(piano music)
00:11 This podcast was recorded on Aboriginal land, the land of the Wurunjeri people of the Kulin Nations. This episode also discusses events that occurred on the lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung people. We pay our respects to their elders past and present.
00:25 (piano music)
Penny: Hello Christina
Christina: Hi Penny.
Penny: Welcome back to In Those Days.
Christina: Thank you.
Penny: Where we're gonna talk about yesterday's news today.
Christina: Excellent.
Penny: One thing that I wanted to talk to you about is something that I do on Trove sometimes, in my
Christina: Is this a sharing thing? Or is this something you might regret sharing?
Penny: No, no, this is just another way that I enjoy Trove. Sometimes when I hear about an event or something that happened in the past, I look it up on Trove. The results that you get, you can sort them by date.
Christina: Okay.
Penny: And so I start with the earliest and then I just read through the incident. And it kind of unfolds like it's happening. Like so you can read through from the start, what people knew day 1 and then what people knew day 2. And I find that's very interesting. And I've done it with things like air races. So like when they've had a big plane race from America to Australia or something like that. And that's quite fun.
Christina: That's pretty cool.
Penny: So you'll be going home and having a crack at that, will you?
Christina: Look, probably not but I support your choice.
01:35 (piano music)
Penny: Hello. Today's guest is Anna Grace, who is a teacher and we've got her today to talk about a special topic that's sort of related to teaching. Hello Anna Grace.
Anna Grace: Hi Penny and Christina.
Christina: Hello.
Penny: So, my first question is, how long have you been teaching and did you always want to be a teacher?
Anna Grace: Yes, I always wanted to be a teacher. But I can't exactly remember how long I've been teaching. I think I was in my late-20s when I started. But it took me awhile to get there cos I couldn't go straight into teaching out of high school because turns out, you know how they tell you in high school 'do maths to keep your options open'.
Penny: yeah.
Anna Grace: I was like 'pfff. I don't need to do maths'. And turns out I needed to do maths to keep my options open. So I had to finish the world's longest Arts degree that I just crawled through hating every minute of it, knowing that I actually just wanted to be teaching. I feel like I'm the opposite of people who fell into teaching after all of their other things collapsed or didn't work out. I was desperate to be a teacher, even though I actually had options to do other seemingly more exciting things. But I just, it was like a vocation, like I didn't have a choice.
Penny: That is fantastic. Christina is also a teacher. And so I'm the only non-teacher in the room.
Christina: Yeah, how does that feel Penny?
Penny: Well
Christina: Third-wheel?
Penny: I feel, pretty much like I often feel about this, which is disappointing. Cos both my parents are teachers. So I'm of teachers.
Christina: You've ignored your genetic calling.
Penny: That's right. And you are of teachers as well.
Christina: I am of two teachers too. I was genetically blessed slash cursed.
Penny: And so did you feel it as a calling? Or was it, more like
Christina: No, I ran rapidly in the opposite direction from the calling. Look I guess a bit how Anna Grace said, I guess I'm the opposite, at the end of an Arts/Science degree, with options looking a little bit limited in terms of, I'd majored in pretty weird stuff in both degrees, and suddenly a one-year dip-ed seemed like a great plan.
Penny: And now you're both in primary schools. You didn't start of in primary schools?
Christina: No, I'm not primary trained. It's scary for me and the kids. So, I'm secondary trained so I'm in a P to 12 school but at the moment doing most of my work in primary-land.
Anna Grace: I'm terrified of teenagers. As soon as they're taller than me, which is about grade 5, I'm out.
Christina: What grade do you teach at the moment?
Anna Grace: At the moment I have grade 2/3.
Penny: See I also am scared of teenagers. But I'm not more scared of them now than I was when I was one. I've always been scared of them.
Christina: See I'm scared of them when they're small. Much safer with teenagers. At least they'll tell you what they mean.
Penny: They certainly will. Anna Grace, how much do you use Trove?
Anna Grace: Professionally, or?
Penny: In any part of life.
Anna Grace: Well, a lot. Constantly. Well, I used it obviously constantly in my degree because it existed when I was studying arts and my major was in history. And then I did a lot of cinema studies, classics and stuff like that, so I was using Trove a lot. I use it a lot at work for primary sources cos it's fantastic.
Penny: Yes.
Anna Grace: Teach the kids how to use it. And how to understand what's a good primary source and
Penny: Getting the kiddies in. This is what we need.
Anna Grace: Yeah, it's great. They think it's fantastic because it's, I'll let them do it somewhat unsupervised. See they can get in a lot less trouble. And I also just use it, I've used it a lot for family history stuff. My mum's a historian so she's interested in family history, always looking stuff up. But I'm also just a nerd who, when I hear something on the news I'm like, 'Oh. Okay what's that?' Or if just something takes my interest in terms of, someone will say, 'Oh, did you hear, have you heard about the Easey Street murders?' or something and I'm like, 'Okay, now I've gotta look it up.' That was probably a really grim example but sometimes it can be not creepy things. But I do just like investigating stuff and finding out things and you can often get stuff on Trove that's so unfiltered.
Penny: Yes. It's not gone through a historian already.
Anna Grace: No, and the way that they used to write sometimes in old newspapers, they didn't beat around the bush so you can get some pretty amazing stuff.
Christina: No niceties.
Penny: I completely agree. And the topic that we're gonna be talking about today is something that you and I talked about at book club and I realised that you had this interest in it. And it's the Faraday kidnappings, which is a famous event in Australian history. Now I grew up in the Castlemaine district. Faraday is a little town just outside of Castlemaine and I grew up in a town on the other side of it. My knowledge of this was every time we went through Faraday my parents in the car would just say something to each other. So I kind of knew that a kidnapping had happened there. But they never gave me any details and I actually always assumed it was a long time ago. Like I thought it the bushranger days, right. It was actually in the early 1970s. So my parents can remember it happening. And so the thing about this topic is, a lot of the people involved are still alive and have moved on with their lives and done other things but it's still a very traumatic thing that happened and everyone involved was very young. So that's something that I kind of want to be aware of when we're talking about that this. Often we're talking about things that happened a very long time ago and everyone's dead. So it's a bit different this week. And Christina, had you heard about this?
Christina: I had. I wasn't super familiar with it but I definitely had an awareness and I went off and did a little bit of reading before today. Which is unusual for me. I'm usually quite disorganised.
Anna Grace: Where do you think your awareness came from? Most people in our age group haven't heard of it, I've found. Unless they were maybe from a rural area.
Christina: I think it had been mentioned at home when I was a kid.
Penny: Maybe being of teachers.
Christina: Being of teachers. From teachers' loins. I do think it was discussed and I think like you we definitely went through that area at some point on a road trip and Dad mentioned something in the car. I may not have paid a lot of attention cos Dad also liked to point out geological features as well.
Anna Grace: The You Yangs? Always getting the You Yangs pointed out.
Penny: The anti-clinal folds.
Penny: Yeah, and how did it cross your radar?
Anna Grace: I feel like maybe it was hidden from me. Because I am of a teacher but I'm the nervous type and also the obsessive type. So I feel like perhaps there was a conspiracy around me to protect me from hearing about it. And so the first time I heard about it was exactly where you want to hear about it, which is at a meeting of school parents where we're discussing where we're taking their Grade 1 and 2 children on an overnight camp, where they're going to sleep in tents in the middle of Gippsland. And someone says, 'How come your school has access to this campground?' So my Deputy Principal wasted no time in just letting the parents know that, well, these rural schools have closed down in the '70s and in '80s and some of them were sort of gifted back to under-privileged city schools. So they had a withdrawal place they could take the kids. And my school at the time had a lot of migrant and refugee families and kids who had never been to rural Australia. So they gifted the school, or possibly the school paid or they rented, or whatever this school site in Gippsland that had been a tiny single-room school house. And he said, 'And of course, over time they've closed these schools down because of all the kidnappings.' And there was just dead silence in the room and the teachers were all looking at each other like, did you know this? And everyone's like 'no'. And he's like, 'Well, obviously you know there were some prominent kidnappings as you're probably aware of and it was, you know, I don't think that was the only reason that rural schools closed down. But they were quite unsafe because you were vulnerable and very, very isolated.' And again, the parent's faces. That remains the place where I take my class on an overnight camp where we sleep in tents. Wind, hail or shine. And it's usually hail.
Christina: Sounds great.
Anna Grace: Yeah, it's horrific. I'm not a natural camper. But it definitely. Knowing that when I take the kids to that camp, when you're there in the tents in the dark and it's this little falling-down single-room schoolhouse that basically hasn't been touched since the '70s or '80s. Basics have been done to maintain it, but it's still pretty rough and it's so quiet. You're in the middle of nowhere and this is just in the middle of Gippsland. It's not even a town, because there's nothing there. You do get this incredible sense of what it must have been like to work in those schools, already isolated and quite challenging. And then add in this extra level of fear that I suppose must have emerged in the '70s and I just think 'Oh my gosh'.
Penny: Because this is the thing. There were so many of these single room, single teacher schools all around Victoria and I assume all around Australia as well, which now seems very odd. This Faraday kidnapping story is so famous there's been films and books.
