Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Acquiring a room of her own
ably encountered, too, the difficulties that the depression created for anyone trying
to make a living through education. The Independent churchman, T. Q. Stow, whose
Classical Academy was one of only 11 pronounced worthy of its name in 1841, was
having to farm a lease on the River Torrens to support himself during those years. 49
However, by the time Spence was 17, late in 1843, she had gained employment as
a governess to the children of three government officials: the Post-Master General
(Henry Watts), the Surveyor-General (E. C. Frome), and Grey’s Private Secretary
(Alfred Mundy). She taught each family for two hours each day five days a week, and
she was paid sixpence an hour. 50 In 1843, the South Australian School Society could
not find parents who could afford sixpence a week for school fees. Four years later
when free enterprise capitalist development was again winning profits and wealthy
colonists formed the South Australian Proprietary School, they fixed its fees at ten
guineas a year, equivalent to about four shillings a head a week. 51 Spence was earning
15 shillings a week four years earlier. It is little wonder that she was proud of her
income. ‘My mother said she never felt the bitterness of poverty after I began to earn
money’, she boasted. 52
Spence continued governessing for three years. Then, in 1846, the Spence family’s
fortunes altered again. Spence’s brothers abandoned their attempt at farming.
William eventually left South Australia for the west and never returned. John moved
back to Adelaide and found work as a clerk in the South Australian Bank, at £100 a
year – more than three times Catherine’s earnings. David was to arrive from Scotland
at about the end of that year, to find work in one of the Adelaide offices administering
mining of the newly-discovered copper at Burra, 90 miles north of Adelaide.
And Spence decided that, at the age of 20, she could do better than governessing by
opening a school. Her sister Mary was nearly 16 years old, and her mother could
help. So she set about arranging an establishment like those of her aunt Mary and
her own teacher Miss Phinn, on the other side of the world. Her school opened at
the beginning of May 1846. Her father, she recalled, ‘thought that our difficulties
were over’. On 29 May, he died. 53
David Spence’s death, at the age of 57, meant that any expectations that his family
had retained, of his fulfilling the conventional patriarchal function of breadwinner,
died too. From that time, the Spences looked to their own resources for their
livelihoods. Those resources embraced not only the financial help given to them by
their aunts in Scotland, but also their households, their friends and their paid work.
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