From the Archives

Memories from David Tunley

David Tunley was the music teacher at Fort Street Boys High from 1953-1957. He recently sent me this email recalling his time at our school. With his permission, here are some of his memories…
“My five years on the teaching staff was at a time when the school was trying to recapture its earlier reputation of being the outstanding school in Sydney. The excellent headmaster Mr Graham Shaw (who arrived at Fort Street on same day as me) had been chosen to help restore its great status. Why I was chosen to develop the musical side I will never know. I had just graduated from the Sydney Conservatorium and the Sydney Teachers’ College and had no track record as a school teacher at all. All I had was a driving ambition to do well and justify the trust that the Education Department had placed in me. Mind you I couldn’t have done worse than my very elderly predecessor who, judging by the chewed up blotting paper on the music-room ceiling, must have given up all hope of establishing class-discipline.  The anxiety I felt on my first day at the school was  lightened by a conversation with Mr Shaw who told me of his love of music by Bach and by Beethoven and then offered to re-construct the sound system which by then reached had its end-of-life.  What an incentive for the ‘new boy’!
Music at that time at Fort Street was not taken seriously and to build up a choir seemed a Herculean. However, I felt sure that if I could entice a few prefects and sporting types to sing with the group this might – in the famous French phrase – ‘encourager les autres.  ‘Les ‘autres’   included a senior boy (Jon Henricks) who even then was swimming his way to the Olympics and who sang a few times in the choir. Need I say more! By the time I left the school choir numbered more than a hundred boys.
It took a couple of years for Music at Fort Street to develop and I was instructed to also teach Maths (fortunately I had won a Maths prize at school) and a subject I had never heard of: Social Studies. My task was to take one of the lower classes and discuss Mesopotamia – the ‘land between two rivers’. To give my lesson some credulity I practised drawing a map on the blackboard showing the positions of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Thus, imagine my horror when the class had left the room to discover that I had placed the two rivers the wrong way around! Expecting instant dismissal I rushed around to the Social Sciences master, and – almost in tears – described my appalling mistake. To my unbelieving eyes he roared with laughter and said ‘Don’t for a moment imagined that by tomorrow any of the students will remember a single word of your lesson!!’  None of the lecturers at the Sydney Teachers’ College had ever mentioned such a thing – more’s the pity,
Because the State Education Department had paid for my year at the College I was bound to it for five years. I had decided at the beginning that I would finish school teaching at the end of that time and so in December 1958 resigned from Fort Street after five wonderfully happy years there. I had been preparing for a university position and during the time at Fort Street applied to sit for the examinations for a Bachelor of Music from Durham University which was the only university that offered an external degree. During the last few month of my time in Sydney I received news that I had gained the degree. So the opportunity for a university career came my way. Yet I have never forgotten my time at that fine school and over the years have kept in touch with quite a few ex-students, one of the real pleasures of teaching. I have indeed been so lucky.”

Iain Wallace
School Archivist