Headmaster Ben Gates (1915-40) sets high standards for Unley High; at Adelaide's Netherby from 1965
Australian prime minister Julia Gillard was among Unley High School's students.
Image courtesy Unley High School
Unley High School in the Adelaide suburb of Netherby was founded in 1908 – the same year as Norwood and two years after Adelaide, as the oldest South Australian public coeducational high schools.
Initially part of Unley Primary School, the high school gained independence in 1915 under headmaster Ben Gates who remained until 1940 as the school became renowned for discipline and high academic standards. It adopted the light and dark blue colours from early links with Australian rules football club Sturt.
The school’s second site at Kyre Avenue, Mitcham, lacked space and sports grounds, causing a trust associated with the school to buy extra land and a cottage. This became open space, later used by Mitcham Girls High School on Belair Road. The 1930s Depression saw fees introduced for students to attend high school but numbers gradually rose to 869 in 1939.
Unley High was coeducational from the start but most classes were single-sex groups until the late 1960s. During World War II, students engaged in fund raising, with girls knitting for the troops. A parents and citizens association gave parents a more active role beyond the school council appointed by the South Australian government in 1916.
The 1950s baby boom pushed Unley High’s enrolment to more than 2,000 by 1960. The South Australian government began building new high schools from the mid 1950s, including nearby Blackwood, Marion and Daws Road but Unley’s Kyre Avenue site remained inadequate. Land at Netherby, part of the Peter Waite bequest for agricultural education, was finally available for a new Unley High School. Temporary wooden buildings went up there, occupied by girls from 1957. Permanent buildings arrived in 1961. With Mitcham Girls Technical High also starting to occupy the Kyre Avenue site, temporary headmaster Jim Giles decided in 1965 to shift all students to the Netherby campus.
By 1970, the school reached the size it roughly maintained between 1,100 and 1,300 students. Unley High had a $32.5 million expansion, funded by the state government, with Year 7 students to join it in 2022.
Noted students from Unley High School included: Julia Gillard, Australian prime minister; John Bannon and Dean Brown, South Australian premiers; Keith Seamen and Mark Oliphant, South Australian governors; Elliot Johnston QC, South Australian supreme court justice; Bruce Lander, South Australian Independent Commissioner Against Corruption; John McLeay, Australian House of Representatives speaker; Michael Atkinson, South Australian attorney general; Lowitja O’Donoghue, Australian of the Year 1984; Pat Oliphant, cartoonist for The Advertiser and in the USA; Peter Colman, scientist who determined the structure of the influenza virus; Dave Shannon, World War II Dambuster pilot; Joan Beaumont, historian/academic; Keith Briggs, mathematician; Peter Combe, singer/song writer; Simon Goodwin, Australian Football League player and coach; John Halbert and Malcom Greenslade, Sturt Football Cub players; Jeffrey Smart, painter; Joseph Garnett Wood, botanist.
