From The Getting of Wisdom to Heartbreak High: Australian school stories on screen

Bruce Beresford's 1977 film, The Getting of Wisdom

Going to school is one of the few life experiences almost everyone shares. From the time children began to be educated in small groups in Britain, there were school stories in popular culture, beginning with what many consider the first novel for children, Sarah Fielding’s The Governess; or, The Little Female Academy (1749).

The emphasis in early school stories was on moral and intellectual learning, which the reader was supposed to absorb. However, as school became a universal experience, stories about school elevated peer acceptance, sporting success, and friendships to the main sources of drama. This has remained true from the crucial cricket match of Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) to the quidditch tournaments of the Harry Potter series.

School stories appeal to children and adolescents because they represent a world comprised largely of other young people, with adult teachers relegated to the periphery. However, they also mark changes in the kinds of ideals and goals we want young people to aspire towards.

Conformity and obedience were measures of a protagonist’s success in early school stories. However, as the genre has evolved in film and television, school stories have celebrated characters who transgress adult expectations, emphasising the importance of individuality.

Nerds, jocks and popular kids

North American film and television from the 1980s embraced stories about high school in particular, with earnest considerations of the dilemmas faced by teenagers forced into almost familial relationships with each other.

John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club (1985) was among the first films to treat the experience of high school with seriousness and empathy. In what became a template for the genre, it explores the unique forms of social stratification found in schools between the popular kids, the nerds, the jocks, and outcasts who sprinkle dandruff on their artworks.

Canadian series Degrassi Junior High

Canadian series Degrassi Junior High (1987-89) and Degrassi High (1989-1991) were pioneering in their focus on teenagers and willingness to confront mature topics including drug use, teen pregnancy, racism, and sexuality. The ultimate dark and vindictive side of school friendships were most memorably fictionalised in 1988’s Heathers, which darkly satirised teen suicide. Reflecting a significant transformation in real-world schools, the recent television reboot of Heathers had its premiere delayed for almost a year because of the Parkland, Florida school shooting.

Some of the longest-running American TV series set in schools in the 1990s nevertheless idealised beautiful, popular, and often wealthy students. Both the Saturday-morning comedy Saved by the Bell (1989-1993) and the prime-time drama Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990-2000) were largely told from the perspective of fashionably dressed and perfectly coiffed characters at the zenith of the social hierarchy.

Outsiders and underdogs

Australian school stories have differed from their British and American counterparts from the outset. Henry Handel Richardson’s classic novel The Getting of Wisdom (1910), which was adapted into a film in 1977, is the story of poor country girl, Laura Tweedle Rambotham, who is sent to an exclusive Melbourne boarding school.

While the usual arc of the school story was to teach the outsider appropriate lessons about how to conform and contribute to school spirit and sporting success, Laura lies in an ill-fated attempt to be liked, cheats to pass her final exams, and finishes school without having found peer acceptance. It is her very inability to change herself to fit stifling gender and class expectations that has made her an enduring and beloved character for the past century.

---

Read more: The case for Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom

---

Such irreverence toward authority figures is a frequent attribute of Australian stories about school. In its early years, teen soap Home and Away (1988-present) built many dramas around conflict with high-school principal Donald Fisher, who the students privately referred to as “Flathead”.

With conscious efforts to present a grittier and more realistic depiction of school life, Heartbreak High (1994-1999) not only included a cast that aimed to represent Australia’s increasingly multicultural society but depicted teachers as less authoritarian, and heavily invested in their student’s welfare.

In a reworking of the opposition between student and teacher, it has become common for Australian stories about school life to retain a focus on the underdog but to draw out its comedic potential. Hating Alison Ashley (2005), based on the novel by Robin Klein, cast pop darling Delta Goodrem as the beautiful, superficially perfect student, but presents the story from the perspective of friendless hypochondriac Erica Yurken.

Rather than a disciplinarian setting in which the teachers and principal have ultimate control, Barringa East high school exhibits a loss of adult order, with graffiti and rubbish covering the campus.

The film opens with the explanation that three teachers have retired due to the trauma of teaching at the school, with two institutionalised and one escaping to join the Hare Krishnas. While the overall culture of underachieving students allows Erica to shine academically, she does not feel comfortable in herself until she makes an unlikely friend in her imagined rival, Alison. A happy ending for Erica is found not in changing herself and achieving popularity, but in finding a supportive friend to join her outside the mainstream.

The trailer for 2005 film Hating Alison Ashley.

Chris Lilley’s Summer Heights High (2007) at once adopted the perspective of an underdog in the form of Jonah Takalua (a Tongan character controversially played by Lilley), and a queen bee in the form of Ja’mie King, a private school girl “slumming” at a state school.

Rather than glamorising the wealthy, image-obsessed Ja’mie, the series positions viewers to laugh at the shallowness of her manipulations to gain the approval of teachers and the few students she deems worthy of her attention. While many of the teachers at the school do care for student welfare, the infamous Mr G is the ultimate demonstration of the way teachers and authority figures are often depicted as flawed and ineffectual.

Chris Lilley as Ja'mie

Across time, Australian stories about school have more in common with the narratives of outsiders like Napoleon Dynamite than those of inspirational teachers as in Dead Poets Society or the beautiful students of Riverdale.