Anna Grace: And significantly, an episode of Blue Heelers. I realised, when I heard the story I was like, 'Hang on, that was an episode of Blue Heelers.' Where the young female constable Dash gets kidnapped with the school bus. I think her brother's the teacher or something.
Penny: All these representations. And I actually listened to an American podcast recently, two teachers talking about the Faraday school kidnappings.
Anna Grace: They had they Chowchilla kidnappings, which was very similar.
Penny: But they could not get their head around the fact that we had these single room schools.
Christina: It is bizarre.
Penny: With the teacher expected to teach all these grades. So you could do, I reckon the Faraday kidnappings and what happened afterwards could be a whole podcast series. We will be looking at it a little bit superficially and through a particular lens today. I really want to get Christina and Anna Grace's perspectives as teachers. But then also it's gonna be a Trove perspective so we're gonna look at the articles from the time. Usually in Trove, after the 1950s not so good because that's when the digitisation generally goes up to except this was such a national story that it was in the Canberra Times. Canberra Times is not the world's most sensationalist newspaper. So at the time every paper would have been covering this story and some of them would have been really salacious and whatever. But even through the fairly moderate lens of the Canberra Times this is a very wild story so. And I'm just gonna say at the start, no-one dies.
Anna Grace: I feel like in a way that has probably led to it becoming more of a joke, or a eye-roll or a giggle than when you think about the reality of it.
Penny: Exactly. Because it was certainly not a foregone conclusion. It was a very dangerous situation.
Anna Grace: Just an absolute loose cannon.
12:30 Penny: Okay, so this is from the Canberra Times, which was printed on the Saturday morning on the seventh of October 1972. And it's the first article about the incident:
“$1m demand for teacher, six pupils
“MELBOURNE, Friday. — Six young school girls and their 20-year-old teacher were kidnapped from their school near Castlemaine this afternoon.”
Now that's the first thing that I think is amazing. That this teacher was 20 years old and by herself in the classroom. So you were in your late 20s when you became a teacher?
Anna Grace: Look, it's a bit fuzzy to be honest but when I was 20 I did have a huge amount of responsibility. Probably more than I do now.
Penny: What role did you have?
Anna Grace: Well, I. As I was sluggishly making my way miserably through my Arts degree I worked out I wanted to be a teacher. Sort of ended up accidentally forming this non-profit organisation, which still exists. It was the folly of extreme youth and just having no, not really much fear, because you're young. So it's called the SAIL program and it is a literacy and community support program for the Sudanese community in Melbourne, which at the time was a very, very newly emerging community. I was 19 and a friend and I formed that together and it snowballed really quickly because the community was growing really, really quickly. And then I also went and worked overseas in Southern Africa. So I remember turning 21 when I was working in Southern Africa and it was the AIDs pandemic was still going. There was, they hadn't, communities didn't have access to any of the drugs that treat it yet. So I was working in the middle of that situation. There's no way I could do either of those things now. I'm too tired, for a start. I think I definitely relate to that element of the story of, it's easier in some ways to go through that stuff when you're 20 and you haven't really got as much of a sense of how dangerous the world can be or. Or, I don't know what it is your brain just protects you, right? Like isn't that when people go and jump out of planes and do all kinds of exciting adventures. But what it definitely taught me is I don't like that much responsibility. Feeling completely responsible for people's children. It's much harder now that you have an understanding of, like you're older and it's like 'oh my god that's the most important thing in someone's life.' Whereas when you're 20 you're like, 'Ah, get in the car kids.' You know, you just don't overthink it.
Penny: I'm helping.
Anna Grace: So I had more responsibility then I do now, by choice. Because I never wanted to be in charge of anything ever again. Ever.
Penny: And what about you Christina? You'd be more like me, I was just mucking around in Melbourne.
Christina: I was mucking around. A lot of hovering around theatres.
Anna Grace: That's what I wish I'd been doing.
Penny: You might have been a bit older, how old were you when you directed the Law Review?
Christina: Look, too young to be sensible.
Anna Grace: Oh my god, the Law Review. We all wanted to be in that.
Christina: I was very driven by the cash payment for the director. But heavily involved with a lot of theatre stuff. Loosely doing academic stuff in the background as my two degrees. And I ended up teaching, I think I started about 24, 25. At a fairly lawless school. You know, you could literally do whatever. I went into the principal one day and said, oh you know, 'My group of year 9s that's really hard to engage, I thought maybe on a Wednesday afternoon I could take them Chadstone in the minibus.' And he's like 'yeah, just do it each week.' So that
Anna Grace: Oh my gosh. Now it would be like, 'Yeah are the 27 forms. Have you done your risk assessment? Where's your high-vis?'
Christina: Yeah, we never signed anything. I just used to dismiss them from Chadstone. What the hell.
Anna Grace: It's incredible thinking about those single-room schoolhouses. They wouldn't have had nearly as much bureaucracy to wade through.
Penny: Well that is interesting.
Christina: Now I'm the person who checks over all the forms to make sure that everything is ticked off.
Anna Grace: I'm the one who is like, 'Have you done it? Well do you want to be the one standing at the inquest? Do you? Do you? Do it!'
Christina: 'Do you want to be in the courtroom? Because I don't want to be. It'll be my head on the chopping block if you haven't done it.' What a fun person I am.
Penny: Okay, so the article goes on:
“The kidnapper left a ransom note demanding $1 million in cash.”
So that's in 1972 that’s a shitload of money.
Christina: It's still a decent sum today. I'd be happy
Penny: I'd be happy with a million. I mean let's not get ideas. And it is much harder to kidnap people these days everyone, okays. But it's over $12 million now, so I did the conversion. Anyway:
“The Victorian Premier, Mr Hamer, announced tonight he would go to Castlemaine to direct the police hunt.
The girls, aged 5 to 11, and their teacher, Miss Mary Gibbs, of Bendigo,"
She is our hero. She is a legend.
"were taken from Faraday School, on the Calder Highway, 70 miles north-west of Melbourne.
It is thought they were kidnapped during their music lesson about 2.30pm.”
Christina: You can't hear anything over recorders.
Anna Grace: Apparently they were play musical chairs. Is that true?
Penny: Yeah, well I believe so and I think it's a real shame that it had to happen during the bludge lesson.
Anna Grace: That is unfair.
Penny: Yeah, should have been during spelling or maths.
Anna Grace: No, anyone who's ever tried to wrangle a group of children in a music lesson, it's anything but a bludge.
Penny: But it was obviously a tiny school so Mary Gibbs was teaching them everything. She was the music teacher, she was the sport teacher, maths, science, English, everything. Do you, Anna Grace, have to teach specialist at all these days?
Anna Grace: Yeah, over the years depending on which specialists the school might have employed, I think I've taught a bit of everything. So for the most part my school hasn't had a P.E. teacher, so I taught most of the P.E. And stop laughing.
Penny: Does that come naturally to you? I don't know.
Anna Grace: It didn't but like with not being good at maths. It turns out I really don't like to be defeated so I was on the Fs netball team. No, I think I was on the Gs actually. Like I was so bad at all ball sports and I got away with teaching P.E. in my first year we just did a lot of dancing. But then I found this one book on how to teach P.E. and I know that only a nerd, like a humanities person would teach P.E. from a book but it had everything in it. It was like, 'this is how you kick. You step with this foot. You raise your. You put your knee here.' Whatever. And I just used that book for about ten years to teach P.E. until we finally got a P.E. teacher this year. I actually loved it. I got quite good at teaching P.E. just through sheer determination. Every now and then one of the boys was really good at kicking would be like, 'You getting that from that book again.' And I was like, 'Shut-up.' And one time the book went missing and kids were searching the whole school. 'Find my P.E. book!' So yes, I think I've taught every specialist on the way. Especially when, I've done some emergency teaching and they'll just put you in Italian. And I don't speak Italian, it's alright, it's fine just figure it out. What about you, if you've taught...I think primary school teaching is Jack of all trades. You have to have a bit of everything and you pull in things constantly from your grab-bag of tricks but I feel like high school you can specialise a little bit more. But then you've had to diversify your year level.
Christina: Yeah so, teaching in secondary my actual methods are English and Biology.
Anna Grace: Oh wow, you're very employable.
Christina: So employable. However, if you are a biology teaching that also means that you teach general science. Not a fan, do not enjoy. Don't ask me how to balance a chemical equation. I did an entire science degree without coming out that as part of my toolkit.
Anna Grace: What about all those physics things that I didn't understand like waves and stuff?
Christina: I can teach that but I have to re-learn it every time.
Anna Grace: Yeah, yeah, like me with the kicking. Every time.
Christina: But then I discovered because at one point I had multiple year 12 and year 11 English classes, my marking load was so extreme I started to have a bit of a think and I suggested that I could also take some drama classes, which I rapidly got.
Anna Grace: Nice.
Christina: And that was the best form of assessment ever. Cos kids would present their performance. You go, 'Well done guys. 8 out of 10.' Finished.
Penny: You don't have to do it at home.
Christina: You don't have a parent who can bring that in as a reference. Like you weren't there, you didn't see the performance.
Anna Grace: And did everyone get 8?
