Alethea May Acason
May married a widower quite late in life and became May Stephenson.
She and Les lived at Forestville and I spent a fair bit of time with
her when I first left school. I cannot remember when she died but I
have a photograph of my son, Ben, and I that she took in 1977 when she
and Les visited us in Canberra. By that time she was walking with a
stick and suffering from stomach cancer so it probably was not too long
after that. When my girls were at North Sydney Primary Lance Richardson
was either principal or deputy principal of the Primary School - that
would have been mid 1960's. He remembered me and immediately asked
after Diana, so our relationship must have been fairly strong in his
mind. He then asked about a surprising number of people he remembered
from our class. Guess some of us made an impression of some sort on
him. (Janet Green)
I have just found a note I had made in an old address book that May
died on 21 November 1986, so she lasted a while after her last visit to
Canberra. Also my daughter has pointed out that Lance Richardson was
neither principal, nor deputy principal but he certainly was a teacher
at North Sydney Demonstration School in the mid to late 60s (Janet
Green)
It was a Wednesday. We always had a question and answer time before
going down to 'sports' at that playground with Roman rings and hard
asphalt surface. Brian and others of my 'friends' knew how naïve I was,
and put me up to asking a question of Miss Acason. "Miss, what is a
prostitute?" I asked in all innocence, not having any idea what the
word meant. Miss Acason, in full flush, with red rising to her eye
level, strode down to where I was sitting, grabbed me by the ear, and
hauled me off into the library next door, and soundly berated me:
"Cohen, you are an obnoxious, precocious... wretch!" There was another
word I have struggled all these years to remember, but maybe it was
blocked out by my innocent tears at the time. (David Cohen)
Miss Acason was not just the schoolmistress figure in the class
photo but also gave much of her personal time to her students. I can
remember her taking me and Diana to see our first ballet 'Coppelia' and
first live Shakespearean play 'Taming of the Shrew' at the weekend.
These photos below were taken during the 1953 school holidays, I think, when
some of the girls, including Margaret and Sarah, spent the day at
Newport Beach with her.
She also continued to mix with many of her students after they left
Fort Street. This was in 1960 at Roseville Chase where she was enjoying
a picnic with some of the girls.
Shorty after leaving school I was quite ill and my mother was overseas.
May somehow heard about this and carried me off to her home where she
fed, nurtured and pampered me back to good health. She was really a
very caring lady and at that time bought the best bread I had ever
tasted. (Janet Green)
AN INTERVIEW WITH MAY'S BROTHER JIM
Exclusive investigative report by Sarah Neal
Jim Acason, now 88, lives in Wareemba , near Five Dock. He was
Alethea May’s older brother. He was born in England but his parents
came to Australia when he was two; his three sisters were born here:
Doreen, now in a nursing home, May born in 1921 and Patricia who lives
in Umina. Alethea was also his mother’s name.
May was born in Dumbleton, which is now Beverly Hills. The family
lived opposite Dumbleton school, a one teacher school, and had a dairy
farm there. The small weatherboard house they lived in is still there.
The area was all bush; there were three sawmills; the nearest train
station was Hurstville. King George’s Road, now a major highway, was
then called Canary Road and was a dirt track. The family used to graze
cows on the common which is now covered by the East Hills railway line.
In the Depression they went broke and had to leave their farm; they
went to live in a shack in Londonderry. There was no such thing as the
dole; they lived on whatever they could grow for themselves in the way
of vegetables – the soil wasn’t very good – cabbage, lettuce, potatoes,
as well as ‘a lot of native food’ – one which they called ‘native
spinach’, a weed we know as ‘fat hen’, which they boiled up with
potatoes. Jim caught rabbits using traps, snares and ferrets.
Jim wrote a short book about growing up in the Depression – printed
a few copies for his friends and great-grand-children – but it wasn’t
about his family at all. He said there were a lot of bad things about
the Depression, but not criminal things; they had no locks on the house
and neighbours always helped each other, swapping food and sharing what
they had. He said a lot has been written about the Depression but you
had to experience it to write about it.
May’s mother was not well educated but was a very good pianist –
self-taught – and when they were living in Petersham she accompanied
Peter Dawson and Stanley Clarkson at concerts a few times at Sydney
Town Hall.
The children did most of their primary schooling by correspondence;
they moved to Sydney in 1931 when May was 10 and Jim was 14, and went
to Petersham School –‘their first time at school’. May – ‘the bright
one of the family’ – then went to Fort Street High on a scholarship.
There were only four high schools then – you either went to a high
school or a technical school. She got a scholarship to Teachers College
and was then sent to teach at a one teacher school – nine pupils – at a
town called Boloko, near Deniliquin. Boloko was the name of a sheep
station owned by the Kidman family and May boarded with the Kidmans.
May taught at a number of different schools. She applied for an
overseas exchange and taught overseas for two years. She'd got an A in
French in the Leaving so wanted to teach in France but found her French
couldn't cope with speaking in France; she taught there for a while
then taught in England, somewhere near Oxford. It was on the strength
of her overseas experience that she was selected as a specialist
teacher and got to teach at Fort Street for six to eight years.
She met her husband through teaching his children at Forestville;
their mother had died many years earlier and they were pretty wild
kids; it was a very sad situation as they hated her. After she married
she left full-time teaching and became a casual teacher at Roseville
East but it seemed to Jim as if she was still working full-time.
(Sarah, July 31 2006) Sadly, Jim Acason passed away in March 2008
