Blackwood Primary School

Founding and the Timber Schoolhouse

Blackwood in the years before the First World War was a scattered settlement on the edge of the Adelaide Hills, its families drawn from the orchards along the creek flats, the railway that climbed through the gullies towards Belair, and the modest public-service households that had begun to commute into the city by train. Children walked or rode considerable distances to reach the nearest schools, and by 1915 local residents had begun petitioning the South Australian Education Department for a school of their own.

The Department approved construction of a small timber schoolhouse on Shepherds Hill Road in 1916. The building was a single room with a verandah, a rainwater tank, a potbelly stove for the winter months and a long-drop toilet at the back of the block. Blackwood School opened in March 1917 with thirty-two pupils and one teacher, Miss Ethel Wainwright.

Wainwright was twenty-six when she took up the post and remained head teacher until 1931. She ran the room with firm discipline and a practical turn of mind, and she made unusual use of the surrounding country. Nature study was her particular conviction: pupils kept specimen books of leaves, seeds and insects, recorded rainfall from the school tank, and walked the gully behind the schoolhouse to learn the names of the trees. Children came on foot from Coromandel Valley or by train to Eden Hills station on the Adelaide-to-Belair line, and Wainwright kept the morning roll open until the train had arrived.

Through the 1920s and 1930s the school grew slowly with the district. A second classroom was added in 1926, and enrolment passed seventy by the end of the decade. The Depression years were lean. Several families left the district, others could not afford boots or books, and the school's small fundraising committee spent most of its efforts on clothing and lunches for children whose parents were out of work. A succession of head teachers followed Wainwright through the 1930s and the war years, none staying longer than six years.

Post-War Growth and the Kilvington Years

The suburban expansion that followed the Second World War transformed Blackwood. Orchards were subdivided into housing blocks, young families arrived from the city and from overseas, and the school that had served a few dozen children found itself unable to seat them all. Portable classrooms appeared on the oval, and classes of more than forty were common by the early 1950s.

Bernard Kilvington was appointed headmaster in 1952. A former RAAF officer who had taught Latin before the war, he brought a military regard for order and an unexpectedly broad view of what a primary education should contain. Under Kilvington the curriculum widened beyond the basics to include structured science lessons, art and music, and he lobbied the Department relentlessly for permanent buildings. His persistence was rewarded in 1957, when a red-brick classroom wing and an assembly hall were completed on the Shepherds Hill Road site. The original timber schoolhouse was kept and turned over to storage and craft.

Enrolment passed three hundred by 1964. The school's community grew with it. The Parents and Friends Association, led for much of the 1960s by Mrs Dorothy Minter, raised the money for the school's first library, organised weekend working bees to lay garden beds and install playground equipment, and established the fundraising fete that ran each spring for decades afterwards.

Kilvington's most enduring contribution was the school's connection to Belair National Park. Regular excursions to the park began in the late 1950s for bush studies and nature journalling, a deliberate echo of Wainwright's methods, and the annual sports carnival was moved there in 1961. The Belair days became fixtures of the Blackwood calendar, and for many former pupils they remained the strongest memory of their schooling. Kilvington retired in 1972 after twenty years in the post.

The 1970s and the Farquhar Principalship

Raymond Hosking succeeded Kilvington in 1972 and led the school through a period of administrative change. The Education Department's reorganisation of the decade replaced the title of headmaster with that of principal, introduced school councils with formal parent representation, and pressed schools to broaden their teaching methods. Hosking was a careful administrator rather than an innovator. He managed a second wave of enrolment pressure with more portable classrooms, oversaw the establishment of the school council, and kept the school steady. He retired at the end of 1978.

Lenora Farquhar was appointed principal in 1979. She came to Blackwood with a reputation as an advocate of integrated learning, the approach under which literacy, social studies, art and drama were taught around a single shared theme across a term. Farquhar introduced it across the school within two years, with themes such as sustainability, storytelling and Australian history, and the change won her both admirers and critics among staff and parents. She also strengthened the school's music and drama programmes and staged the first of its end-of-year performances in the 1957 hall.

When the school opened for the 1981 year on 27 January, it enrolled 312 students from Reception to Year 7 under a teaching staff of thirteen. Forty-one children began their schooling that day across two Reception classes. The figures held broadly steady through the decade, with enrolment moving between roughly two hundred and ninety and three hundred and twenty as the district's families aged and were replaced.

Farquhar retired in 1988 after nine years as principal. Her integrated learning programme survived her and remained part of the school's teaching for the following two decades.

School Life in the 1980s

The Blackwood Primary of the 1980s was shaped as much by its setting as by its curriculum. The school sat among gum trees on a sloping block, and the bush that bordered the oval was treated by generations of pupils as an extension of the playground. Recess and lunch were given over to four-square, cricket against the toilet block wall and improvised bushcraft in the scrub at the oval's edge, which teachers tolerated so long as no one climbed above head height.

The uniform of bottle-green jumpers and gold polo shirts was a familiar sight along Brighton Parade and Young Street in the mornings and afternoons. Most pupils walked or rode from the surrounding streets of Blackwood, Hawthorndene and Coromandel Valley; others were driven from further afield by parents who had chosen the school for its reputation.

The grounds were kept by Murray Hartley, who joined the school as groundskeeper in 1974 and stayed for thirty-two years. Hartley maintained the oval, the gardens and the ageing timber schoolhouse, knew most pupils by name, and was the person children sought out first when a ball went onto the roof or a bike chain came off.

