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Although it had a long gestation, the Arnold Street school’s change of status is not surprising. Calls for a High School in the Princes Hill district were first heard in 1913-4, and were repeated in the 1940s. The arguments raised are familiar: the population of Princes Hill and North Carlton was growing, as was the demand for secondary education, with approximately 95 per cent of grade 6 continuing into secondary classes; Arnold Street’s proximity to the University of Melbourne made it ideal as a High School. In 1944, the Department had responded by elevating the Arnold Street school to the status of a Central School, allowing it to take students in the first two years of the high school course. But its conversion to a full high school had to wait on the major changes in Victorian secondary educational policy that occurred after the Second World War.2
The Victorian state secondary school system was inaugurated in 1905, with the opening of the Melbourne Continuation School, later to become Melbourne High. In the next four years, five more high schools were opened in 25 country centres. The Education Act of 1910 signalled a more systematic approach to state secondary education. After the Act was passed, Higher Elementary Schools, district High Schools, Preparatory Trade Classes, Trade Schools and Technical Schools immediately began to open and new curricula were developed. In 1912 alone, eight new high schools and seventeen higher elementary schools were opened.
The new system, however, was far from being comprehensive. Director-General Tate saw state post-primary schooling mainly as vocational preparation for agriculture and the trades; he was not prepared to countenance the establishment of a system of secondary schools that would compete with the private schools in the academic curriculum. This bias was compounded by pressure from country MPs and from the private schools, which feared that they would be eclipsed by ‘the wealth of the State’." 3 As a result, all the high schools established in 1912, and a majority of those that followed in the next decade, were outside the metropolitan area.’ 4 The Department’s preference for country high schools and its hopes to develop an agricultural curriculum persisted for many years, in spite of clear evidence that the agricultural curriculum was not a success and that enrolments in the country districts were waning.5 In 1929, only ten of Victoria’s 36 high schools and two of its 48 higher elementary schools were in the metropolitan area." 6 Tight budgetary restrictions in the 1930s and during the war made it impossible to redress the imbalance: only one new high school was opened in the 1930s and another during the war though, significantly, both were in suburban areas.
The Department was caught completely unprepared for the massive increases in enrolments after the Second World War. The combined effects of the post war baby boom, immigration and growing student retention rates sent school enrolments soaring. Primary school enrolments increased from 185,798 in 1950 to 290,027 in 1959; in the same period, high school figures had jumped from 37,019 to 82,004 an increase of 130 per cent.7 The increase in the secondary sector placed immense pressure on the Education Department to accommodate these children. High schools were being opened everywhere: the Department set 26 a record in 1958 and 1959, opening sixteen new high schools each year. But the Department was facing a losing battle, especially in the outer metropolitan suburbs, where new housing developments were burgeoning.8
By 1958-9 there was an urgent need for secondary schools in inner suburbs such as Fitzroy and Carlton. After a period of depopulation, ‘slum’ demolition and general socio-economic decline before the Second World War,9 these inner suburbs were now experiencing a new growth. Fresh waves of migration to Carlton, North Carlton and Princes Hill were again increasing pressure on Carlton’s schools.
Arnold Street’s elevation in 1944 from Elementary to Central School formalised the ‘high school’ curriculum that had been introduced in 1915 and added to the pressure for a secondary school in the inner northern region. Although Princes Hill had been designated as a natural ‘feeder’ for University High School, the latter school’s wide appeal and very restrictive selection limited the number of local students it could accept. And there were not many alternatives nearby: Coburg, founded in 1916, Northcote Boys’, founded in 1926, and Brunswick Girls’, founded in 1924, were all a considerable distance away. Nearby technical schools included Brunswick Boys’, founded in 1911, Collingwood, founded in 1911, and Emily McPherson, founded in 1906. In 1953, Moreland High was opened; in 1958, Fitzroy was elevated from Higher Elementary to High School status; Princes Hill followed in 1959, and Brunswick in 1964.10
The decision to separate Princes Hill Primary and High schools was accompanied by an undertaking by the Education Department to provide a new building at Pigdon Street as a matter of the highest priority. Nevertheless, in December 1958, the school’s representatives were informed that tenders were unlikely to be called before July 1959, and no firm date could be given. In November 1959, the undertaking was extended to July 1960. Meanwhile, the senior primary grades had to stay on at Arnold Street; even the two headmasters were forced to share an office. The new building at Pigdon Street was finally opened on 16 November 1960.
