Adelaide Miethke

Adelaide Laetitia Miethke (1881-1962), school inspector, was born on 8 June l881 at Manoora, South Australia, sixth daughter among ten children of Emma Caroline (Louisa, born Schultze) and Rudolph Alexander Miethke, Prussian born schoolmaster. Educated at country schools and Woodville Public School, in 1899 she became a pupil-teacher and in 1903-04 attended the University Training College. From her first appointment to the Le Fevre Peninsula primary school she rose in the Education Department, while helping to open career opportunities for women and wider educational choices for girls through her leadership in teachers' unions, speeches and articles.

In 1915 Miss Miethke was founding president of the Women Teachers' League; next year she became first female vice-president of the South Australian Public School Teachers' Union. She was a forceful advocate of salary rises. From 1915 she taught at Woodville High School, from 1920 being senior mistress of the girls' section. She studied part-time for her BA (1924). She believed that 'technically gifted girls should have a chance of developing their bent'. In 1924 she became the first woman appointed inspector of schools since 1902; she was to inspect high schools, including domestic arts classes, and to organise domestic and secretarial training in the home-making (later girls' central) schools which opened in 1925.

Scrupulous and intimidating, she was at the same time brisk and cheerful, encouraging attractive classroom decor. She supervised the gradual move from cooking, household management and dressmaking in central schools to a wider educational emphasis, especially on commercial skills. She prized housewifery but not at the expense of girls' general development. By 1939 she was on the executive of the New Education Fellowship, which explored progressive methods.

In 1936 Miethke was one of two women on the State Centenary Executive Committee and president of the Women's Centenary Council of South Australia, which, as a memorial to pioneer women, raised 5000 pounds to establish the Alice Springs base of the Australian Aerial Medical service. It also built the Pioneer Women's Memorial Garden in Adelaide and published Louise Brown (ed.) A Book of South Australia: Women in the First Hundred Years. Miethke designed and produced a grand Empire pageant, her stentorian voice being suited to rallying 14,000 costumed children on the Adelaide oval. The following year she was appointed OBE.

In l941 she retired as inspector. She devoted herself to charitable, professional and patriotic causes, mobilising schoolchildren in two world wars for fundraising and scrap collection; a 1918 project was the completion of 50,000 horse fly veils, for the Light Horse in Egypt, made from old binder twine. After the 1939-45 war, money remaining from the Schools Patriotic Fund helped buy Adelaide Miethke House for country girls studying in Adelaide, administered by the Young Women's Christian Association, to which Miethke belonged.

President of the state Flying Doctor Service branch, she observed outback children's shyness, had the idea of 'bridging the lonely distance', and devised and singlemindedly established the world's first school of the air, as a branch of the Flying Doctor Service. It began operating from the Alice Springs Higher Primary School in 1950, using individual pedal-wireless sets on remote homesteads to link the children.

She edited the schoolchildren's magazine Children's Hour in 1941-46, and was founding president of the Woodville District Child Welfare Association in 1942. She maintained links with the Girl Guides Association (commissioner, schools division, 1925-39); the National Council of Women (state and national president); the Royal Commonwealth Society and the Catherine Helen Spence (q.v.) Scholarship committee. 'Addie' died at her Woodville home on 4 November 1962, her name a byword for organisation.

Suzanne Edgar and Helen Jones