Attributes such as wealth, attractiveness, and family connections and status often distinguish the protagonists of American and British stories. Similarly, working hard and behaving correctly often brings success and popularity to these characters.

In contrast, Australian stories about school days are more likely to question structures of authority and social status. And anyone who wants to suck up to the popular kids or teachers can just, in the words of the students of Heartbreak High, “Rack off!”



This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Case for Henry Handel Richardson's The Getting of Wisdom

Image: State Library of Victoria

This piece was originally published at The Conversation as part of the site's "The case for" series on Australian books.

From David Copperfield to Holden Caulfield, most canonical coming-of-age novels depict boys becoming men. Jane Eyre’s traumatic journey to adulthood is considered a female version of the Bildungsroman, or novel of development. Yet books about girls are most commonly seen as only weighty enough for girls themselves to read.

Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom is remarkable because it is one of few novels about a girl’s maturation that has come to be understood as a “classic” and also because it is ultimately a girls’ school story. HG Wells, who described the protagonist Laura Tweedle Rambotham as “an adorable little beast”, considered the book to be the best school story he’d ever read.

But was Wells paying Richardson a great compliment? The genre of school stories is maligned and rarely considered as literature. The school story is often seen as originating with Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), but actually has a significantly longer history, providing moral instruction to girls from the mid-18th century.

Henry Handel Richardson

Set in the 1890s, but published in 1910, The Getting of Wisdom defiantly flouts the conventions of the British girls’ school story that were established by the first decades of the 20th century. Typically, a “new girl” confronts a school community in which she does not fit; after many trials she conforms to the system of rules among peers and teachers and is finally accepted. The once unruly or misunderstood girl caps off her first year with a victory for the school in a tennis tournament, or by acing her exams.

When Richardson, a female writer who wrote under a man’s name, transports a new girl from the country to the Ladies’ College in Melbourne, she sets about undermining the very concepts of unity, friendship, honesty, and diligence on which girls’ school stories depend.

Laura learns little from her own mistreatment at the hands of others. After her tumultuous introduction to the College, Laura rejoices “in barbarian fashion” when another new girl, the daughter of a millionaire squatter, is similarly snubbed by other students.

Her crimes are many. Torn between a desire to belong and ambivalence about several of the girls around her, Laura concocts an enthralling tale about the happily married curate’s romantic interest in her. Desperate not to devastate her widowed mother, who has laboured and sacrificed to fund her daughter’s education, Laura seizes the opportunity to stuff a history book down her dress and cheat in one of her final exams.

Her punishments are few. While Laura is ostracised after her most flamboyant lie, there are no lingering consequences for her deceptions. She enters school at the age of 12 as a “square peg” and leaves after several years without her edges having been rounded in the slightest.

Sydney schoolgirls of the 1890s

At the novel’s outset, Laura’s mother cautions that schooling heralds the end of childhood and that Laura must now “learn to behave in a modest and womanly way”. Girls of the period were socialised into traditional feminine expectations of marriage and motherhood.

But, as critic Sally Mitchell shows in her book The New Girl, some Victorian and Edwardian fiction presents girlhood as a liminal state that brings with it freedom from gendered restrictions. There are many things that a girl can get away with without being seen as unfeminine that a woman cannot.

The novel encourages the reader to value Laura’s minor acts of rebellion, such as when she refuses to eat an apple foisted upon her by a condescending woman during her first journey to school. Laura subsequently hurls the despised apple out of a train carriage toward a telegraph post.
  
Likewise, her lack of interest in boys a not represented as a failing. When the attractive Bob is unexpectedly “gone” on Laura, she is irritated that she now has to “fish for him” and fails at her feeble attempts at flirtation. A number of the older girls have men waiting for them to finish school and have already “reached the goal” of womanhood that seems strange and distant to Laura.

Australia’s most celebrated literary girl rebel, Sybylla Melvyn in Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901), flees expectations of marriage to follow her writing dreams. Laura remains too young to receive marriage proposals, but Richardson briefly reveals that the end of girlhood can promptly close off the excitement of a future of seemingly infinite possibilities. Laura’s friend M.P. aspires to take several degrees, but soon after leaving school she has returned to her home town, is married, and has been “forced to adjust the rate of her progress to the steps of halting little feet”.

The Getting of Wisdom grants Laura, like Sybylla, an ambiguous ending. The reader does not witness the death of girlhood freedoms, but watches Laura run without care, as she departs school for the final time, down a straight path and then around a bend, out of sight.

We know little about her future, other than that “even for the squarest peg, the right hole may ultimately be found”.

Book Cover: Gem of the Flat, Constance Mackness

For the 3-year project I'm working on, 'From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Australian, New Zealand and Canadian Print Culture, 1840-1940' , I've begun buying Australian girls' books in earnest. British girls' books, I'm finding, are much more readily available for sale online, possibly because they had much larger print runs. Some of the Australian titles are simply not to be found, or rare copies are being sold for hundreds of dollars.

Many of the covers are very striking and ornate, so I'll share a few here. This copy of Gem of the Flat (Angus & Robertson, 1914) by Constance Mackness has its paper spine illustration intact. I was surprised to see that the cover images were illustrated by May Gibbs, of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie fame. These sorts of girls' books with elaborate covers were often given as gifts and prizes, as was this one, which is inscribed "To Mary, With much love from Auntie Minnie + Uncle Sidney, Ballarat, Australia, October 1930."