ABSTRACT
In January of 1887 the head teacher of the boys’ section of the Newtown Public School, then the largest in the colony of New South Wales (NSW), ordered from the Education Department some 150 ‘framed slates’ of various sizes to supplement the school’s supply. What followed was an extended, and sometimes strained, series of communications in the form of official memoranda between the head teacher and his departmental superiors in which the cost and quality of slates, as well as the care required in their storage and use, were debated. In the 19th century, the slate was a key material object in the teaching and learning of literacy in schools for the general population as they became compulsory, secular and free. This series of memoranda provides a unique opportunity to foreground an often-underplayed factor in the history of literacy education – the role and function of the material objects that were involved in different times and places.