Positioned to the north of the 1924 building on an east27 east west axis, the building cost £33,643. It was constructed according to a 1953 Public Works Department innovation known as Light Timber Construction, with timber stud walls clad with concrete tiles two inches thick. The building was simply designed: it is divided by a long central corridor with classrooms on each side.” 11 The offices and staff room are positioned in the centre of the building. The eight standardised classrooms, each twenty-four feet square, give little scope for layout variations, and initially the building had no specialist or small-group rooms. Integration classes are held in the staff room. Ample windows along the north and south walls of classrooms provide natural light, but they limit wall space for work displays. Specialist rooms followed much later, thanks largely to parents’ initiatives. An Arts and Craft Centre was built in 1972, after parents raised $7000 to supplement an Education Department grant of 5156000$6000. The next year, money was collected to create the Adventure Playground. A decade of working and waiting for a library at the primary school was finally rewarded in May 1980.
On 24 July 1964, the concrete cast of the school’s name and number, until then fixed to the front of the Arnold Street building, was shifted by the Public Works to its new home. This had been first requested on 18 April 1962.12
Meanwhile, accommodation was already running short at Arnold Street. When the Education Department declared Princes Hill a High School, it anticipated net enrolments of ' 500 pupils.’3 13 Reality proved to be quite different. In 1958, enrolments in the Central School numbered 400. In 1959, 494 students enrolled: 212 in form 1, 183 in form 2 and 99 in form 3. Of these, 236 were new pupils. The numbers increased each succeeding year, as the school developed its programme to cater for older students. There were 560 students in 1960, 689 in 1962, 748 in 1963. In 1964, the first year that form 6 was offered, 833 passed through the school’s doors. In five years, the school’s numbers had increased by more than half.14
The influx arose partly from the increase in the primary school intake and partly from Austra1ia’s Australia’s expanded immigration policy after the Second World War. Pigdon Street, Lee Street, Rathdowne Street and South Brunswick were 28 primary contributors. Others regularly feeding Princes Hill High School included King Street and Errol Street, North Melbourne, and North and Central Brunswick.15 Children of immigrants were another source. There had already been large numbers of Central European Jewish children attending Princes Hill during the 1930s and 1940s, and Italians and Greeks, Russians, Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Rumanians, Yugoslavs, Cypriots and Australian-born shared the classrooms of the 1950s and 1960s. "’ 16
Another factor in the - increase during the 1960s was the construction of high-density Housing Commission estates in North Carlton and North Melbourne. In 1962, D. Lovegrove MLA estimated that these estates would add 791 primary and 238 secondary children to Carlton’s schools. The majority of children of secondary age were expected to attend Princes Hill.17
Overwhelmed by these odds, the Department capitulated in 1960 and agreed to provide a new building. It was finally occupied in February 1964. Despite all efforts, the Education Department could not keep up with the demand for secondary places and classrooms, which was running 60 per cent ahead of its 1950 estimates. By now, more schools were being opened than were being built. The Department’s only recourse was temporary quarters wherever they could be found: in portable classrooms, in leased halls, in buildings already occupied by another school, in staff rooms, in shelter-sheds and in specialised classrooms.18
To cope with the delay, Arnold Street once again resorted to dispersed education. In October 1959, Headmaster Bill Johnston requested permission to investigate leasing suitable available premises in the neighbourhood. These included church halls, the Carlton Cricket Ground Pavilion, and the Exhibition Bui1ding.’9 19 By 1963, his students A occupied five different locations. Arnold Street catered for the majority of the students. Classes were conducted in the old building, in portables in the schoolyard and in 51 Arnold Street, the old house in the south-east corner of the yard, where the tenant had been ousted to make way for small senior classes. Senior classes were also taken in the school’s she1ter-shed, hallways of the main building and the staff room‘. The school also reoccupied C Block, a dilapidated shoe factory on the junction of the lanes behind Arnold and Richardson Streets, previously used as the Sloyd and Cookery centre.
