the air force.” He could speak a little German – his family had come from Germany and had changed their name from Jung – and he had the nominal rank of flight lieutenant. “He came back to Bellingen and strutted around, got Mum pregnant again and went off, leaving her to run the farm and raise the kids,” Joan said. Joan – born in 1936 – was Ivy’s fourth child, and first daughter. Joan recalled how, on the farm, her three older brothers had to milk the cows in the morning before riding the family’s half-draft horse to school. It wasn’t possible at that stage for Joan to go to school – a situation that rankled with Ivy, who was determined that none of her children should be deprived of educational opportunities.
When Joan was seven her mother had just had her seventh child. When Ivy knew the time to give birth was getting near she asked the local milk carrier if he knew anywhere her other children could stay while she went to hospital to deliver the baby. He arranged for his sister to care for the children. When Ivy came out of hospital she walked around Bellingen looking for somewhere to live. She didn’t want to go back to the isolated hardship of the farm in the hills but it was hard to find an alternative in Bellingen. “During the war a lot of city people had moved to country towns out of fear of possible Japanese bombing,” Joan said. But Ivy found an empty house – a derelict with no windows and in need of maintenance and repairs – and moved in with her family of seven children. “She scrounged mattresses to start with,” Joan said, “then she found the executor of the deceased estate that owned the house and arranged a lease.” She put in a sharefarmer to run the dairy but when the farm was sold Howard – always the rotter – is reputed to have kept all the proceeds for himself.
Living in “town” meant that the younger children – including Joan – could go to school. Fortunately, at seven years of age, she could already read. “I learned to read from copies of a farmers’ newspaper called The Primary Producer,” she recalled. “I knew all the dimensions of the perfect cow”. While the family’s new home was “in town”, it still provided access to enough land to keep a cow and some chickens – important during the war when supplies of all kinds – including food – were tightly rationed. When Joan was in sixth class at Bellingen she and her three sisters shared a bicycle. “The oldest was allowed to ride it home for lunch,” Joan said. By then her older brothers were going to high school at Coffs Harbour. One day, she recalled, application forms were being passed around at her school for free transport passes to the high school. The passes were necessary since the journey to high school would involve bus and train travel. “I went home and told my mother that the other girls at school had said there was no point them filling in the forms since they were girls,” she said. “Mum said there was no question I would be going to high school and she demanded I bring the form home.” Ivy also encouraged her children to try to learn music and if they showed aptitude she supported them in having lessons. Joan excelled at piano, progressing through all her exams, and this skill was later highly valued when she became a teacher.
Joan recalled a small incident while she was home on leave from teachers college that had a lifelong impact on her. “I was sitting outside with Mum and a man came around with a petition. The town’s people wanted to get rid of the school principal for some imagined offence,” she said. “My mother was my height but she could somehow make herself look taller. She stood up and told this man that there was no way she would be signing his petition. He looked shocked but he went away.” The principal was moved on anyway, but Joan was mightily impressed by her mother’s firmness. “I didn’t realise until then that you could say no to things – especially that you could say no to men who seemed to be in authority. I’ve never forgotten that. It had a huge effect on me.”
When the estate that owned the formerly decrepit house was wound up Ivy was given first option to buy it, and the owners generously deducted some of the rent she had paid from the purchase price. By then, Joan had finished high school and was at teachers’ college. “My brother Wal and I took holidays from college and went home to help Mum paint the house. Wal tied himself to the chimney to pain the steep roof,” Joan said.
Ivy never remarried. In time she sold the house at Bellingen and moved to Sydney, operating a boarding house at Chatswood. Joan had no contact with her father for years. When she eventually met him again he was, in her words, “a charming rat of the first degree”. “He was pretending to be married to another woman who had changed her name by deed poll. He had two sons with her and he never told them about his other family,” she said.
Joan attended Armidale Teachers’ College between 1953 and 1954, then came out teaching in 1955, aged 18, and began teaching at “the infants end of primary”. She had one term at Katoomba North but was then moved to Cabramatta West where a new school had been built to cater to an influx of British immigrants who were housed at a hostel nearby. It was an incredibly challenging teaching environment. “If a migrant ship came in then your class size increased dramatically,” Joan recalled. “You could have 70 children in your class. You couldn’t teach. It was child-minding. You had to deal with whatever came, and if a teacher was away sick you had to take her class. I normally had 57 in my class, then everybody got sick. One teacher was off for three months with polio.”
