I’ve been reading Shirley Barrett’s Rush Oh!, a story about whaling in Eden in the far south east of New South Wales, and an area which I more or less know.

When we lived in Canberra, the coast from Pebbly Beach south to Green Cape was our playground for bush walking, swimming in summer and so on.

Now this isn’t review of Shirley Barrett’s book, but one thing that struck me was that in the course of the book there’s a dance at the School of Arts. The School of Arts wasn’t an art school but local society that provided a public hall, a library, reading room and so on.

Unfortunately, the School of Arts in Eden is long gone and the building demolished, but interestingly there are other Schools of Arts in the area – for instance Bega had one, Cobargo had one, Narooma had one and so on.

A search of Trove shows that these were valuable community resources in the early twentieth century in what was then quite an isolated area – the railway never made it south of Bomaderry despite proposals connect Bega and Eden either with what is now the South coast line, or alternatively with the now closed Bombala railway with the Eden and Bega Schools of Arts hosting community meetings about the railway.

And it wasn’t just railways, or the lack of them, as well as dances these institutions provided circulating libraries, reading rooms, and served as a meeting place during such important events as the 1919 flu pandemic.

Like the Athenaeum in Stanley, they grew out of the Mechanics Institute movement, but why was it called the School of Arts, especially in a town like Eden, where the principal industries at the time were whaling and logging, or Bega, which was solidly agricultural, is a bit of a puzzle.

And I think the reason might simply be down to class predjudice – in the goldfields of North East Victoria the term Athenaeum was often used – Stanley has one, Chiltern has one (now a museum), Yackandandah had one, and so on.

Without any proof what so ever, it’s my guess that where the founding members were more genteel, they tended to call these bodies Athenaeums, seeing them more as a literary and philosophical society than a traditional mechanics’ institute.

It’s interesting that in New South Wales, and Queensland, the term ‘School of Arts’ seems to have been preferred – we even have an example just across the border in Victoria in the Wagunyah School of Arts.

Why School of Arts in New South Wales, and Athenaeum in Victoria I have no idea – it might be interesting to plot out the distribution of the terms on a map…