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Robertson then invited Dr Charles Pearson, Minister of Public Instruction and architect of Victoria’s state school system, to open the school. Pearson began by expressing his satisfaction that 230 students had enrolled in the school that very morning. There had been ‘a good deal of demur’ when the matter of building a school at Princes Hill was first raised, but the Department would be happy to extend the school if students attended in sufficient numbers. Pearson lectured the assembled students on the necessity of attending school, then went on to praise the school’s large playground. If the training of the mind went on in the classroom, he opined, the training of the character occurred in the playground. He expressed the hope that the students would carry into the playground ‘the same feeling of discipline and duty, and the same sense of loyalty to one another, and the same morals, as they exhibited in the classroom’.
Dr Charles Pearson
John Gardiner MLA gave a brief reply. He expressed his gratitude at the large turnout, which had given the lie to those who claimed that a school at Princes Hill would be a ‘white elephant’. He thanked all those who had supported him in his campaign to have the school established.
John Gardiner MLA, in his playing days as captain of Carlton Football Club.
He was followed by Mr Leonard MLA, who echoed Robertson’s call for more truant officers. The official function over, fifty of the ‘gentlemen’ present were invited to lunch in the school building as guests of the Carlton Board of Advice.’ 1 The assembled children were let off for the rest of the day. No doubt many were grateful for the chance to go home and warm their hands by the fire.
Many things have changed since that day. The Arnold Street site, somewhat enlarged, now houses a secondary college rather than an elementary school, and no trace re- mains remains of the old red-brick building, which was destroyed by fire in 1970. To construct the new building, private architects Daryl Jackson and Evan Walker had an apparently simple brief: one million dollars; one acre of land; one year to complete the project.2 A second round of festivities marked the opening of that new building on Sunday 4 November 1973 by the Honourable Lindsay Thompson, Minister of Education under Rupert Hamer. Again, proud dignitaries delivered speeches of congratulation.
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