Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemJohn Lawrence Tierney: his contribution to education in Australia( 1985)When John Lawrence Tierney retired from the service of the New South Wales Department of Education in June 1952, few outside his immediate circle knew his name. His forty-odd years of teaching had brought him none of the rewards which come to the most successful of that profession. He had, however, made a noteworthy contribution. For John Tierney was also "Brian James", whose short stories, marked by comic invention and acute observation (especially of idiosyncratic behaviour), had been widely acclaimed since first they began to appear in the Bulletin ten years earlier. In his fifties before he began to take his writing seriously, his earliest themes were of the land. Born and raised on a farm, he had always hankered after a return to the life he knew before teaching. From the very beginning his short stories were compared with those of Henry Lawson, and some eminent critics thought Tierney's surpassed them. A year before his retirement, his first novel, The Advancement of Spencer Button, was published. Two features made it remarkable: its construction (Norman Lindsay referred to it as "one of the few major novels in the country"), and its themes. It was the first Australian novel to take schoolteaching as its subject. Not only was it a full account of the growth and development of public education in New South Wales, from the Public Instruction Act of 1880 until the Second World War, but also it contained much detail on daily life in our schools. Moreover, it was unique in its presentation of the account from the teacher's point of view rather than from the student's. It explained, for the first time, the frustrations and tensions of "the system" of education that had evolved. It was a comic novel, but its purpose was serious. For Tierney, education was central to the health of society, and it was important that it should be properly examined and then made well. Most of his writing after this novel dealt with similar issues. Unfortunately, none of it ever reached its heights. His retirement did not bring him the peace and leisure he had hoped for. He found that much of the desire to write had evaporated. Other circumstances, too, had changed. Those who had advised and encouraged him earlier were less able to do so. The last ten years of his life produced little. In all, the output during his writing career had been comparatively meagre. For this and similar reasons, an accurate assessment of his contribution is not easy - and, in fact, will not be possible until history makes its final judgement on the literary merits of his writing. In the meantime, there are two aspects of his contribution which even the passing of time cannot deny: four decades of dedicated service to the youth of the nation, and a unique novel. These make him worthy of special attention.