Christina: Pretty much. Good job guys. But I have had to teach maths. I was told it would be for 2 weeks it was for 3 and a half terms.
Penny: That's a year.
Christina: That was year 10 maths.
Anna Grace: Year 10 maths is tricky as well.
Penny: I don't want to put more pressure on you, but that is an important year of maths.
Christina: Tough time.
Penny: So, I'll continue with the article:
“The children are Christine Ellery, 10, of Calder Highway, Faraday; Lynda Alison Conn, 9 and her sister Helen Myra, 6. of Sutton Grange Road, Faraday; Robyn Elizabeth Howarth, 11, and her sisters Jillian Michelle, 8, and Denise Kaye, 5.”
Anna Grace: It's nice that we've identified the victims.
Penny: Yes.
Anna Grace: Very specifically. And I'm assuming
Christina: Feel free to visit their house.
Anna Grace: At some point there'll be a photo.
Penny: Like we say, everyone's gonna be safe at the end and they do have a lovely photo all together.
Anna Grace: But that's a big change, isn't it in the way that we talk about children who have been involved in crime. I suppose it was public interest at the time to know who everybody was.
Penny: Yeah, I don't know why they had to say where they lived. I guess if kids are missing maybe knowing their names is relevant. Because at this point, they are all missing so maybe that's important. I think there's been a very big change.
Christina: I do think it's interesting now, because I've been on the other side where we've had, we've reported children missing, several times at our school. And it's amazing to watch how rapidly things start to happen. We've come an awfully long way.
Anna Grace: Well there seems to be so many stops along the way with these kidnapping stories where of course there's no phone, there's no radio there's no anything and that's just mind-blowing like when you saying before, this couldn't happen now, like it just couldn't.
Penny: "Four other pupils who attended the school, two boys and two girls, were away with influenza."
That’s two fifths of the class of ten away. Which seems about right.
Christina: Yep.
Penny: “The ransom note, which was left on a desk in the classroom, demanded that $500,000 in 520 notes be placed in three suitcases and the other half million in $10 notes be put in six suitcases.”
And at this point it does feel a little bit like teacher was just trying to make maths more fun.
Christina: It does sound like a maths problem. How many ten-dollar notes will be in each of the six briefcases?
Penny: "The note added, "Delivery will be arranged. Will contact Lindsay Thompson [the Victorian Minister for Education] at police head-quarters at 7.25pm. Will not waste time making threats, but any attempt to apprehend will result in annihilation of hostages"."
Yeah, it was serious. They were really threatening the people who they'd kidnapped.
"Mr Thompson arrived at Russell Street Police Headquarters about 7pm. The Premier also was called in.
They, with the Deputy Commissioner, Mr A. L. Carmichael and Assistant Commissioner, Operations, Mr S. I. Miller, discussed the terms of the ransom note. But the kidnapper did not call.
The question of raising the $1-million ransom was discussed.
Late tonight Mr Thompson and police officers were still waiting for any word from the kidnapper."
It's kind of a little bit weird, they're kind of just waiting. They're prepared almost to pay the ransom, but these guys never got, didn't get in touch.
Anna Grace: Yeah, I can't understand that.
Penny: And then what happened was:
"First news of the kidnapping came in a telephone call to a Melbourne newspaper at about 4.40.
The caller, a man, spoke to a Sun-News Pictorial police rounds-man, Wayne Grant, and said, "I'll say this only once. I have kidnapped all pupils and the teacher from the Faraday State School. The ransom is $1 million. The details are in a note in one of the front desks".
Mr Grant said the man was Australian and sounded about 20. He spoke in a high-pitched voice and did not sound nervous."
So sorry, I should do that again, "I'll only say this once" [speaking in high-pitched voice.]
Anna Grace: That's the weirdest description. I read that description too and was just like, what?
Penny: "When told of the call Castlemaine Police said they had been notified only 10 minutes earlier that the children and Miss Gibbs were missing.
The three mothers of the children had arrived at the school at 3.30 to pick their children up. They became alarmed when the children had not come out at 3.50pm.”
Which to me, as a parent now, is quite a long time. Like they kick 'em out pretty fast now at 3:30. They are out the door.
Christina: Absolutely.
Anna Grace: I feel so, so sorry for those parents. I can't imagine. I'm not a parent but I just can't imagine what they must have gone through that night.
Penny: It would have been incrediably horrible. Okay:
"Mrs Thelma Conn said she and Mrs Howarth and Mrs Ellery went into the school.
"We thought the children and Miss Gibbs were probably out walking but after we had searched around nearby roads we got worried and phoned our husbands", she said.”"
Once again that probably wouldn't happen these days, if I got to the school and the kids weren't there I probably wouldn't be like, 'Oh they must be out walking'.
Anna Grace: No, they might have been at Chadstone.
Christina: Yeah, with their teacher that didn't fill out any paperwork.
Penny: "Tonight friends were comforting the distressed parents."
And I think that's also a really interesting thing. At this time, the support that people got afterwards would have just only been from the community and their friends.
Anna Grace: Yeah.
Christina: If we have a significant event, you get significant support, well they say
Anna Grace: You get one visit
Christina: You get some support sent out in terms of psyches and teams that can debrief with staff and students. Probably not in this instance.
Penny: ""It's almost impossible to believe what's happened", Mr Jock Conn, 37, said outside the school. "All we can do I suppose is wait and hope".
Mr Rex Howarth, 40. said, "Only an animal would do this to six innocent little girls".
He and other parents said the only comfort they had was the knowledge that Miss Gibbs was with the children.
"She is a very conscientious and sensible woman", Mr Howarth said. "She would only do what she thought best for the children".
Miss Gibbs has been at the school since Easter."
Christina: That's a lot of faith to put in a 20-year-old.
Penny: It is but she obviously had made a very good impression in just the 6 months that she'd been there.
"Late tonight the three fathers waited anxiously outside the school for news from the kidnapper.
The police search and rescue squad arrived in Castlemaine late tonight to join police in the hunt.
Detectives called in from Ballarat and Bendigo joined more than 20 other police in a search of empty buildings and houses around the Castlemaine and Faraday areas.
In Melbourne Mr Miller said he could not say what had been decided at the conference earlier tonight.
"Every move is critical with the lives of seven people at stake", Mr Miller said. "At this stage it's a matter of sitting and waiting"."
I think what that's referring to is that they hadn't decided what to do about the ransom and trying to pay the guys.
"The school, an old granite-rock building, is situated about 30yd off the Calder Highway.
Everything inside the school appeared normal.
Miss Gibbs' Torana sedan was still parked outside the school. Her coat was lying on the back seat."
Which I find a really evocative image.
Anna Grace: Cos it's not necessarily gonna be warm out in the Australian bush.
Penny: No, well it's in October so it'd still be cold at night. Okay so at this point, that's the end of the article and at this point the kids and the teacher are missing, the kidnappers are at large.
Anna Grace: And they've actually managed to get this article printed and out on time.
Penny: Yeah, this is Saturday morning, so it happened Friday afternoon.
Anna Grace: Yeah right.
28:43 Penny: They've moved it around. The next one is from Monday the 9th of October 1972:
"MELBOURNE, Sunday. - More than 400 police, most of them armed, were still searching tonight for two men who on Friday kidnapped six schoolgirls and their teacher and demanded $1 million for their safe return."
So now we know it was two men. It wasn't one kidnapper.
Christina: Yep.
Penny: "The children, aged between five and 10 years, and their teacher, Miss Mary Gibbs, 19, were forced at gunpoint from their one-room"
Anna Grace: She's 19 now.
Penny: Yeah, I know. Sometimes she's 19, sometimes she's 20. I dunno if she had a birthday coming up. It's confusing.
"From their one room bush school at Faraday, 70 miles north of Melbourne, and locked in the back of a former baker's van.
After 15 hours, in which time they had been released briefly for exercise, Miss Gibbs kicked a panel out of the back of the van at dawn and escaped with the children through bush country where they had been left about 12 miles north of Lancefield. There was no sign of the kidnappers.”
She kicked her way out of the van.
Christina: Impressive.
Anna Grace: That's definitely the defining anecdote when you and I were talking about this at book club I was like, do you know the story? She kicked out the back of the van with the platform heeled boots on, or whatever. Because that was just such an iconic image.
Penny: She was very short apparently.
Anna Grace: Yeah, 5 foot.
Penny: So she needed the boots just to give herself that little.
Anna Grace: And her kids would be getting taller than her. Like I said, that makes you very uneasy.
Christina: Whatever you need.
Penny: So guys, what are wearing when you're teaching?
Anna Grace: I'm always wearing my kicks. I have about 20 different pairs of sneakers. I like to be practical and that way if they get PVA glue on them I can just wipe it off. I'm very mistrusting of primary school teachers who wear fancy high-heeled open toed little pumps and stuff. I'm like, you are not in a position to get down on the floor and play a maths game.
Penny: Let alone kick down a van door.
Anna Grace: But most teachers do wear quite fancy clothes and shoes. I feel like I'm usually in the minority and I always just think, 'You're not serious about your job. How can you step among the bodies of heads-down thumbs-up with those shoes on.'
Penny: What about you Christina, because you're in a slightly different position because you are an Assistant Principal.
