Golden milestone for magazine

Western Teacher at 50 Golden milestone

for magazine

Celebrating 051971 2021 years

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. 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. “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.”

Members responded well to the new publication and the second issue of Western Teacher reported that a November 1971 meeting of Executive resolved that:

Western Teacher be published on a fortnightly basis during school time where possible.

The publication would include “serious articles, as well as materials highlighting the activities of the union and its members.”

A section of Western Teacher would be allocated to students so they could “appreciate the fact that they are members of the union and that the union is mindful of their needs.”

Teachers were able to express their opinions via a letters to the editor page.

Four issues of the existing Teachers’ Journal be still published in 1972, which would also contain union news alongside articles covering all aspects of education. The general secretary has discretion to publish special issues of the journal as required.

For over 50 years Western Teacher magazine has covered the most important issues and events affecting public educators in WA, nationally and across the globe.

From industrial campaigns, strikes, changes of governments, pay rises and education cuts, new education policies and philosophies, the Western Teacher has been there to document all. It has also been a record for all the changes within the union itself, through its leadership, Executive and relocation of headquarters from Murray Street in the city to Adelaide Terrace and then to West Street in West Perth in 2018.

Western Teacher returned to its magazinestyle format at the start of 2007 following demand from membership to move back to a glossy A4-sized magazine.

“The magazine will include features about teachers in all areas of the public education system in Western Australia, education stories from interstate and overseas, industrial news, training and professional development updates. It will be published nine times per annum,” the union stated in its 24 November 2006 issue.

Production also moved back in-house, overseen by the communications coordinator of the time, the late Don Rowe, who edited the magazine until his retirement in 2014.

Technology has played a big role in shaping the Western Teacher, changing the way it was designed and laid out and how it is distributed to members.

The magazine is now available in electronic format, able to be viewed on digital platforms such as PCs, tablets and smartphones.

Western Teacher’s incorporation of technological changes mirrors that of the SSTUWA, which went online in the late 1990s, firstly with a dedicated webpage at sstuwa.org.au (which is still the domain name to this day) and email addresses for the union and its staff members. The first email addresses for the SSTUWA were printed in the April 2000 issue of Western Teacher in a staff directory on page 3.

And of course, Western Teacher has been there to document the enormous influence technological change has had on teaching and school communities.

An article in the January 2007 issue of Western Teacher warned of the emergence of cyber bullying in schools through the use of mobile phones, via the mediums of text and multimedia messaging (SMS and MMS).

This was on the eve of the launch of the first iPhone, which has since ushered in the era of the smartphone and facilitated the growth of Facebook and Twitter.

“Consider the following scenario,” the article detailed.

“Ivy turns off her mobile for class and, when she turns it back on at lunch time for a call from her mother, picks up 30 different SMSs about her behaviour at a party on the weekend, all forwarded to other girls in the year level and to students at other schools. “Many of those on the periphery exclude Ivy or send her their own harassing SMS. By the end of lunchtime, Ivy is confronted by one girl and the altercation that follows is filmed by another student on her mobile, with the footage forwarded to other people via MMS, and later downloaded onto the recorder’s personal website for anyone in the world to view.

“When Ivy goes home after an exhausting day, she logs on to MSN (Messenger) to chat with her sister who’s overseas but is drawn into the MSN conversation of two girls she knows at school who are discussing her.

“She’s the hot topic on MSN that night as more people get involved in the conversations and the next morning, predictably enough, she doesn’t want to go to school.”

Successive redesigns may have kept the magazine’s look fresh, but the one constant has remained – the content has aimed to honour the foundational goal of keeping SSTUWA members informed on the most vital industrial, professional and educational issues through its nine editions a year.

During this golden anniversary year, Western Teacher will look back regularly at the last half century of Australian, SSTUWA and union history captured in print.

We hope you enjoy this month’s retrospective at the past 50 years. Thank you for coming along this journey with us and we look forward to what another 50 years of Western Teacher will bring.