Manual Work and Self-sufficiency
At the time of Dart’s headmastership, Ballarat Grammar was a small Church of England boys’ school of up to two hundred or so students, at least half of them boarders from country towns and farms, especially in the Mallee, Wimmera and Western District regions of Victoria.
Dart was an active gardener who valued manual work. He encouraged students in outdoors projects and in small farming enterprises which developed the school’s self-sufficiency, for example by producing vegetables and eggs for the school kitchen. The school ran a piggery and at one stage kept two draught horses. In the early 1960s, some senior boys designed and built a students’ common room that later became the school’s library for a time, and from the mid-1960s students and teachers laid many square metres of brick paving around the school.
Read more about this topic: G. F. J. Dart
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