Christina: I'm an Assistant Principal. I do wear flat shoes 99% of the time. If I've got heels on, someone really important's coming.
Anna Grace: Yes definitely, when I see our AP wearing a tie, I'm like 'Oh, it's that day.'
Christina: So our principal's a bit old-school he will give us like, 'And I expect everyone to be suited and booted.'
Anna Grace: Amazing.
Christina: Which I always find quite amusing but, you know, he himself will be definitely suited and booted so I guess the rest of us fall into line.
Penny: Leading by example.
Anna Grace: It's definitely different when you're in a leadership position.
Christina: But I will always have sensible shoes under my desk because you never know when you get a small person going on tour and you have to follow at high speed.
Anna Grace: I also feel like the kids look at your feet pretty much all day. Like I like to wear colourful and interesting and different kinds of sneakers because they spend a lot of time looking at them and it's pretty boring. I remember quite vividly my teachers feet as a child, all the different teachers. So sometimes a kid will say to me, 'You have a lot of sneakers.'
Penny: "Miss Gibbs led the children until they came on a party of rabbit-shooters who took them to the police station at Lancefield.
Miss Gibbs told police the men had taken her driver’s licence and about $9.”
Christina: Wow.
Penny: Which is a lot less than the million they were hoping for.
Anna Grace: I love that detail about the party of rabbiters. Like there's just something very C. J. Dennisey about you've come upon the rabbitohs.
Penny: And my dad could have been, could have been a part of that at that time of his life probably.
"Officially police have said they do not know why the kidnappers had left their hostages or why they did not attempt to collect the ransom which the Victorian Government had made available."
Christina: Wow.
Penny: I feel like they just really
Christina: Sounds like the government was disappointed. They wanted to hand it over.
Anna Grace: The minister for Education was on site, hiding under a blanket in the car.
Penny: No I think he had the money ready to give it to them.
Anna Grace: The cop was under the blanket.
Penny: Was under the blanket. But he was very personally brave.
Anna Grace: Yeah, and involved. I can't imagine
Penny: Who's the Minister for Education now?
Anna Grace: Nat Hutchins.
Penny: Yeah, I don't know. I can't say whether
Anna Grace: I just would feel pretty bad for her if, if that would still be expected. She's also Minister for Women I think.
Penny: That's a big job.
Anna Grace: Yeah, huge.
Penny: Doing both.
Christina: A bit of a grab bag of portfolios.
Penny: "But police sources said today they thought the men had panicked when they realised that an Army exercise was going on in the area."
Which I think was a completely different thing and maybe they just heard.
Anna Grace: They heard gunshots and stuff. Yeah cos it didn't make any sense why they wouldn't front up to get the stuff.
Penny: I think they might have also later claimed that it wasn't them who made the call.
Anna Grace: They're definitely erratic and confused in their thinking, right? I don't know if you get a super sane ransomer.
Penny: Well you do sometimes in the sense that sometimes people do these plots, like I've mainly from other podcasts, I've heard stories where they very elaborately designed things whereas this seems to be like, they got the van they got the kids and the teacher and they didn't quite
Christina: Then the panicked and didn't know what to do.
Penny: They hadn't thought through the next bit.
"Police said they were looking for two young men in a white 1960 or 1961 FB or EK Holden sedan with a blue or possibly maroon flash on the tail.
Police said"
I like this bit
"Police said the men had apologised to Miss Gibbs for the smell of the car, and had said they had been living in it."
Why apologise for the smell of the car? That's not the main issue.
Christina: Sorry for taking your freedom and personal liberty. Oh and the car stinks a bit too.
Penny: It reminds me, you know when someone gets in your car and you're like 'Sorry about'
Anna Grace: 'Sorry about that.'
Penny: Anyway:
"Police have issued 'iden-tikit" pictures of the two men and a photostat copy of the ransom note which had threatened "annihilation" of the victims unless the money was paid.
The pictures were compiled after Miss Gibbs had spent hours at Russell Street police headquarters in Melbourne sifting through photographs of criminals. Police will not say if they know the identities of the men.
Senior Constable A. Anderson, officer in charge of the Lancefield police station, who found the van, said, "If the girls had not got out of the van and the kidnappers left them, they would not have been found for weeks.
"I think they would have died. In my opinion the kidnappers got the wind up and abandoned them".
The Victorian Minister for Education, Mr Thompson, who had gone to Woodend, about halfway between Melbourne and Faraday, with three suitcases containing $1 million in notes, said later in Lanceficld, "I will recommend Miss Gibbs for an award. The release of the children is very largely due to the presence of mind of the teacher. She showed extraordinary courage"."
Which I think basically everyone in the world agrees with.
Christina: Absolutely.
Penny: "At 4am on Saturday police at Russell Street had received a call from a man asking for the ransom money to be left on the steps of the Post Office at Woodend. Ten minutes before the money was due to be left there, another call had been received from the same man, who said his earlier call was a hoax. He had said that as children were involved he did not want anything to do with it.”"
I don't understand whether it was.
Christina: It's very odd.
Penny: And this is the thing, I'm not an expert on the subject. I have read these Trove articles and basically nothing else. There's gonna be quite a few complexities and things that I'm sure someone who's an expert on the Faraday kidnappings knows.
Anna Grace: Well they went to prison for it. So they were obviously able to prove
Penny: Well they definitely left a note. They definitely took the kids and left a note in the school saying that they wanted a ransom. Whether they made this phone call or not, I don't in a way care. You've done the wrong thing.
37:15 On the same page of the paper is this article about the reactions of the kids.
"Robyn Howarth, 10, one of the kidnapped schoolchildren, said today, "There may have been a tear or two shed by some of the girls, but if they did, they kept it to themselves"."
Christina: Good, tough upper lips.
Penny: They were stoic. Nobody cried.
Christina: Nobody saw a counsellor.
Anna Grace: Nope. Noone was debriefed.
Christina: No. Noone was encouraged to write some notes in their journal about that.
Anna Grace: Or a poem, or draw a picture about their feelings. I do like the story that Mary Gibbs took the tape recorder from her classroom because they'd been in a music class. And she thought, we're gonna have to do something if they're kidnapping us. So they took the tape recorder and they sang to pass the time. And I do just like that resourcefulness. Like I've definitely been in situations as a teacher we're you're just thinking 'what are we going to do to stop X happening?' To stop this whole thing falling apart. And you have these tricks in your back pocket. Like games you can play with no equipment and definitely singing. Lots of singing that we have to do on school camp because there's lots of long drives to these very remote locations where help would be far away. But I do think that's pretty amazing. I don't know how she convinced them or whether they really noticed.
Penny: In the American podcast that I listened to about it, which is my only other source of information they were saying that she tried to make it as much like a lesson as possible.
Anna Grace: She treated it like a game.
Christina: Like a role-play.
Anna Grace: Yeah, I don't think I'd be able to do that. I know that I've been told to do that. You know like when you do a fire-drill or something pretend it's a game. But I don't. Like it's always really hard doing shelter-in-place drills because you, especially with really young children. So that one I've managed to come up with a really good way. I just say in some rural schools you get a kangaroo in the yard. So we call it 'kangaroo in the yard' practise and so far no-one's questioned me. But there was one kid who was about to move to the country and then she started crying cos she's like, 'Is the kangaroo gonna come in the yard?'
Penny: This is the problem sometimes you try and help kids with anxieties and then accidentally
Christina: Trigger them off.
Anna Grace: Most of the time, I'm honest but shelter-in-place
Penny: It's very, I think that's very difficult because we did not do those. And I only realised with my kids when they told me once
Anna Grace: Most parents have no idea.
Penny: They said they had a fire drill. And I said, 'Oh, so you all went outside and assembled on the oval.' And she said, 'Oh no, no we all stayed in the classroom.' And I was like, oh that's not a
Anna Grace: Most parents have no idea.
Christina: Has your school gone into a real lockdown?
Anna Grace: Not my school but I've been at other schools that have, yes, certainly.
Penny: What about your school?
Christina: Yeah. About a monthly event.
Anna Grace: Unpredictable behaviour is the big reason, like, could be a parent, could be a student, could just be someone in the local area. We've had a few of those. The biggest reason usually is that a child can't be located in the school grounds and the easiest way to find them is to pull everyone else in for a lockdown. So that you know exactly where they are and then they can send the therapy dog, and whoever's in charge of that out to coax the kid back in from usually whatever tree log or whatever they've curled up in. So definitely seen that one.
Penny: The school that my kids go to, when there was an incident once the teachers must have done an amazing job because my kids did not even really realise that anything had happened. At the end of that week, I said to them, 'Oh, so what was school like this week? What was, you know, what happened?' And they went 'Oh my god, it was such a big week! Oh it was drama!' I said, 'Oh what was it?' They go, 'There was a fox in the school!' Yeah, and all they talked about was the fox in the school.
Anna Grace: Was it a real fox?
Penny: It was a real fox, but that was not the real incident that occurred. Actually, something else happened. The teachers must have done a really good job.