'Dispersed education’: the various locations of Princes Hill High School in the early 1960s
Form IL 1L was housed in that old standby, St Michael’s Hall, leased for £700 per annum. Eight classrooms were leased for £40 per week from Peretz, the Jewish school in Drummond Street, to accommodate 200 form 3 students. In 1962, Pigdon Street returned the hospitality of 1959-60, and accepted two portables on its grounds.2" 20 To appease grumbling teachers, the Schoo1’s 30 Advisory Council agreed to reimburse staff members 9d. per mile petrol money for using their cars to travel between annexes. The Education Department refused to contribute. When news came in 1960 that a new building would be provided, members of the newly formed Advisory Council began to dream of a ‘Canberra’ model school with a gymnasium, assembly hall and other coveted facilities. No such dreams materialised. Not only were the assembly hall and gymnasium refused, but there was no sign of work commencing on the building. On 15 November 1960, a delegation called on Sir John Bloomfield, the Minister of Education, to press the urgency for a new building. The delegation Headmaster Johnston and John Polglaze, the chairman of the Advisory Council - received no satisfaction. The Minister would not commit himself to a date for the calling of tenders, and the Department would not even accept the Advisory Council’s offer of £5000 over ten years to pay for an assembly hall and canteen on a £1 for £1 basis.2’ 21 The Minister did, however, agree to buy land. One plan mooted was to buy houses in Garton Street behind the school to provide a corridor for students to Princes Park. By March 1962, tenders had still not been called. The building originally planned for completion by early 1962, was now unlikely to be occupied before the beginning of 1964.22
The initial plan was to construct a two-storey building on the corner of Arnold and Richardson Streets?" 23 That was replaced with a building positioned on a north-south axis along the rear boundary of the school property. According to popular myth, the building, erected at a budget of £140,000, had been intended for Kew High School. The desperate situation at Princes Hill, however, forced the Department to adapt the plan to that site. The rear boundary was the only available space that would accommodate the long, rectangular building?" .24
This building was one of the first in the latest Education Department/ Public Works Department developmental plans for inner suburban schools. The Light Timber Construction plan, which required ample space to lay out a school complex (as for example at Newlands High School, which was built in 1971), had to be adjusted to fit the smaller inner-suburban sites. The Light Timber Construction plan the long corridor with basic-sized rooms leading 31 off remained the nucleus of the design, but now buildings were multi-levelled rather than spread out on ground level. The buildings also appeared far more solid and permanent than the earlier versions. Other examples built about this time include Kew, Prahran, Caulfield and Chadstone High Schools.25
The three-storey building offered two fully equipped science rooms, two art rooms, a domestic science block, a manual training class for woodwork and mechanical drawing, four general classrooms, a staff room, book storeroom and general office. A single-storey link connecting the two buildings at the north end of the site housed the offices of the Principal and Senior Mistress. On Saturday, 6 June 1964, the Minister for Education, The Honourable Sir John Bloomfield, declared the new wing open. Dignitaries present included the Director of Education, Mr A. McDone11McDonell, Lord Mayor Curtis and school officials. The Mothers’ Club of Princes Hill High School made the afternoon tea. 0ne
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On the fateful Sunday morning of8 of 8 February 1970, the old Arnold Street building was set alight.26 The fire began about 2 a.m. Debra Hilton, who was sitting in a car outside , her parents’ house, a stone’s throw from the school, was the first to raise the alarm. Awakened by his sister, Chris Hilton telephoned Alleyne Sier with the news that his school was on fire. According to Chris Hilton, Sier’s reply was, ‘Right-o; I’ll get my keys and be right over’.27 At first, the Arson Squad attributed the fire to an accidental shorting-out of power wires in the roof.28 A spate of school fires during that year, however, aroused suspicions that an arsonist had been at work.29 The destruction was complete. The top floor, consisting of six classrooms, was entirely destroyed, and the ground-floor classrooms were extensively damaged by smoke and water. The building was rendered useless; it had to be razed to the ground. The fire was the climax of a long debate between the school’s representatives and the Education Department about the fate of the old building. Moves to replace the building had begun even before the 1964 building was completed.
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