WHITE ELEPHANTS CAN LAST
It was a cold, windy Monday morning, but there were Festivities in Arnold Street, Carlton on 2 September 1889. Two hundred and fifty youngsters dressed in their Sunday best, parents, teachers, dignitaries and honoured guests braved the weather to witness the inauguration of State School 2955, Princes Hill.
James Robertson, chairman of the Carlton School Board of Advice, began the ceremonies. In his speech, he pointed out that this was the sixth school to be opened in Carlton. With the suburb’s rapid growth, there were 5000 students on the rolls of the Carlton schools, and almost 4000 were regular attenders. For the rest — the families who drifted from suburb to suburb and ‘sadly neglected’ their children’s schooling — Robertson urged the Department of Public Instruction and its truant officer to ‘take that class in hand’ and enforce the compulsory provisions of the 1872 Education Act.
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 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.
Yet the joyful scenes of 1889 and 1973 are not the whole story of the making of Princes Hill Primary and Secondary Schools. They give little hint of the tribulations that accompanied the building of ‘Prinny Hill’, as it has become affectionately known to generations of students. The construction of the school fell into four main phases — the building of the old Arnold Street school, the extension of the infants’ school to Pigdon Street in 1924, the erection of new buildings at Pigdon Street in 1959-62 and Arnold Street in 1962-4 and, finally, the replacement of Arnold Street’s burnt—out shell by a modern, modular building in 1973. In every case the new buildings only arrived after overcrowding had become acute, and each improvement required a massive lobbying effort. The malaise set in between 1887 and 1889, when the ‘old’ school’s establishment was delayed by self-interested elements in the local community. It was perpetuated by the Education Department bureaucracy’s indifference to the welfare of the school and the Public Works Department’s reluctance to provide for the physical needs of students and staff. Slow decision—making and long delays were the order of the day, if not of the century. Wider social, economic and political problems also took their toll on the schools. But in spite of these impediments the Princes Hill Primary School and Secondary College have grown in reputation and enriched the community they serve by providing an environment in which thou- sands upon thousands of young people could exercise their right to a free, secular education. This section traces the history of the Princes Hill schools and of the people who made them what they are.