Description

Extended Data

Birth Place

Manoora, South Australia, Australia

Biography

teacher, inspector, unionist and organiser, was born on 8 June 1881 in Manoora, South Australia, sixth daughter of the ten children of Rudolph Alexander Miethke, a schoolmaster, and Emma Caroline (called Louisa), née Schultze. In 1899 Adelaide became a pupil teacher and in 1903-4 attended the University Training College to qualify as a teacher. When the former Women Assistants’ Association (SA) became the Women Teachers’ Association in 1906 Miethke, then teaching at Le Fevre Peninsula Primary School, was elected secretary. She organised letters, petitions and delegations arguing for equal pay for women teachers, then being paid less than three-quarters of the male wage. In August 1914 Miethke, now teaching at Woodville High School, inaugurated a campaign to improve conditions for female high school teachers, not only financially but through the appointment of head mistresses to the large high schools then being planned. She also mobilised schools for war work. Among other activities, her team completed 50,000 horse fly-veils made from old binder twine for the Light Horse in Egypt in 1918. Re-named the Women Teachers Progressive League, the Women Teachers Association held its first congress in May 1915. In her presidential address, Miethke identified with the 'rank and file’ of disillusioned women teachers sick of trying to maintain their ideals while coping with class numbers of ’60, 70, even 80 and 90, active little beings’. One solution, she argued, was to employ more women in the Education Department’s administration, notably as inspectors of schools. She became the first female vice-president of the SA Public School Teachers’ Union the following year. After graduating BA in 1924 she became an inspector of schools, the first woman to be appointed in the state since 1902. For South Australia’s Centenary year (1936), sixty-two women’s societies affiliated to form the Women’s Centenary Council of SA. Miethke, inevitably, was president. She was also one of two women members on the State Centenary Executive Committee. During the year she organised her 'Pageant of Empire’ starring 14,000 school-children. As well, her council raised £5000 to establish the Alice Springs base of the Australian Aerial Medical Service as a memorial to pioneer women, built the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden in Adelaide, funded its statue by Ola Cohn and published A Book of South Australia: Women in the First Hundred Years . 'Addie’ Miethke retired as an inspector of schools in 1941 and devoted all her unflagging energy to charitable, professional and patriotic causes, several of which continued to mobilise large numbers of school children. She edited the school magazine, Children’s Hour , in 1941-46. As president of the state Flying Doctor Service, she devised and single-handedly established the world’s first School of the Air; it began operations from the Alice Springs Higher Primary School in 1950. Her multitudinous official positions included being both state and national president of the National Council of Women. She died at her Woodville home on 4 November 1962, her name, as Edgar and Jones note, 'a byword for organisation’. Writers: Kerr, Joan Date written: 1995 Last updated: 2011

Born

b. 8 June 1881

Summary

Teacher, inspector, unionist and organiser, in South Australia. When the former Women Assistants' Association (SA) became the Women Teachers' Association in 1906 she was elected secretary.

Gender

Female

Died

4-Nov-62

Age at death

81