asked the General Board to dismiss him. The parents of forty-two of the forty-six school children signed a memorial to the General Board stating that Roe had their full confidence, but the request of the local Board was endorsed nonetheless, and Roe was dismissed. Having been dismissed from his post, Roe was now able to speak freely on the education system in which he had worked. On 28 January 1871, he wrote a long letter to the Fremantle Herald, outlining a series of recommendations for education reform. He proposed: That attendance should be made compulsory; That the ages of attendance should be raised; That good books and teaching aids should be provided, instead of the current "execrable rubbish... bad grammar, bad English, bad taste and unutterable tediousness"; That salaries should be raised substantially to attract decent teachers; That qualified inspectors should be appointed to assess the quality of teaching; That teaching should be secular only; That control of the education system should be in the hands of a secular board or minister of education. Later that year, the Elementary Education Act 1871 was passed, and some of Roe's proposals were adopted. Attendance of children who lived within three miles of a school was made compulsory, the ages of attendance was raised, and a system of inspection was introduced. Within his lifetime, Roe would see more of his measures introduced: salaries were raised and large numbers of trained teachers recruited; and responsibility for administration of government schools was passed to a minister of education responsible to parliament. For the next two years Roe and his family remained at Greenough. Susannah Roe continued in her teaching post at South Greenough, and Roe leased a small farm and cut sandalwood. He also acted as agent, auctioneer and clerk for Henry Gray. He also began to work as a local correspondent for the Fremantle Herald, and in 1873 this resulted in an offer of full-time work as a reporter on the newspaper. At the end of the year, Susannah Roe resigned her job as a teacher, and the family moved to Perth, where Roe took up his position with the Herald. Shortly afterwards he joined James Pearce and William Beresford as co-editors. He worked at the paper for the rest of his life, by which time Beresford had died, and Pearce had sold the Herald to the Inquirer. Susannah Roe died in 1887. James