Gilles Street Primary, a state heritage Adelaide city school from 1900, welcomes whole new world a century later
The South Australian state-heritage-listed original Gilles Street Prinary School building from 1900 in Gilles Street, Adelaide city. Inset left: The school's Lower 2 class from 1923. Inset right: "The world in our city school" with more than 40 different cultural backgrounds represented in Gilles Street's New Arrival programme from 1997.
Inset images courtesy State Library of South Australia and Gilles Street Primary School
Gilles Street Primary, South Australian state heritage listed as one of Adelaide city’s oldest schools from 1900, reflected a very changed world by the end of the 20th Century.
In 1997, the school in Gilles Street took on the New Arrivals programme, taking students arriving in South Australia from around the world and representing more than 40 different cultural backgrounds. The school's two components became a mainstream Reception to Year 6 school and an Intensive English Language Centre giving a 12-month course for new arrivals but also teaching Aboriginal English.
Gilles Street Primary School, opened in 1900 in Adelaide city’s southeast, was another example of work within economic restraints by South Australian government superintendent of public buildings C.E Owen Smyth. Not a trained architect, Smyth, as superintendent of public buildings (1886-1920), oversaw the drawings for several prominent Adelaide city buildings, most notably the South Australian School of Mines and Industries building (later Brookman building) that opened on North Terrace in 1903.
Gilles Street school's original heritage-listed building had three large schoolrooms, two classrooms and an infants classroom with gallery. Its carefully detailed edifice in red brick with limestone dressings exemplified Owen Smyth’s concern “with designing the finest buildings possible within financial constraints”. The Gilles Street school – a brick single storey with Murray Bridge stone banding – had been created in that style and restraints. It had aspects of the Gothic revival (or an Arts and Crafts version of it) and continued the architectural idiom of Adelaide’s earlier model schools. First conceived when a site was bought in 1881, Gilles Street school construction didn’t begin until mid 1899, with E. Fricker the contractor for the £3,182 build.
When inspectors visited in July 1900, there were 588 students in a school designed for 500. The school’s demographics meant many children educated in this school were at military age when World War I broke out in 1914. By 1917, the school had an honour board naming former students (and teachers) killed in the war. Another honour board acknowledged former students killed later in the war.
Overcrowding remained a problem at the school so a new infant building was opened in 1919 plus an extra primary school building in 1926. In 1918, the Glover Playground in the city south park lands was opened and used by the school for “open air exercises”.
From 1920 until 1961, there were two separate schools: Gilles Street Practising and the Gilles Street Infant Practising. Both were important as practising schools for student teachers. This era saw Gilles Street buildings also used for the start of other education department branches, such as the correspondence school, girls' special classes, the deaf blind unit, the language centre and the curriculum unit.
In 1962, the two practising schools were amalgamated into Gilles Street Primary School. After a state government review in 1994-95 and Sturt Street Primary School closing in 1996, the New Arrivals Program transferred to Gilles Street Primary School in 1997. In 2004, Sturt Street reopened as the Sturt Street Community School educating children from birth to Year 7.
Gilles Street Primary remembered its past by actively comemmorating Anzac Day. In 2023, an original Union Jack flag was presented again to the school, 100 years after it was originally given.