Anna Grace: There was actually, remembering now this one time where it was the last day of term and there was a lockdown called before we really knew, before protocols had been sorted out. Like this was probably going back a long way and I'm at a very upper-middle class school area. And it was as parents were picking kids up so they got pulled into the classrooms but no-one was really sure what was going on. And I just have this vivid memory of one parent after another going, 'Is it okay if we just take him. Because we're just going to Noosa.' And one mum was like, 'We're going to the Cook Islands. Can I just take her?' And I was like, 'I mean sure, sure, take her. That's fine. Could be anything happening out there.' Definitely things have tightened up since then but I just have this vivid memory. Yeah, yeah, and I remember putting Rug Rats on. I was like, 'I suppose we'll just put Rug Rats on' and someone else got out their guitar. And there's just all these annoyed parents who want to get to Tullamarine to catch their plane.
Penny: Oh that is so funny.
Anna Grace: We are very lucky in Australia, and I constantly think about how lucky we are and super grateful for our gun control laws that we just don't live on top of everything else you're managing as a teacher.
Penny: So the article continues:
"The kidnappers had told them they would come to harm if they tried to escape.
"We were terrified", said Robyn, who will be 11 on Friday. "Horrible thoughts kept flashing through my mind. I just did not know what they would do to us. I kept wondering if I would ever see my Mummy and Daddy again"."
And I read that bit just so that we keep in mind that they were genuinely, yes it turns out okay in the end, they did that know that and they were terrified.
Christina: Very scary.
Anna Grace: No, I was just fully tearing up every time I read about this without a doubt. It's just super upsetting.
Penny: "Robyn said that throughout their hour-long drive to the hiding spot in thick forest about 12 miles north of Lancefield, the kidnappers kept "laughing and talking about the money they were going to get"."
9 dollars.
Anna Grace: That they forgot to go and pick up.
Penny: That's funny. It's good that they didn't get that.
"Mr Rex Howarth, father of the three Howarth girls, said he hoped the Faraday school would be closed.
"I don't think the school will open on Monday", he said. "I think they will be sent to another school where there are more teachers. I don't want this sort of thing to happen again".
Which he wasn't deliberately doing but does feel like foreshadowing to me.
Anna Grace: It really does.
Penny: "Police would not allow press interviews with Miss Gibbs because "she will be a witness in a very serious case".
Mrs Patricia Hayward, of Melbourne, one of the rabbit-hunting party,"
Anna Grace: Wait, wait, what? There was a female rabbitoh?
Penny: Yeah.
Anna Grace: I love it!
Penny: Pat Hayward, 'of Melbourne'. So weird she's come down to Lancefield for a bit of shooting. Okay.
"said that as they drove to Lancefield, Miss Gibbs had told them:"
So she's like a source. Miss Gibbs is not allowed to tell us this herself but we can get it through Pat.
""They came into the schoolroom carrying a sawn-off shotgun. There were two of them. The children thought it was a practical joke and began to laugh.
"Then one of the men said, 'You are all coming with us. You are being kidnapped'."
Sorry, I should have read that like that. That was
Christina: Had a bit of a Big Ears and Noddy vibe.
Penny: "They put us in the back of the red van and drove us straight to the place where they left us for the night".
She had said that about 2am on Saturday the men had said they were going to collect the money.
"They said they would be gone for about three hours and they would be back at dawn", she said. "When they didn't come back by dawn I thought it was now or never and began kicking the door in with the two eldest girls".
Mrs Hayward was in a car with another woman while her husband and another man were shooting rabbits."
Okay. Stand down. She is not shooting the rabbits herself.
Anna Grace: But she went along.
Christina: She took a thermos.
Penny: I've been left in the car for a few kind of things. My dad was always taking me places and leaving me in the car. Not to pubs or anything. I feel like I now need to defend Dad.
Anna Grace: Did you always have a book with you?
Penny: Yes.
Anna Grace: Yeah, cos nowadays you can just scroll your phone but in our youth, we always had to have a Baby-Sitters Club Super Special.
Penny: There was one time, Dad used to umpire at the footy, and one time I went with him. Just country footy. I stayed in the car and I was in the back of the car and then this man came over to the car and like leaned in the front window and took Dad's smoke from the front seat. I just sat there and he went away. And then when Dad got back he's like, 'Oh, where are my smokes?' and I'm like, 'A man came and took them. I thought he was your friend.' Yeah, anyway, it was a different time. Yeah, but I can remember sitting in the car in the bush when Dad was collecting firewood or fishing or something. I actually quite like fishing as well, so.
Anna Grace: I don't reckon I ever got left in the car because I had an over-pampered inner-city childhood. So my parents had to sit in the car while I went to ballet and gymnastics and interpretive dance class.
Christina: Yeah, my parents sat in the car while I did horse riding and failed to look up at key moments of my outstanding skill display. 'Did you see me do that jump?!' Oh no, you're just drinking your coffee and doing your marking. They stayed in the car so they didn't get muddy.
Penny: "She said that Miss Gibbs had said they heard the shooting and "thought we were the kidnappers"."
So that would have been a really terrifying moment. To be hearing the gunshots and not being sure who it was.
"Miss Gibbs had said they hid until they saw Mrs Hayward and the other woman get out of their car, and then ran from behind trees and told them who they were."
Imagine the relief of seeing the women.
Anna Grace: Yes totally.
Penny: These are the descriptions of the subjects. One is described as being "in his mid 20s, 5ft 7in tall, blue eyes, slightly hawkish nose, pimply face, stocky build with long dark hair. The second is about 30 years, 5ft 9in tall, average to medium build, with brown shoulder-length hair and long red bushy sideburns."
Okay, so they're not hot. That's fine, they don't need to be. Still don't know who these kidnappers are though. So this next article is actually not the Canberra Times. It is the Papua New Guinea Post-Courier.
Christina: Oh, did we go global?
Penny: Yes, well I'm assuming it was also a global story. Probably was reported around the world, not just in Papa New Guinea.
Christina: But don't you think it's funny how Australia always gets really super pumped by us being reported elsewhere? Like in the bushfires it'll suddenly go 'And we've made the news in the United States.'
Penny: As if that's the news.
Christina: Yeah, wow. Anyway, sorry
Penny: Stephen Colbert mentioned us.
Christina: We're on CNN.
48:07 Penny: Okay, Tuesday 10th of October 1972:
"Two men were charged last night with the kidnapping of a schoolteacher and her six pupils from a lonely country schoolhouse last Friday.
The arrest of the two men. Robert Clyde Boland, 32, and Edwin John Eastwood, 21, in dawn police raids on Monday ended one of the most intensive manhunts in Australia in recent years. Boland was charged with kidnapping the seven with intent to demand ransom while Eastwood was charged with abducting them with intent to gain for himself."
I'm not really sure why they were charged with different things. But anyway.
"Both men were described as plasterers."
That's kind of weird, because either are or you aren't.
Anna Grace: It's a nice turn of phrase.
Penny: It's not really just a description.
"The kidnappers demanded a $1 million ransom but it was never collected. Early on Saturday Miss Gibbs escaped.
They were remanded without bail to appear in court again tomorrow."
49:43 So this is great. Everyone's safe the baddies have been caught. Hurrah. But then we get to sort of the aftermath of it, Tuesday 10th of October 1972:
"Schoolteacher collapses
Miss Mary Gibbs, the teacher heroine of the Faraday State School kidnap, collapsed at her home in Bendigo today and has been ordered to rest."
Anna Grace: I did not know this part of the story. My gosh the poor woman.
Penny: "The district inspector of schools, Mr J. Revell, told a meeting of parents in Faraday, "What happened finally caught up with her. It was delayed shock".
Miss Gibbs was to have gone to Melbourne today to assist police in their inquiries, but a police officer said the visit was put off for a day.”"
Christina: That's generous. Have 24 hours to get over it.
Anna Grace: Not surprising really.
Penny: So she obviously got back from the kidnapping and then just immediately was helping the police.
Christina: A lot of adrenaline.
Penny: Yeah.
Anna Grace: Totally.
Penny: She would have had no time to really reflect on it at all.
Anna Grace: And depending on who she lived with. Did she have anyone to talk it over with?
Penny: I think she might have lived with her parents in Bendigo. Not sure.
"The Faraday parents decided today that the future of the school would de pend on Miss Gibbs. If she was prepared to return then the parents of its 10 pupils wanted it to remain open."
Christina: That's nice.
Anna Grace: That's stressful though. That's a big decision.
Penny: It kind of is. In a way, it could be seen as generous; we'll do whatever you want. But then in another way it's pressure cos maybe you're making
Christina: It's gonna be a very inconvenient change elsewhere.
Penny: Although I'll keep going with the article:
"Mr Revell told the parents that as far as he knew Miss Gibbs was prepared to come back and teach at the school, but it would be at least another month before she was ready."
Anna Grace: Thank goodness they're giving her a month.
Penny: The parents decided to close the school until the end of the year and in the meantime send their children to Harcourt State School.
Christina: Good plan.
