END OF THE SCHOOL YEAR – SPEECH NIGHT, NO MORE UNIFORM, THROW AWAY THE TEXTBOOKS.
We thought that recordings of the achievements of the little darlings in a play, dancing, singing or at speech night were a recent phenomenon – an advent of the DVD. But this find from 1964 shows otherwise – the speech night recording for MLC families to play for relaxation for the rest of the ’60s and ’70s (until they replaced their turntables with cassette players).
The speech night was held at the Melbourne Town Hall and the recording is of hymns, madrigals, a Christmas oratorio, the school leaving song and concluded with the national anthem. (They sang verse 3 from the BBC Hymn Book.) No speeches or list of prize winners was recorded for posterity.
Once again we see nuggets of social history to be found in these discarded records (pun intended).
Text books
Here is an interesting little book that has been kept somewhere for about 80 years and just recently abandoned.
We say interesting not for the love of algebra but because the standard textbook for Victorian technical schools was written by a country headmaster, J. R. Wilson. He writes:
…The aim of the writer has been not merely to increase the number of textbooks already in use, but to produce a work in which the subject has been developed in accordance with modern educational methods…
As usual we note if you would like to contribute further material for display about the end of the school year, let us know by commenting.
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