May O’Brien wanted to become a teacher while she was still a small girl. There is nothing unusual in that. Other girls also want to be teachers when they grow up – but few have ever faced the problems and difficulties of May O’Brien. She would have given up long ago in the face of white prejudice and hostility, if it had not been for her unrelenting determination to reach her goal as a teacher.

It is easy now for Aborigines to become teachers. They get plenty of help and encouragement. But it wasn’t like that when May was born at Laverton in the 1930’s. At that time, she claims, white people used to say that the Aborigines in the Eastern Gold-fields were “the worst in Australia” – and they were treated as such by whites.

She left that hostile atmosphere when she was sent with other Aboriginal children to the Mount Margaret Mission.

There were no qualified teachers at Mount Margaret but the mission staff realised the importance of education and did what they could for the Aboriginal children. It opened up a new world for May.

The staff received Correspondence School lessons for their own children. They copied these for the Aboriginal children, but because there were too many children for full-time lessons they were split into two groups, one being taught in the morning and the other in the afternoon. Each group thus got two hours schooling a day. It wasn’t much, but the grounding in basic subjects was good, particularly in English.