Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
Many of them belonged to the few large families which, by intermarrying extensively,
bound the congregation together with ties of kinship and established a common
culture among them. Family gatherings at Hazelwood to perform home-made
burlesques set the pattern for social gatherings in the Unitarian Church Hall. 37 And
several members of the congregation were also engaged, according to their lights, in
a variety of educational enterprises outside their own community.
John Baker, one of the church’s 12 founders, and an elected member of South
Australia’s first and second partly elected Legislative Councils, would probably have
liked to make education universally compulsory. In debates on the Constitution
for South Australia, to come into force with self-government in 1857, he sought to
disenfranchise the uneducated. In his speech after laying the foundation stone of the
Unitarian Christian Church in Wakefield Street in 1857, he berated parents who
put their children to work instead of sending them to school, ignoring the financial
necessities of labouring families and asserting that ‘In this colony, where every man
can educate his children, there can be no excuse for the prevalence of ignorance’. 38
Arthur Hardy, another of the church’s founders, erected and presided over a
mechanics institute in the village next to his house and property at Glen Osmond,
aiming to keep his quarry workers out of the public house in the evenings and to
enhance their education. 39 Three other Unitarians were closely associated with the
South Australian Institute which for many years sustained the reputation of being
one of the principal education factors in the colony. 40 The most active of them,
John Howard Clark, also taught and examined students at J.L. Young’s Adelaide
Educational Institution, wrote book reviews, literary articles and comic verses for
the Register, and from 1870 to 1878 was its editor. He joined the South Australian
Society of Arts, and he chaired the meeting which formed the Adelaide Philosophical
Society (later the Royal Society of South Australia), becoming the first secretary
of that would-be august body. 41 His activities offered a Unitarian example to South
Australian society.
However, the Unitarians were educators and disseminators of culture not only
because they were themselves well educated, and not only because such activity
conformed to their church’s teaching; they also had the time and financial resources
to devote to such aims. A few of the congregation were leading colonists. The Bakers,
the Everards, the Hardys and the Martins conformed to Wakefield’s ideal of
the gentleman immigrant who invested in land. They were early colonists, a source
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