PHOTOS L to R and Down: The Barnier's House 1920's, The Barnier Brothers, Bert Barnier and Frankie Conaghan 1922

The school was a one-room building about forty feet by thirty feet, with a front verandah at ground level and in the rear, it was about eight to ten feet high. This was used for a weather shed and we put our saddles and bridles and sporting gear in it. It was built across the side of a pretty steep hill, on about ten acres of ground which served as a horse paddock, and a cricket pitch cut into the side of the hill. There was plenty of ground to play football. The girls played rounders. There were pit toilets and their water tank. We used this for the flower garden. In those times the road ran between the school residence, (which still stands) and the school. Now it runs down beside the school residence.

There were five teachers in my time at the school. Mrs Clothier, Mr Gobert, Mr Robinson, Mr Paul and Mr Henry. They were very good teachers and very understanding. I remember one morning a pupil didn’t do his homework and the teacher asked him why he didn’t do it, and he said, “I went to a party.” The teacher said,” Oh, you want to get your L.C. before you get your Q.C. do you?” There was a break in teachers after Mr Gobert left. We were about a month or five weeks without a teacher after the Christmas holidays. We were in the favourite swimming hole one day when someone came with bad news, “School tomorrow, the teacher’s arrived.”

The lessons were the basic three R’s, Dictation, Geography, History and Composition, but above all we had a lot of Mental Arithmetic which I found very useful, right up to this day. I can’t understand the young one’s today, adding up on an adding machine.

On getting to school, some walked, some rode, one family even drove a horse and sulky. They were the Stauntons, it was about six miles to school from Bilambil, which is now called Urliup. The story goes that someone important was going through there early one morning, and everybody was up milking in the dark, and he called it “Urliup”.

There were two exciting happenings when I went to school, one was at the end of World War I. We went berserk and the teachers sent us home. The second was in 1919 - an aeroplane flew over and it was the first time we had seen an aeroplane. I think the teachers were more excited than we were.

The school was only eighteen years old when I went there. I could honestly say I would have known nearly all the ex-pupils, as I was eight years old when we started school.