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Six-foot-wide corridors lined with pressed tin directed movement within the school.51 Externally, the decorative features . that adorned the central upstairs windows of the 1889 building were not reproduced in the extension. It is clear that the Education Department responded belatedly to current community needs rather than planning so as to anticipate future growth. The first stage of Arnold Street was built to accommodate 300 scholars; 250 arrived on the first day. The second stage added another 200 places, when figures were already 500 plus. The third stage provided 502 seats, when the average attendance was 1000. It was to be another seventeen years before the students of Princes Hill would have room to spare.
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Classroom decorations became acceptable again. A letter to the Argus from an ex-pupil led the way at Princes Hill. Comparing the ‘handsome collection of masterpieces’ adorning the walls of SS Macarthur in Ballarat with the blank and barren walls of Princes Hill, Donald McDonald exhorted all past students of Princes Hill to show their 23 appreciation of their old school by purchasing pictures and presenting them to Princes Hill.76 Requests for money to buy pictures were made periodically to the Department. In 1956, a subsidy of £50 was used to purchase sixteen prints for the Infants’ Department. Among them were Heysen’s ‘Summer’ and, ‘A Summer’s Day’, Corot’s ‘The Bent Tree’, Young’s ‘Evening Sunlight’, and Wood’s ‘Seascape’.77 Scientific and technological developments also made an impression. Despite the general use of electricity‘in electricity in the community, and even though wiring had been installed some time before 1936. (defectively, as it transpired), in 1945 the Department refused to install electric lighting in the classrooms at Pigdon Street. Electric lighting had been connected at Arnold Street in 1912 to provide light for the evening classes. A wireless was bought in 1936, a film projector was promised for 1946, a public-address system was installed in 1947, and a strip projector was supplied in 1959. But here, as in so many other areas, the facilities provided at Princes Hill lagged far behind the times.