First Day of Term 1 - Stirling East Primary School (1961)

The new school year opened at Stirling East Primary School, and the small forest school filled again with the children of the district. The older pupils returned to classrooms they already knew; the youngest came for the first time, walked or driven up to the gates by their parents, to begin their schooling among strangers their own size. It was the ordinary beginning that every Stirling childhood passed through, come round again for another year's intake.

The year was the school's hundredth. A century after it had opened as a single room on the rising eastern ground, it took in another reception class on the same site — a larger school now, grown to a cluster of classrooms, and fuller than it had been in living memory. The post-war Hills were filling with young families, and the children arriving that summer were the babies of that growth, a numerous cohort starting together at the opening of a decade.

A first day of term had its unchanging shape. There were the children who arrived certain and the children who arrived in tears; the names read out from a new roll; the youngest sorted into their class and shown their pegs and their places; the long routines of letters and numbers and lining up begun once more. Outside, the tall gums stood over the yard in the dry heat of the new year, and the Hills went about the first ordinary morning of another school year.

For the district, the day was unremarkable and quietly foundational. A whole cohort of Stirling children began their schooling together that morning — in the same rooms, under the same teachers, on the same patch of high ground — one year's share of the district's young entering the institution the Hills had kept for exactly this purpose for a hundred years. The school did it again, as it always had, without ceremony.