PROBUS members of Hawks Nest and District welcomed two new members on a rare rainless day at the Hawks Nest Golf Club on Friday 6 June, before settling in to hear an anecdote-laden life story from guest speaker Rob Murdoch.
Now a resident of the area, Rob’s story began on a dairy farm, and ended with him well on his way up the ladder to becoming a superintendent of the NSW Education Department.
Rob’s father had moved the family from the city to a dairy farm near Moss Vale for health reasons.
He taught himself and his progeny how to dairy-farm the ‘modern way’ – namely feeding and breeding to maximise production.
“I walked to the one-teacher primary school, but had to be home to help milk and other farm jobs,” Rob said.
“I have enormous respect for my father as a dairy farmer, but we could never work together.”
Grand plans to go to Papua New Guinea as part of a university study were stalled by a medical situation that made the tropics an inadvisable scenario, so Rob ended up going to teachers’ college instead.
“Back then it was a two-year course followed by three years on-the-job, which in my opinion is really a rigorous five-year course in all.”
He was appointed to an Aboriginal school on a station near Jervis Bay, and boarded at the naval base, where he interacted daily with military personnel.
In one instance, a pod of whales beached themselves nearby, turning into a teachable moment for himself and his students, as was the time he took the class to see how their milk came “from the local dairy, not the supermarket”.
Rob’s career saw him teach at a number of schools including Petersham, where he witnessed migrants who “wanted to give their all to their new country”.
At La Perouse, one student inadvertently set loose a snake in an assembly hall of 300 students, an incident that led to the grim discovery that the nearby boys toilets block was sitting atop a nest of snakes.
“Much has changed over the years in the education system, such as discipline, how literacy and arithmetic is taught, and who should really be held responsible for different scenarios,” Rob said.
“One thing that has not changed, though, is the fact that all the different stakeholders have their own different views – the teachers, the parents, the department, the students.
“A lot of it was just dealing with attention-seekers.”
By Thomas O’KEEFE
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