Walloon State School

Walloon is a rapidly growing rural community about twelve kilometres west of Ipswich. Called at various times Five Mile, Guilfoyles Creek and Ten Mile Peg, Walloon was ten miles from Ipswich by the original track and was probably the first train station on the state's first railway line. This was laid from Ipswich to Grandchester in 1865. The name Walloon came with German farmers who settled around the area in the 1860s and populated towns like Kirchheim (Haigslea), Marburg, Prenzlau, Englesburg (Kalbar), and Blumbergville (Boonah). A hotel was built at Walloon's main intersection in 1877, although the current hotel was erected in 1898 after fire destroyed the original building. By the 1890s, Walloon had a blacksmith, a butcher, a saddler, a tailor, carriers, storekeepers and a tannery, and coal mining was an important industry. Many railway workers lived in the town. Walloon is now surrounded by housing developments and boasts a mini shopping centre and a service station.

The Catholic Church opened a non-vested school (i.e. not owned by the state) in 1865. It was called Guilfoyles Creek and was among the first schools in the state. Once a teacher's residence had been obtained, the government opened a school with 87 pupils in 1877. Walloon State School was a shingle-roofed timber building diagonally opposite the hotel. Alfred Kemp was its first head teacher, and it seems he was appointed because he was the only one willing to accept the available temporary accommodation. Soon, over 100 pupils were enrolled. Thomas B. Cowie became the school's fifth principal in 1920, by which time Walloon boasted a hotel, a milk factory, a sawmill and a thriving mining industry. Upon arrival, Cowie was collected from the train station and driven by horse and carriage to the school residence. He had the support of a school committee and other teachers. At that time, pupil teachers were employed - these were students who were kept on after graduation, usually at their own school; they taught during school hours and learned from the principal after school.

In 1935, after accommodating children for nearly 60 years, the schoolroom was moved to make way for a new building. Local resident Lennie Bell remembered seeing the original school winched down on greased logs to the western boundary of the school property. it was then used to hold the school's fancy dress balls and other events. A new school was built in its place, and beside that, on the road to Amberley, a new teacher's residence. Cowie taught at Walloon State School until 1952. With 31 years of service, he remains the school's longest-serving principal.

The eighth principal was Mr. Horace Mervyn Risson, who carried the school through the 1960s. Horace was born in Ipswich 22 December 1916, the fifth of eight sons raised by Charles and Ada Risson, who owned Risson's Produce in Nicholas Street. Horace attended Ipswich Grammar School, successfully completing the State Scholarship Examination at the end of 1929. He stayed at Kings College while studying Pure Maths and Chemistry at the University of Queensland, then completed an additional year at Queensland Teacher's College. Horace's first school appointment was Running Creek School. In this small community between Woolooga and Biggenden, he had only seven pupils.

By the time Horace enlisted in the Citizen's Military Forces (Q137249) at nearby Kilkivan in April 1942, he was married to Noel Nancy Risson. They had no children at that time. After 17 months with the CMF, Horace was on Horn Island in the Torres Strait on 13 November 1943, when he enlisted in the AIF (QZ59322). After serving at Moratai, he was discharged 16 November 1945 and spent the next six months in a Sydney hospital recovering from stomach bacteria. Five of the Risson brothers served during the Second World War: Cecil Dudley, Clifford Norman, Horace Mervyn, Wilfred Goodwin, and Donald Glen.

After the War, Horace taught at Spring Hill in Brisbane. Next was Lark Hill on the Marburg-Glamorganvale Road, where he served for 10-12 years, and then Morrlands near Bundaberg for a short time. His fifth appointment began in 1959, at Walloon State School, and here he remained until August 1971. By the time Horace was transferred to Walloon, he and Noel had four children - three boys and a girl - and the verandah of the school residence was enclosed to provide bedrooms. Those children of primary school age attended their father's classroom.

In the 1960s, Walloon was a quiet hilltop community consisting of modest timber homes clustered around the hotel, the railway station, a general store and a few churches. there was a brief section of bitumen, but the road into Ipswich was gravel. Only 28 children were enrolled at the school in 1966, and some classes had only two or three children. It was a one-teacher primary school There were no uniforms, no school captains, no sports houses. Milk was delivered and consumed at 'little lunch' (morning tea), with milk monitors being appointed to hand out straws.