Joan was at Cabramatta West for 18 months and for one period of three weeks she had more than 100 pupils in her class. “You couldn’t fit them in the class room. They sat wherever, including two under my table. Most of the kids were British, some were migrants from other countries and some were locals. Many of the British children were from the urban slums: riddled with lice, undisciplined and totally unmanageable,” she said.
It was this situation that drove Joan – still in her late teens – to become an active unionist. Another aspect of the job she found upsetting was the attitudes of principals and – especially – “infants’ mistresses”. “It was amazing how many of them were horrible dragon ladies,” Joan said. “Some were all right but some were proper bitches.”
After the harsh baptism of Cabramatta West Joan’s next school was rural Dunedoo, which had a male principal. Joan recalled the day the principal opened and read a personal letter that had been addressed to her, care of the school. “I stamped my foot and asked him how he dared to do such a thing,” she said. She realised it was dangerous to upset a principal. “I was only 20 and still under bond. If I’d been dismissed I’d have been liable to pay a huge bond that I couldn’t afford.”
Also teaching at Dunedoo was Joan’s future husband, Greg Dawson. But although the pair struck up a wonderful friendship from their first meeting it was destined to be a love delayed. Greg was already engaged and was unwilling to break his engagement. It was complicated, Joan explained, since Greg would have felt guilty to have broken his word but also because his fiancee was the daughter of his parents’ best friends and business partners. “I understood that he was in a difficult position but I was very dismayed when he married and I went off and married someone as opposite from him as I could find,” she said. As Joan summarises things: “I married the wrong person”.
Joan had two daughters – the first born in 1962 and the second in 1964. In those days female teachers – like women in many jobs and careers – had to resign when they became pregnant. The situation highlighted the gender discrimination so rife throughout society. “When you came back to work after having children your time away from the workplace was deducted from your status,” she said. For men, however, the situation was reversed. “If a man left teaching for another job then came back he was given credit for those years. Women were penalised again and again.”
When Joan came back to teaching it struck her very forcibly that young teachers were being treated “like dirt”. As deputy infants’ mistress at Parramatta West she saw young women being severely harassed by the infants’ mistress and this made her decide to become really active in union affairs. “Several of us went to a Teachers Federation meeting,” she said. “I got interested in the debates. I became a delegate to council meetings and that began my union career”. The union at that time was deeply involved in many key education issues, helping design curricula. Not that the Government appreciated the union. On the contrary it did what it could to bring the union down, at one point refusing to deduct union dues from member’s pays, obliging them to pay in cash – a tactic designed to slash union membership.
In the early 1970s Joan chanced to encounter her old flame, Greg Dawson. He was living apart from his wife and Joan was divorced, so the pair began dating and were married in 1975. The pair moved to Newcastle, where Greg was the city’s first Teachers Federation organiser and very active in Trades Hall. When he got a job at the union’s head office in Sydney they moved to the capital again. When they retired they moved to the Newcastle suburb of Hamilton, but by then Greg was very sick with emphysema. His death in 1995 was a huge blow to Joan. “Greg was my soulmate and the love of my life,” she said. “Losing him was heartbreaking for me.”
But Joan pressed on with life, completing an honours degree in Fine Arts then embarking on extensive travels with an old friend. “Margaret and I went everywhere,” she said. “Across Russia, across Canada, across Africa, Mexico, South America – we had a glorious time”.
Joan’s well-publicised involvement with Newcastle’s Save Our Rail group began when activist and friend Pat Keating took her to some meetings, which she ended up chairing. The unsuccessful fight against the Government and developers was an eye-opener for the seasoned campaigner. “I don’t mind a fight, but I didn’t like that one,” she said.
Really enjoyed reading Joan Dawson’s bio. I supported Save our Rail whilst it fought the Rail curtailment but I didn’t know all those interesting anecdotes!