Penny: Now, when I think of small schools, I think of them as being remote, Faraday's about six ks away from Harcourt. It's really not that far, and people did have cars. The school I went to, the primary school, quite a lot of kids travelling more than 6 ks to get there so I don't
Anna Grace: I think sometimes the reason that there are the smaller schools is if there's nearby schools. Do you know what I mean? In some of the areas that there are still small schools it's because there's another one a little bit further away that might actually split the enrolments. So some people will want to drive to that one and other people really want the kids nearby, want them to be able to walk, all that sort of thing. So that's what I've noticed. Often the reason there's a school with really small enrolments is because the other one's not that far so for whatever reason some people are choosing the super local one and some people have the, potentially have the impression that the one that's a bit further away is a better school, or something like that.
Penny: Right. Or their parents don't want them to go to such a small school cos some kids it's good for and other kids they need more people around.
Anna Grace: On the other hand, then like there's school deserts. Access to education for kids is tricky and I do think ideally you should be able to walk to school.
Penny: That is definitely the ideal I reckon. But I mean you're at a P to 12 so you must have kids coming in from
Christina: No, we're really tightly zoned. We're on what they call an Enrolment Management Plan. So every enrolment
Penny: Get it under control!
Christina: Sort it out!
Anna Grace: That's so Department of Education. I love it.
Christina: Edu-babble. So our primary and secondary have different zones.
Anna Grace: Are they different campuses?
Christina: No. All in the same campus.
Penny: What is pick-up and drop-off time like? I can't get my head around it.
Anna Grace: Is it kiss-and-go or whatever?
Christina: So it's 2,700 kids on one site.
Anna Grace: Oh my god. Wow.
Christina: Pick up and drop off is hectic. It pretty much stops the suburb. And I guess the reason that the zones are different is that there's heaps of feeder primary schools as well. So it's a really tightly managed area and we're in a growth corridor where there's heaps and heaps of new schools popping up. Left right and centre.
Penny: So can many people walk and ride?
Christina: A lot can walk and ride.
Penny: Wow.
Christina: And you'll often see kids that you think are really too small to be doing that journey by themselves. On foot and heading to school but I guess they sort of get caught up in the wave of other kids.
Penny: It's like a spontaneous walking bus.
Christina: While some kids do catch a bus, they're not really catching it far because they have to be so closely zoned.
Penny: That's really interesting. Like you'd think inner-city schools would be bigger, but actually they're not because there's not enough room. Like you literally just can't fit a thousand kids in one school.
Anna Grace: For the most part it is the outer-suburban and growth corridor areas that have the really big schools.
Penny: "Homicide detectives, led by Superintendent L. J. Patterson, took a man to Faraday today to re-enact Friday's kidnap. This was filmed and photographed.
Two of the children who were kidnapped were taken to the school in the afternoon to help detectives with their inquiries.
Inside a music sheet was still at the piano and the students' chairs were still in the position for the game of musical chairs they had been playing when the kidnappers entered the school.”
So those kids would have won.
Anna Grace: I am just thinking, wow, how is their PTSD triggered walking back in there.
Penny: So soon afterwards.
Anna Grace: Not very trauma informed.
Christina: No not at all.
Anna Grace: Which is the current, popular, actually very effective approach in education.
Penny: “The Premier of Victoria, Mr Hamer, said today that the Victoria Police Force might select a special squad to deal with any future cases of kidnapping and attempted extortion."
Christina: But they might not.
Penny: Little bit of foreshadowing again I feel.
"We want to take all possible precautions to ensure that no one attempts this sort of kidnapping or extortion again", Mr Hamer said.
The State Minister for Education, Mr Thompson, said that "certain security precautions" had been taken at Victoria's 430 one-teacher schools.”
Which to me.
Anna Grace: You're kidding, that's how many there were?
Penny: Well, this is in one newspaper article and as I say I have done no outside research. So I can't confirm that it really was 430.
Anna Grace: Nah, it would have been.
Penny: It's an amazing number to me.
Christina: Just so isolating because I think one of the great things about teaching is that you collaborate with other people and it is a really, I don't know, you make huge friendships in schools because you're all kind of in the trenches together but you don't ever get that real sense of isolation. I can't imagine
Anna Grace: I think sometimes
Christina: Well, if you're in a portable you might.
Anna Grace: I think it depends a little school to school. Like you can feel isolated in a school or, I work in an open-plan school. The collaboration that happens when it works is unbelievable. I remember someone saying to me, 'it's like a marriage'. It takes awhile to get in synch and if it changes year to year you spend the first few months thinking 'I miss so-and-so. It's just not the same with such-and-such' and whatever. And by like the middle of the year you know every little detail of each other's lives. So I can't imagine not having that teacher buddy in those single teacher school houses. But they also had to do all the ordering of everything, as well as teaching everything. And I also teach in a multi-age school so basically
Penny: They probably had to clean the toilet!
Anna Grace: Yes, yes, they would have had to do a lot of that. I dunno if the kids might have helped, but anyway. But I know that working in a multi-age school is considered great training for working in a rural school because you have multi-age classes. And definitely our, both my school principal and AP were, when I first started teaching at my school, were from single-room rural schools where they taught all year levels together. So they were used to that. So when I'd say, 'It's just really hard sometimes trying to manage this gap.' They'd be like 'Oh, get over it. I had 13 kids and I had little Billy he couldn't even walk yet and I had Jason, he had a beard.' So, it was quite a skill.
58:12 Penny: Okay, so the next article that we've got is from the 2nd of November 1972. So about a month later.
Anna Grace: Is Mary Gibbs out of bed? I just need to know if she's okay.
Penny: She is okay. She's definitely okay. The article is headlined "Teacher 'not going back"
"Miss Mary Gibbs, the 20-year-old schoolteacher heroine of the Victoria kidnap last month, does not want to return to the school at Faraday."
It's pretty fully on though that she has to kind of announce this in the newspaper.
Christina: Really should just be quietly dealt with.
Penny: I guess there was just so much public interest in what she was going to do. I often hear people say as teachers, that it's not the kids that are the problem, in the job it's the parents. Or is it the other teachers? Or is it the kidnappers?
Anna Grace: Ah it depends. I think it's the bureaucracy is tricky. Like the amount of things that you have to juggle, yeah. I've been really lucky, I haven't had a lot of issues with parents over the years or other teachers. But just the amount of stuff that you're juggling. Noone ever told me I was going to have to wash the art smocks. It's like you're dealing with like kids with really complex behaviour or really complex learning needs. You're collaborating with people, you're trying to work with the curriculum, with all the new initiatives and then you turn around and it's like, 'Well, I suppose I'm washing the art smocks" you know. Or getting the cobwebs off the windows. Like the amount of physical cleaning that I have to do is unbelievable. And it's just so draining. And I'm just so sick of cleaning cobwebs and floors and surfaces. Like stuff that normal cleaners don't do cos it's not in their award and fair enough. In fact the other day I got so cross. And I said, 'Somebody get that mandarin peel up off the ground. I don't understand. Someone's had their fruit snack and they've just dumped the mandarin on the ground.' And I actually didn't have my contact lenses in and there was a long pause and one of the little kids goes 'It's a Post-it note'. I was so fed up with cleaning and mess and logistics and stuff like that that I just kind of
Penny: That's funny. What about you Christina?
Christina: Look I think it goes in roundabouts for me. It's very rarely the kids that I find. Yes, they're draining at times and you get some real, really challenging behaviours and so on. I can deal with that if the family's on board, if the teachers are on board. No drama we can navigate that. But I think moving into leadership roles there's no buffer. So if you hear a psycho parent in the foyer you're like 'Oh, that'd be for me.' Because who else is coming in to deal with that? So I think, for me, after COVID that's where people's behaviours have gone really bizarre and I guess I feel like I've dealt with situations that I'd never dealt with before that time. And I don't think that's just linked to the role that I'm in now, I think people's behaviours have become a lot less measured and considered and
Anna Grace: That's definitely what the leadership at my school. Sometimes to me. As I'm going, 'And I've just the storeroom again. There were clogs. Who left clogs in there?' It was like five teachers ago.
Christina: Some Dutch exchange student.
Anna Grace: Yes, totally. And I just lost it. 'Why are there clogs!? I'm just trying to put the Lego away.' Yeah, I think that's true and I feel like one thing if I was ever to reform a teaching degree it would be to try to include more human psychology in it. You do a lot of child psychology in your degree, if you're lucky, in your degree, a lot of child development. But I feel like there needs to be maybe a semester on the psychology of the family. What are family dynamics.
Penny: Yeah.
Anna Grace: And then on just generally. How does bias work in your brain. What are all the theories around all that because so often you're dealing with people in an irrational state. And it can be teachers as well. You're managing staff in a highly emotional job where they're at the coal face with everyone's stuff and they're also trying to do, you know, all the stuff that you have to do, now the bureaucratic stuff, where, you know, you've got your AIP, the school plan and the goals and targets and try to hit all that stuff. That stuff is really tricky for the leadership to manage but they also have to have their door open for me to come in and cry and say, you know, 'There was clogs in the storeroom.' So I think just
Christina: And I think too, it keeps popping up in the media and it's certainly something I've experienced and I know a lot of people do. Schools when they run well are sensational, but there does tend to be an overrepresentation of very challenging workplace environment. There does tend to be a lot of schools, and they keep popping up in the news where there is a real toxic culture. And I often ask myself, what is it about schools, and I'm not saying it's unique to schools, but they do seem very much overrepresented.