The school building, which had been built in 1935, had two rooms. The main classroom was furnished with a blackboard and its accessories - set square, T-square, pointer, dusters, a compass that held a stick of chalk - and large shiny charts that were used for rote learning. In the corner, a varnished 'press' stored boxes of chalk and piles of copybooks, Queensland School Readers, and Happy Venture Readers. Dick and Dora, Jack and May, and Fluff and Nip, the characters in these books, were household names in those days. Pupils sat side by side on long forms at equally long, sloping timber desks. At the back of the desktop, and each child had access to a groove to stop writing tools from rolling onto the floor, a slot to safely stow a slate, and a hole for an inkwell. The slate was a thin rectangular slice of natural black slate set in a pine frame. The writing tool was a fine stick of soft slate encased in a cylindrical metal holder. The 'slate pencil' made a mark when scraped across the surface of the slate. It sometimes squeaked too, but not as badly as chalk or fingernails on the blackboard. Slate pencils were sharpened by being rubbed on the concrete under the school and slates were cleaned with a damp sponge. Both slate and pencil were likely to break if dropped. Pupils progressed from slates to writing in copybooks with pen and ink. Younger students were still using slates in the late 1960s. Dale Small (enrolled in 1964-1971 and pictured in the 1968 school photo) remembers progressing from slate to inkwells. Ink monitors had the job of mixing ink from powder and filling the ceramic inkwells that sat in the holes at the back of the desks. During Horace's term at Walloon, he disposed of these long desks and forms.

Horace conducted some activities with the whole school, things like art and singing which were part of the curriculum. Being a dedicated churchgoer, he was an accomplished singer and taught children to sing in a round, or perpetual canon. He beat time as they sang. At other times, children worked in their different grades on separate tasks, sometimes moving into the second room. If older students had completed their work, they might be charged with helping younger children, using the other room to work with things like Cuisenaire rods. Made of timber blocks of ten different colours and lengths, the rods were used to teacher number concepts, arithmetic, and fractions under the New Maths program. They were introduced in Queensland schools in the early 1960s and became widespread across primary classrooms in the 1960s and 1970s.

Mr. Risson, otherwise known as 'Sir', set one map and one 'exercise' for homework every weekend. The exercise title was always executed in Old English font. The Calf Club, which began in the 1920s, had morphed into a Project Club, and this continued from the 1950s through to the 1980s. During the 1960s, projects were largely related to gardening endeavours such as growing tomatoes.

On Friday afternoons, females students wandered across the schoolyard to the teacher's residence, where Mrs Risson sat them on the front verandah and taught them hand sewing. Girls learned embroidery stitches - stem, chain, herringbone, featherstitch, cross-stitch - and how to make buttonholes and do invisible hemming, all of which were sewn in parallel lines on a sampler. Meanwhile, Horace took the boys for basketweaving, which involved some woodworking skills.

Sports day was a much anticipated affair. Schools in the region - Walloon, Haigslea, Mt Marrow, Mt Walker, Ashwell, Tallegalla, and Rosewood (a large school with multiple teams) - competed against one another at an appointed venue. Each school had a school colours. Walloon State School was green. Students wore green skirts or shorts and white shirts, with a white square bearing a large green W pinned to the front of their shirt. School fancy dress balls were another annual highlight. These and other school events were held in the hall that had been the original schoolroom.

The toilet was situated near the hall, well away from the school building. During nesting season, students scanned the gumtrees before dashing across the open space, hoping to reach the toilets before the magpie got to them. One female student remembers running with arms flailing overhead to stop the bird from pecking her, only to discover that the terrifying rustling about her ears was produced by her long nylon hair ribbons. There was no loitering on the way back to class either.

Queensland once had countless one-teacher schools, most of which closed due to failing numbers. At one point in the early 1960s, Horace had Alana Murphy start at age 4 to make up school numbers. Similar instances had happened in the 1930s to 'keep a teacher'. Locals again feared the school would close during the 1970s, but housing development during the early 1980s ensured its future. In 1981, a demountable was built to accommodate 55 students, and there were two teachers. By 1994, enrolments had grown to 200. At the end of that decade, the teacher's residence was removed to make way for a carpark. The school now has numerous buildings, and the one that was built in 1935 is used as the admin block. Theo original schoolroom still sits on the western boundary and is now the CWA Hall. Some families have attended Walloon State School for generations: a member of the fifth generation of the Sharp family enrolled in 2002, and other long-term enrolments include the Bell, Page and Levitt families. Walloon State School commended in 2026 with 325 students.