Primary schoolchildren drinking their daily milk after the scheme was introduced in 1950. Photo: Supplied.
James Page (1871-1939) just happened to be the brother of former Australian prime minister Sir Earle Page (1880-1961).
James taught at Mt Kembla Primary School in 1929 and saw the horrors of the onset of the Great Depression and its impact on the kids of unemployed miners.
By 1930 in the Illawarra, shanty towns for evicted families and individuals soon grew up at places such as Slacky Flat at Bulli, Tom Thumb Lagoon, Dapto, Port Kembla and elsewhere.
Even as late as 1938, 1079 people (including 443 children) were said to be still domiciled in unemployed camps in the Illawarra.
Employed families could sometimes afford to have their own cow but the once familiar Australian schoolyard rhyme told the story of local poverty very effectively. (Susso was slang for “sustenance” or welfare payments).
“We’re on the Susso now
We can’t afford a cow
We live in a tent
We pay no rent
We’re on the Susso now.”
And even though the teacher James Page’s brother would only serve for 19 days as prime minister in 1939, Dr Earle Page was still in parliament in 1950.
Then, while serving as minister for health, he was aware there were still families struggling to feed their kids.
Even though Earle Page, prior to entering parliament, grew up to become a medical doctor, he knew from personal experience how hard it was to feed a large family with lots of young children.
He was one in a family of 11 kids and began his schooling at Grafton Public School.
Here he excelled academically but his father could not afford to send him to boarding school because of financial difficulties caused by the major economic depression of the 1890s.
Page thus had to rely on scholarships to advance his education and, fortunately, won a bursary to attend Sydney Boys High School.
There the still young Earle Page passed the university entrance exams, and in 1896 – aged just 15 – began studying a liberal arts course at the University of Sydney.
He was equal top in mathematics in his first year, and was also awarded the lucrative Struth Exhibition for “general proficiency in the arts”, which allowed him to switch to medicine and covered the first four years of fees for medical school.
Earle Page entered Federal Parliament in 1919 and served for 41 years.
In 1950 he convinced the government of the day to pay for a school milk program. The deal was that the Federal Government would pay for the milk supply while the states covered the transport costs. And the latter measure certainly kept the Illawarra dairy farmers thinking that Earle Page’s milky idea was quite OK by them.
The scheme was formally rolled out in the mid 1950s, and from then on, milk bottles containing one third of a pint were delivered to each primary school for all children aged 12 and under.
Fittingly, given Earle Page’s brother was a former teacher at Mt Kembla Primary School, in 2006 a worker at the school found a small horde of these small milk bottles under the double storey building.
For those who benefited from the national public health scheme to improve the calcium intake of children until it was disbanded in 1973, they may still have memories of sometimes drinking very warm milk before they could go out to play at little lunch.
The milk was delivered to the school in the morning and, with a bit of luck, was placed in the shade of a tree – as refrigeration facilities at public schools in the Illawarra were generally not available back then.
This was not a big deal in the winter, but by 10:30 am in the summer, downing 189 ml of warm milk was possibly not everyone’s cup of tea.
Photographic evidence (or possibly a publicity shot) shows that some kids loved it – even though milk heated by the Australian sun might sometimes taste pretty interesting.
One Illawarra local I once interviewed told me: “I remember the milk at recess very well. As I came from a struggling family it was one thing I could count on each day. Thank you to the government of the day as it was part of my survival.”
Others, however, had different memories: “Our milk was left out in the sun and the nuns made us drink it and that’s why I can’t drink plain milk these days.”
I, however, lapped up the school milk, for cow’s milk was relatively new to me as my mum kept several goats which she milked each day. The school stuff tasted a little different and hence was something of a novelty.
Today I’m still addicted to full cream cow’s milk but regret that it is now most often homogenised and thus one does not get the rich cream floating to the top of whatever container it is held in.
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