Anna Grace: Well, apparently the Education Department are like WorkSafe's biggest customers. And it is generally, almost always, psychological injury.
Christina: Absolutely.
Anna Grace: It's huge for WorkSafe what they're dealing with. I wasn't aware of how much of a problem it was to be honest until my partner had a minor WorkSafe thing, just injured their arm using the guillotine slicer. I know, right? It was such a teacher injury. My partner's hypermobile and it just. It was just the angle. She said it could have been anything, she could have been picking up a can of beans. But it happened to be the guillotine. And as we were sorting it out.
Penny: Because she did spend 7 hours on the guillotine.
Christina: She was in the French Revolution.
Anna Grace: She was slicing off her phonics, you know, flash cards or something and it just pinged. And when we spoke to a surgeon about it he mentioned the high level of WorkSafe claims from teachers.
Christina: Yeah, it is huge.
Anna Grace: Smaller class sizes'd be nice. Probably solve a lot of problems.
Penny: "The school has been closed since Miss Gibbs and six of her pupils were kidnapped three weeks ago.
Miss Gibbs said at her home in Bendigo that part of her reason for not wanting to return to the school was the association it held with the kidnapping.
"But my main reason has nothing to do with that", she said.
"It's something personal that I am not going to talk about"."
So we don't know.
Anna Grace: I just say that the same strength that allowed her to kick the door is what is giving her the confidence, I assume, to sort of stand up for herself. Because with no debriefing and no real acknowledging of what psychological impact it might have had on you, it would have, you would have felt, I think, to just keep calm and carry on. For her to be able to go, 'No, I don't want to be back there' for whatever reason. Good on her, I say.
Penny: Absolutely.
"She said she was now on indefinite leave and she had seen her pupils "only briefly" since their rescue.
The future of Faraday School now depends on a parents' meeting during the Christmas holidays.
Since the kidnap Faraday's 10 pupils have gone to Harcourt"
As we know.
"Mrs Iris Howarth, whose children, Robyn, 11, Jillian, 8, and Denise, 5, were among those taken from the little granite block schoolroom, said she was not surprised when she was told Miss Gibbs did not want to return.”
So it sounds like at least the parents were like, 'Yep, fair enough.'
Christina: Yeah. Absolutely. Well their children might have been feeling really weird about return as well.
Penny: Well exactly. They might be quite be enjoying Harcourt and getting some nice apples.
Christina: Getting to know some other kids.
Christina: Apart from their sisters.
1:05:20 Penny: That does not mean though that she left the teaching profession because there was also this little snippet from the 21st of November and it's titled "Heroine Back”
“The heroine of the Faraday School kidnapping, Miss Mary Gibbs resumed teaching today at the Flora Hill State School at Bendigo."
Christina: Good job.
1:05:40 Penny: So that's really nice. And then the next thing that we have in the paper about her is from the 3rd of January 1973, so early next year.
“Former Faraday primary school teacher, Miss Mary Gibbs, 20,"
Little bit rude. Heroine Miss Mary Gibbs, is her formal title now it seems.
"with her fiancé, Mr Neil"
This says Neil Woelker but I believe he was Noelker.
"Neil Noelker, 21, an administrative officer with Strathfieldsaye Shire, near Bendigo, in Melbourne at the weekend after their engagement was announced. Miss Gibbs and six of her pupils were kidnapped in November last year.”
Christina: Do you think she'd be in a classroom, like, 'Miss Gibbs can you tell us about the time that'.
Penny: I don't know. And this is the thing. And this is why I feel for her.
Christina: It's going to follow her.
Penny: She's obviously such a strong person, did such an amazing job and is sort of trying to move on but just everything is now gonna be like she was the one who got kidnapped. Which is what we're doing today as well, you know.
Anna Grace: I feel like generally speaking teachers, if you're the kind of teacher who wants to work in that environment, you're not really out for the glory. You just wanna close the door to the school and get on with your musical chairs. You know, like, I think that's a big part of, well for me, a big part of the appeal of teaching is, you close the door and it's like the rest of the world doesn't exist. That's part of the magic of it is that it's just you and the kids and the energy that you create together. And it's just so, when it works, it's just such a brilliant feeling. And that kind of external thing coming in at her, from the side, could have been really frustrating. I don't know if that's, if that was her experience or not. But if it was, it would have been a pain in the neck.
Penny: I do sort of feel for her in that respect. And from what I found looking into it, there's a recorded interview of her in the 1980s, which is available in a library and then after that there's not really very much of her talking in the media or writing books, she didn't seem to want to talk about it that much. There was a lovely photo of her and the Education Minister, Lindsey Thompson in 2004, back at the schoolhouse. Sort of like a reunion photo. So that was, that was kind of nice. So she was obviously happy to do that. She kind of moved on and continued with her career I think.
One thing I have been wondering is, so obviously we don't have so many of these one-room schools anymore but what are the, what's the situation with small schools in Victoria now?
Anna Grace: Well, I looked it up cos I wasn't sure. It seems like there's less of them all the time. I read that in the last 5 years, 10 of the small schools in regional Victoria had closed including, now I don't know if I'm saying this right, Yapeet, or Yarpeet.
Penny: Where's Yapeet?
Anna Grace: I dunno. But it was, famously only had 3 students and they had lots of publicity and came to Melbourne and did lots of stuff and then when I went to look it up it was like, no longer around. But there are some, including some that aren't that far away. But none of them have only one teacher. That's what's interesting. No matter how few students, there's always two teachers or more. All these schools have issues getting staff, keeping staff.
Penny: I imagine there is a bit of pressure as well. Like I imagine it's not as cost effective as sending.
Anna Grace: No, it's not. Schools are grouped in regions and then you have. I don't actually know, you would know better than me, I don't fully understand the hierarchy but you have regional directors and then you have SEALs.
Christina: And you even have EELs as well.
Anna Grace: Really? Right okay. Seals and Eels.
Christina: All very water based.
Anna Grace: And it would be very tricky for someone who's a regional
Christina: Yeah, well a regional director will sort of oversee literally the entire region and then have multiple high-level people under them. But I think it would be hard to justify keeping schools like that open. And I think particularly with the current teaching crisis. You know, if you're looking at a school with 2 or 3 teachers, well if you can't staff that. What's the plan? You know, we've got a staff of over 300 but we're 20 down.
Penny: Wow.
Christina: It is better to pool people together probably at the moment.
Anna Grace: But also each one of the rural schools now would be subject to the same, like they'd all have to have an annual implementation plan, they'd all have to have a school review, they'd all have to have
Christina: And when you're doing that
Anna Grace: Yeah, for all these tiny little schools, would be a lot of bureaucratic work. And that is not stuff
Penny: They weren't doing that in Mary Gibb's day.
Christina: No.
Anna Grace: Not to that extent. There were regional directors. And you know, there were school inspectors and stuff like that but it was nothing like the endless amounts of put a post-it note of what your goal is.
Christina: The four-year-review process. What are you gonna do? You're literally gonna grind that school to a halt because anyone who's there as an adult would have to be involved in the review.
Anna Grace: Yeah. And the other thing I noticed is none of these schools present themselves as though they're really small. So when you read their website they have the same, 'We are an innovative. We believe in challenging. Our values are this'.
Christina: One on one devices.
Anna Grace: No, exactly. And actually, I was like, but hang on a minute. Ad then I had to go and look on another website that enlists the enrolment numbers and I was like, 11! 11! Hang on, I think they've got all 11 of them in different photos. They've got them in different hats.
Christina: Get your hat Barry!
Anna Grace: Quick, put your hair up, put your hair down.
Christina: Sit in a wheelchair, we need to look diverse.
Penny: But I think that's really odd because I imagine that for some parents that is the selling point.
Anna Grace: It is. When you read, all the articles in the paper are parents saying, 'We wanted our kids to go to the local school cos it was small but now they've closed it down.' Like that's the story everywhere but what the school is presenting is 'We're just a normal school like that other one.'
I'm definitely guilty of having romantic thoughts of moving to the country with my partner and the two of us transforming some local school and turning it into, you know, whatever. But in reality, it would just probably be me crying because I haven't filled in the paperwork so there's no pencils, or anything basic. And my partner having to mow the lawn, if there was lawn, probably just a big dust bowl cos there's a drought.
Christina: And asking kids who's on chook duty.
Anna Grace: Totally. And both of us getting chased out of town by angry parents because we've brought a woke agenda to some, you know.
Penny: So look, if I was gonna summarise it. Teachers in general are amazing. Mary Gibbs was even more amazing, maybe, or maybe we don't know what any of us would do until we're in the situation.
Anna Grace: Well, bring the tape-recorder. Keep singing, for God's sake.
Penny: These are the lessons.
Christina: And wear your platform boots.
Penny: Well thank you so much for coming in and talking about this Anna Grace and for bringing all your teacher knowledge and everything. Thank you for doing research.
Anna Grace: It's what I do.
