150th Anniversary Celebration – Stirling East Primary School

Stirling East Primary School marked its sesquicentenary — a hundred and fifty years, to the day, since the single-room forest school had first opened. The celebration was held on the school's original ground in the Adelaide Hills, the same rising eastern site it had occupied since its founding, and it drew several hundred people: current pupils and staff, the families of the district, and former scholars from across its long history.

The heart of the day was the return of the old scholars. Former pupils came back across every decade the school could reach, some of them now in their eighties, to walk the small grounds where they had once been five years old. Displays of class photographs, head-teacher registers and worn roll books traced the run of names the school had kept since the colony's early years, and for a few hours the whole succession of the district's children — from the first slates to the present class — stood gathered in one place.

What the occasion honoured was continuity itself. Few institutions in the Adelaide Hills had run as long or as unbroken — through colony, state and federation, depression, war and the slow suburbanisation of the ranges — and the school had taught some local families three and four generations deep, grandparents and parents and children who had each begun on the same patch of ground. For one winter day the school stopped to count its own length, and found a hundred and fifty years of the district's children standing in its grounds.