Founding and Opening of Stirling East Primary School

Stirling East Primary School opened in the Adelaide Hills district of Stirling East, in country that had been under European settlement for barely two decades. The district was then a working patchwork of timber-getters, orchardists and market gardeners clearing farms from the stringybark forest on the high, cool country above Adelaide, and the school was among the first permanent institutions its families built. It began as a single room with a single teacher, raised on the rising eastern ground that gave the district and the school their name.

Its establishment followed a sustained push by local parents and landholders, who wanted their children taught without sending them down the ranges to the city or relying on the itinerant and church arrangements that had served the scattered Hills families until then. A permanent public school was at once a practical necessity for a district that meant to stay and a declaration that it intended to.

The children who gathered for the first lessons were drawn almost entirely from the orchard, timber and dairy families of the surrounding country, some walking a considerable distance through the forest to reach the door. The teaching was elementary and the equipment minimal — reading, writing, arithmetic and Scripture, conducted by rote in a single cold room heated by an open fire.

With its opening, the Stirling East district gained its first permanent public school: a single teacher, a slate-and-fire room, and a yard of trodden earth among the gums, set down on the high forested country as the fixed centre its families had wanted for the education of their children.