Riding a horse to school, 1928

• At the time that this photograph was taken horses were still an important mode of transport in rural areas; they enabled isolated children to attend schools that were not within walking distance. The fact that the children in the image are crowded onto the horse suggests that horses were used sparingly, but also that the trip to school would often have been an enjoyable social activity. Horses, however, provided little protection in hot weather or in the cold and rain.
• Attendance at school was compulsory only for children who lived within 3 miles (4.83 km) of a school, but rural children learnt to manage horses at an early age and often rode 5 miles (8.05 km) or more, sometimes through the trackless bush. In many rural areas there were no reliable alternatives such as rail, bus or car, and so the horse was the most efficient means of transport.
• By 1928 the average attendance at the Glass Mountains State School had increased to 50 as settlement in the district increased. The original school, Glass Mountains Provisional, opened in 1906 with ten students and one teacher. The teacher was supplied by the Department of Public Instruction, but locals had to provide the building at their own expense. The school closed in 1907 because of low attendance; it reopened in 1910 as a state school.
• The image illustrates the lack of a regulated school uniform. The children appear to be dressed in their 'best' and may have dressed up especially for the photographer.
• The children's parents were likely to have been involved in the district's major industries of pineapple and tobacco growing or poultry farming. At the time land was increasingly being cleared to accommodate these industries, which were replacing the earlier timber-milling industry.
• The name of the school and the small town came from the district's dramatic series of peaks and hills. Captain James Cook (1728-79) sighted three of the area's most prominent peaks on 17 May 1770 as he sailed up the east coast in his ship, the Endeavour. He named them the Glass Houses because their shapes reminded him of the glass-making furnaces in his native Yorkshire in England.

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