Learning no easy task

As a new school year begins, it is timely to reflect on the beginnings of education in this area. Before schools were established under the control of a central board of education parents were thrown on their own resources to arrange instruction for their children.

Clara Richards, when interviewed in her 100th year in 1954, spoke of her own early schooling at Dome Valley. Her father was her first teacher and later, when a neighbour held night classes, their brothers escorted the girls in the family through the bush so they could attend.

Peter Greenhill, an early teacher at Mahurangi Heads, first worked as a tutor to 10 of the McGechie children. An accident had forced him to give up an adventurous life at sea and as a sawyer in the thriving timber trade. For years before a school was built he held classes in any available premises and at night, boys from the ship building yards came to him for instruction. Each morning, he collected pupils in a rowboat and in the afternoon returned them home by the same means. His long teaching career ended in 1886 when school inspectors decided he was too deaf to continue.

On the other side of the river, a school was opened in the 1850s at Cowan’s Bay where an early settlement grew up around the timber trade. A decade earlier, both day and night schools were operating on Kawau Island for the children of mining families living there.

By the 1870s, groups of parents were petitioning the Board of Education to establish schools in all areas. Ideally, schools were placed so that children had no more than three miles to walk to school. Water transport was still needed to bring children up the Mahurangi River to Warkworth School until the late 1940s. Dories were used to connect with launches such as Bert Duke’s Lavona. He was said to be a very good seaman, able to pick up the children in all weathers. He is remembered as one of the old time skippers who knew the river well.

Pictured: The school boat Lavona transporting children of the 1930s up the Mahurangi River to school in Warkworth.

Published February 2011