Western Teacher at 50
Golden milestone for magazine By Minh Lam
The Western Teacher has hit 50 years of age. The first issue of the union’s flagship publication was published on 15 October 1971. It was a year where Neville Bonner became the first Indigenous Australian elected to national parliament and it was announced that Australian troops would be pulled out of Vietnam, even as the war expanded with the invasion of Laos. Globally, the Apollo 14 lunar mission saw humans land on the moon for the third time, while the USSR launched the world’s first space station, Salyut 1. Greenpeace was also founded. Sir John Gorton began the year as Australian Prime Minister before being replaced in March by Sir William McMahon following a leadership spill. In WA the March 1971 state election, where 18-year-olds were allowed to vote for the first time, shifted power from the Liberal-Country Party coalition under Sir David Brand to Labor and John Tonkin.
July 1975 16
Western Teacher January 2021
Australia’s population was about 12.7 million, almost half of the country’s current population of 25.7 million. Prior to Western Teacher, the WA Teachers’ Journal was the union’s published record of note, a distinction that it held for 60 years. The introduction of the Western Teacher masthead also saw a move from a magazine-sized format to a tabloid, newspaper-style format in October 1971. The then-SSTUWA General Secretary Bob Darragh said it was time to move to the bigger format. “The latter has become popular with similar organisations so it has been decided to introduce it here on an experimental basis,” he wrote in Western Teacher Volume 1, Issue 1. “This issue of ‘The Western Teacher’ is the first of two special publications undertaken to obtain an indication of member opinion.
August 1977
50
Celebrating 1971
2021
years
“To allow Executive to assess which format they prefer, the magazine or the newspaper format, any member who has an opinion on this matter is invited to write in before the end of the year to assist planning for 1972”. The front page of the very first Western Teacher covered the adoption of a teacher’s charter, which outlined teachers’ working conditions such as class sizes, professional registration and the provision of adequate facilities and resources. Elsewhere Western Teacher covered issues such as the continuing increase in costs of teaching degrees, worsening of student behaviour in schools and the controversy about whether to suspend boys coming to school with long hair. “Of course all this may turn out to be of little value and interest,” the article concluded. “Tastes change. Who knows that next year the craze will be for crew cuts or perhaps no hair at all.”
April 1987
