Mangowine School

Clyde Adams – Perth Western Australia 2001

Living at Mangowine meant that we would attend the Mangowine School with a few other local primary schoolkids. It was a one-room one teacher school, 3 1/2 miles from the homestead, on about an acre of the nearby Fred Williams farm. Other families whose children would have attended from time to time included two separate (unrelated) Williams’s, Hockings, Daymans, Jollys and more.

Usually there would have been only 10 or 12 pupils, although evacuation from Perth about 1942 of several kids because of Japanese attack fears took numbers up to an incredible 19 for a time. I attended from 1938 to 1945, other than for the latter part of 1943 when the school closed because of low pupil numbers (only four, reduced to three when I broke my arm and spent many weeks in Perth for treatment).

From July to the end of 1943 I stayed with my cousins, the Gales, and attended school in Yelbeni. Mangowine School re-opened in 1944, with about 11 pupils, and I spent my final year there before moving on to Bunbury High School in 1945.

My primary school teachers were Bernard McManus (one month) and Malcolm McLeod (1938), Eric Payne (1939-40), Kath Ryan (1941), Pat Froome (later married locally to Ted Williams and still lives nearby… 1942 and early 1943), Zena Leeder (Yelbeni school, late 1943) and June Young (1944, later married Ron Dayman and still lives nearby).