The school was 26 feet long and 13 feet wide, with a gabled iron roof, four small windows, internal pine lining, a dressed hardwood floor, and a weatherboard exterior. A wooden fireplace, pine door and a small ceiling vent completed the structure. It was equipped with two outhouses and a small fenced playground which abutted the tramline. A 600-gallon water tank was added in 1910, and in the following year a sand tray and observation case for Nature study were obtained. Inside, Department-issue desks and a portable blackboard were in place, along with a master's desk and stool, two book presses, an easel and a notation frame. Increasing enrolments by 1911 had some children sitting on boxes until two more desks arrived.⁹

Henry's Mill site, Great Otway National Park, 1999. Photograph Peter Davies

Deterioration in the school building was apparent within a few years. It is unclear whether this was due to poor design and construction, inappropriate materials, weathering, neglect, daily wear and tear or a combination of these. By 1913, 100 bricks were needed to mend the rear of the wooden fireplace, and a few years later the playground fence was in disrepair. In 1916, only eight years after its construction, there were requests from the parents, District Inspector and a local Member of Parliament to replace the 'antiquated little school room'.¹⁰ The lighting, ventilation and floor space were by then regarded as inadequate and unhygienic by the school committee. The Education Department provided no maintenance allowance because it leased, rather than owned, the building. By 1923, however, it had agreed to increase the annual rental to £10 to permit the necessary improvements.¹¹

A small wooden hut had been built in the school yard by the mill proprietors, WR Henry and Son. It served as a residence for Leo O'Kelly and his successor, Clifford Stanford. Subsequent teachers boarded with a family nearby, and converted the hut into a woodshed.¹² Such basic accommodation for teachers was typical at bush sawmills. Blanche Murphy's hut at the Rubicon school, for example, was only nine feet square, built of unlined weatherboards, and freely admitted 'rain water and mountain air'.¹³ The teacher's hut at the Mississippi Mill was 'nothing much better than a Noah's Ark upon the waters. It is built nearly in the bed of the creek, and water flows right past it and nearly around it'.¹⁴ The very basic teacher accommodation provided at sawmill settlements, however, was probably typical of that available to most teachers appointed to remote rural schools in Victoria during this period. Frank Tate, head of the Education Department at the time, referred to teachers' quarters as being well named, mere 'vulgar fractions' of homes.¹⁵

Teachers at Otway Saw Mills School also had to cope with increasing numbers of pupils. Enrolments had risen to 16 by 1908, to 25 by 1916, and by 1923 there were 38 pupils crammed into the small schoolroom.¹⁶ Teachers' correspondence indicates not that family sizes were increasing, but that more workers with families were based at the mill, attracted by the provision of a school for their children. Children thus eventually formed about one-third of the mill's population. In addition, several mothers sent their under-age three- and four-year-olds to school as well, prompting teachers to protest that parents were avoiding their responsibilities and that the schoolroom was turning into a nursery as a result.¹⁷

Teachers
Otway Saw Mills was a single-teacher school. Fifteen successive head teachers taught there during its nineteen years of operation. All were male. Many were young, generally with limited teaching experience. Some were still in the process of gaining formal qualifications, which generally involved a two-year course at the Melbourne Teachers' College. Nevertheless, they all had at least some training in such subjects as English, arithmetic and algebra, domestic science, history, geography and physics. A few of the mill workers, on the other hand, were illiterate.¹⁸ There was thus often a gulf in the education level between teachers and other members of the mill community. Some of the teachers clearly resented their low level of pay, and most felt that their education entitled them to better living and working conditions than those prevailing at Henry's Mill.