1:12:47 (piano music)

Penny: Hello Penny here. Because we were talking about the Faraday kidnappings and because my family comes from that district, I put a little message in the family group chat, just saying 'Hey does anyone know of any personal connections to the events at Faraday'. And I got a reply from my dad, and my mum, mentioned that they knew someone who had been one of the kids kidnapped and also, that Dad knew Mary Gibbs and that he had in fact worked with her. Because Dad used to be an Assistant Principal. And I had absolutely no idea about this. I had only ever, as I said in the podcast, heard about the Faraday kidnappings in passing. My parents mentioned it when we drove passed the school, or the site of the old school but they never said that they knew anyone who was there, and they never spoke in detail about the events. So I was very surprised by this and so of course that meant that I had a couple of questions for Dad.
He's in Queensland at the moment so I thought I'd just get him on the blower.
1:13:55 (phone dial tone)
Peter: G'day Pen.
Penny: Hi Dad, how are you?
Peter: Yep, we're ready to go.
Penny: How's Queensland Dad?
Peter: Yeah, Queensland's really good. Beautiful sunny day today.
Penny: So I was hoping to ask you about, since we had a little chat the other day, because I didn't realise that you actually knew the hero of the story of the Faraday School kidnappings, Mary Gibbs.
Peter: Yes.
Penny: So how did you know Mary Gibbs?
Peter: I met Mary Gibbs at Maryborough Regional College where she was the Loddon-Campaspe-Mallee Region education region psychologist.
Penny: Oh, so she became a psychologist?
Peter: Yes she did.
Penny: That's so interesting, isn't it, given her experiences?
Peter: Yes, yes. And she was a brilliant operator.
Penny: Like with helping kids and things?
Peter: With helping kids. And the way she went about it. She had a capacity to get people on-side. She made sure that people did what they should do.
Penny: Definitely. From when we went through all the articles and heard the stories about her, she obviously, even as a really young person, was just incredibly competent and kept her head under pressure.
Peter: Her competency would never be doubted. She really led the welfare team at the school, which there were some very, very good operators as well. Like Ray Ollerton and Janice Field. She made sure that us people in the principal class were on the case because this was the most important part of what the school was doing.
Penny: Was she kind of keeping you guys in order a little bit as well?
Peter: Of course she was. It was unsaid but Mary didn't take no for an answer and said, 'Well this has gotta happen', so it happens that's the way it goes.
Penny: Pretty tough.
Peter: Tough is a bad word to use on a person. She was strong-willed, yes. But very, very determined to get an outcome that was in the benefit of the students.
Penny: Cos I think everyone knows about her from this one incident when she was very, very young but it sounds like all those qualities that she demonstrated there she just took on throughout the rest of her career, which was kind of, out of the public eye, but obviously very impactful.
Peter: Look, she was just fantastic operator. She set out to really make a difference for young people who were in strife. She was also a psychologist for the staff as well. You know, she looked after all of us. And probably with the aim in the end that if the staff were looked after, that the kids would be looked after. If staff weren't doing the right thing, or if parents weren't doing the right thing, she was the first one to really tell them.
Penny: It's so interesting to hear about a completely different side of her life, having read about her as kind of almost, you know, she comes across as such a heroine, she sounds almost like a story character when you read all the articles about her, but she was like a real person who you knew.
And do you remember when the Faraday kidnappings happened? How old were you? You would have been
Peter: In my second year at university. It was, you know, it was a very serious business. It's amazing how this young teacher kicked her way out of a van to get the kids to escape.
Penny: As student teachers was it something that you thought about? I mean, you obviously didn't go to teach in one of these small schools, but was it something that was discussed?
Peter: No, it wasn't anything that was really thought about. You know, and then later on, in reflection, how could a 20-year-old woman be left in charge of a school in the middle of nowhere, where no-one knew what was going on.
Penny: In retrospect it seems, but it was so common and everyone was doing it.
Peter: Well, it was going on since primary schools were invented in Victoria. Little, tiny country places. Here they are, there's no lesson preparation time. You were it.
Penny: You're doing everything.
Peter: And you're on yard duty too. All day.
Penny: Obviously, I reckon it was a very famous story. Australia-wide but particularly in the district. So did most people know Mary Gibb's part in it who knew her later?
Peter: Look, it was almost like if. You might be in with, a new teacher might come to the school and there's Mary Gibbs. The first thing that's whispered is, 'She was the teacher at Faraday.' Mary never ever talked about it.
Penny: So she never raised it with you? You never discussed it?
Peter: Never. Because it was sort of, that was her private life, in a sense. And everything had changed, things had moved on.
Penny: And she was doing a different job, like she was still working in schools but she
Peter: Oh yeah. But she never mentioned it or raised it. And I think most of us thought, well that's an era past, she may not want to remember it, or talk about it. I actually think that Mary Gibbs thought she didn't do anything really spectacular, it's just everybody else did.
Penny: Yeah, well the thing is I feel like none of us know what we would do until we're in the situation and she just knows that she did a good job but yeah.
Peter: Look, under pressure, fantastic and I think might have said she finished up I think having the very personal relationship with the Education Minister of the time, over a number of years. She was grateful for the way he handled it, but he was more than grateful about the way she handled it.
Penny: Yeah, he was very admiring of what she did. Lindsey Thompson, he has a connection to the local area too, doesn't he?
Peter: Well his mother used to live near the Castlemaine High School and I can remember going to see her when I was in year 11 or 12, so that's three or four years before this event occurred.
Penny: Were you visiting as a sort of a community activity?
Peter: The school used to visit, little Christmas things and stuff like that. I can't remember exactly but I know that I went to Mrs Thompson's place, and she was the mum of the education minister.
Penny: Yeah, I mean I feel like at the end of every episode that we do of this show Dad, we should just call you up and go, 'Oh right, so how do you know all these people?'
Peter: Oh not really.
Penny: I suppose, I was aware of it being in the district. So I thought there was some chance that you would know someone involved. But that's the thing, you never mentioned it to us. You never said, 'I know this person, she did all this stuff.' You didn't make a big deal of it.
Peter: At the time, I knew that Mary Gibbs was very special because she was doing a fantastic job at the school. Student welfare was a particular bent of mine too and of course you might know that Maryborough socio-economically is a little bit down-trodden and there was plenty of work and Mary Gibbs was in there and I might say, boots and all.
Penny: Did she keep wearing the boots? Did she ever wear the big boots?
Peter: I don't think I. I don't think that I
Penny: They wouldn't have been as in fashion either by the time you knew her.
Peter: No, she just dressed like everybody else dressed.
Penny: And did you stay in touch? When was the last time you saw her after you left Maryborough?
Peter: When I left Maryborough, I hadn't seen Mary Gibbs since except one day that a friend knew a lady whose daughter was riding trackwork at Bendigo racetrack and she got on a horse that flew and it hadn't had a start. And they started it in a big race at Bendigo. The rumor had got around Bendigo that it was pretty good. But another friend of mine and I decided to go to the races. And normally we wouldn't go at all. Who do I run into straight away, is Mary Gibbs. Mary Gibbs, very pleased to say hello. Always on the welfare issue again, saying to me, which I'm ashamed of, 'You haven't given up smoking yet, have ya?' And she used to say to me every time she saw me, you know. At school, every day, 'Give up smoking. Why don't you give up smoking?' Anyway, we had this tip for this horse and Mary introduced me to her partner at the time, seemed a lovely chap. I don't think Mary was an avid race-goer but they decided to go to the races. I said look, 'There's a horse that we come to back that we think, if the message is right, that it'll win.' So anyway, off she went with her partner, and I went off and backed the horse too. Ten to one, which is good odds for a horse that's supposed to go pretty well. The race started and our horse went to the front. And do you know where it finished?
Penny: I'm gonna hope at the front.
Peter: Four lengths in front.
Penny: Excellent.
Peter: Never, ever looked like losing. And who do I see straight after the race but Mary Gibbs with the biggest smile I've ever seen on her face. 'Thank you Peter. Thank you Peter.' She would have falsely got the impression that I'm a guru on the races.
Penny: Had all the tips. Oh that's so great.
Peter: Definitely not. And the other interesting thing about it. I do remember the name of the horse.
Penny: Yes.
Peter: Because I think someone may have told me that when the kidnapping was on that the children were playing musical chairs.
Penny: They were, yes.
Peter: They were, were they?
Penny: Yeah, definitely.
Peter: Well the horse's name that I told Mary was The Big Dance. I know you're not a big football follower but colloquially the Big Dance is the Grand Final.
Penny: Oh right. Yep, yep, yep, yep.
Peter: And you think about Mary Gibbs, the big dance that she did with those kids. Pretty amazing. Pretty amazing too, such an experience, whether Mary ever suffered from post - what do you call it?
Penny: PTSD. Post traumatic stress, yep.
Peter: She would have every reason to suffer from that. I hope she never did. But she really just got on with her life and helping people.
Penny: And that's why I kind of wanted to talk to you at the end cos I think probably there is a tendency for people to focus on that and probably maybe she'd even prefer that we weren't talking about her at all, but I did just want to emphasize that other part of her life, that this thing happened to her, but she did other things.
Peter: She never let it define her. She never went out to get glory or anything life that from it. I don't think she saw herself as a hero. But the rest of the world did. You know, there's not many people who have an incident in their life where they have to stand up and do something that we don't know whether we'd be able to do.
Penny: She did a great job. She was a teacher throughout.
(piano music)