The Jenkins Family at Blackwood

Among the families who chose Blackwood Primary from outside its immediate streets were the Jenkinses of Panorama. Thomas Jenkins, a mechanic at Adelaide Motors, and Elizabeth Jenkins (née Thompson), then a teacher at Glenelg Primary School, enrolled their eldest child at Blackwood rather than closer to home, partly for its academic reputation and partly because Elizabeth admired the direction Farquhar was taking the school.

Karl Matthew Jenkins entered Reception on the first day of the 1981 year and attended Blackwood until the end of 1987, when he moved on to Unley High School. His teachers remembered a serious, observant child who preferred subjects with definite answers, volunteered to settle playground disputes, and kept an unusually close watch on whether others were following the rules. He performed well without being exceptional, and his reports noted his maturity and his strong sense of fairness. Karl later became a detective with Tasmania Police and disappeared at Granton, Tasmania, in August 2018.

Jessica Anne Jenkins followed her brother in 1983 and remained at the school until the end of 1990. Her experience of Blackwood changed partway through. In 1988, when she was in Year 5, her mother was appointed the school's principal, and Jessica spent her final three years at a school her mother ran. Teachers treated her with a careful neutrality that she sometimes felt as distance, and classmates did not always separate the pupil from the principal's daughter. Her Year 6 teacher, Mr Hugh Manning, was a lasting influence; Jessica remembered his kindness, his high expectations and the energy of his classroom long after she had become Director of Nursing at the Royal Adelaide Hospital.

The youngest Jenkins child, Daniel, was enrolled at Panorama Primary School closer to the family home and did not attend Blackwood.

The Jenkins Principalship

Elizabeth Jenkins was appointed principal of Blackwood Primary School in 1988, succeeding Farquhar. She came from the post of Assistant Principal at Brighton Primary School and was thirty-five at the time of her appointment, with fourteen years of teaching and leadership behind her. She held the position for seventeen years, the longest principalship in the school's history.

Her early years were not easy. Some teachers who had applied for the post and been passed over resented her appointment, and some parents openly questioned whether a woman in her thirties could provide firm enough leadership. Jenkins chose to answer the doubts through results rather than argument. She introduced systems that worked, made decisions that visibly improved the running of the school, and backed her teachers in public while holding them to high standards in private.

Her educational philosophy rested on the conviction that effective teaching required an understanding of each child's circumstances, that relationships mattered as much as curriculum, and that the culture of a school shaped learning as powerfully as any method. She translated these convictions into a series of practical programmes. Professional development sessions brought current educational research into the staffroom. Partnerships with local community organisations provided support to families in hardship. A behaviour management policy built around restoration rather than punishment replaced the older system of detentions, on the principle that difficult behaviour usually signalled an unmet need.

Jenkins also introduced a peer mentoring programme that paired older pupils with Reception and junior primary children, restructured the school's reading recovery programme in line with Department standards, and championed Aboriginal education initiatives that brought Kaurna cultural educators into classrooms for the first time. The school's first computer room opened in 1993, and by the end of her tenure every classroom had its own machines.

The results were measurable. Literacy and numeracy outcomes rose steadily through the 1990s, teacher turnover fell, and Blackwood acquired a reputation as a school that was warm without being soft, inclusive without accepting mediocrity. Jenkins received awards from professional associations and invitations to present at educational conferences, and the Department cited Blackwood Primary as an example of effective school leadership.

The principalship came at a cost. Jenkins worked through school holidays, took marking and correspondence home most evenings, and attended weekend community events as the public face of the school. In 2005 she left Blackwood to take up a consulting role with the South Australian Department for Education.

The School After 2005

Andrew Kessell succeeded Jenkins in 2005 and led the school until 2016. His tenure coincided with a renewed rise in enrolment as older houses in Blackwood were replaced by subdivided blocks and young families returned to the district. Modular classrooms were added along the eastern boundary, the computer room was expanded into a dedicated ICT suite, and the school's catchment widened to include more of Coromandel Valley and Eden Hills.

Murray Hartley retired as groundskeeper in 2006. After his death in 2011, the school planted a community garden in his memory beside the original timber schoolhouse, tended by pupils and volunteers.

Enrolment passed five hundred in the early 2020s. Later leadership extended the school's commitment to student wellbeing with a sensory garden, a Yarning Circle and designated quiet zones for children who found the busy yard overwhelming. The school's partnership with local high schools, environmental organisations and arts bodies broadened, and its stated values of respect, resilience, creativity and curiosity were written into its teaching programmes.

Campus and Grounds

The Shepherds Hill Road campus grew in layers. The 1917 timber schoolhouse, restored in the 1990s, stood at the heart of the site and served as an art room and community space. Around it stood the red-brick classroom wing and assembly hall of 1957, which remained in daily use, and the modular classrooms added in the 2000s.

The main oval, used for physical education lessons and Saturday sport, lay against a stand of blue gums at the low end of the block. An amphitheatre, built by parent volunteers in 2003 during the final years of the Jenkins principalship, was cut into the slope above the oval and became the venue for assemblies, performances and seasonal festivals. The bush along the school's boundary was never cleared, and the gully behind the old schoolhouse where Ethel Wainwright had taught the names of the trees remained part of the grounds.

Community and Traditions

Blackwood Primary's identity was always tied to its place. The Belair excursions that began under Kilvington continued in one form or another for more than six decades, and the bush studies and nature journalling of the school's first teacher remained part of its curriculum long after the specimen books had given way to tablets.

The school marked its year with a set of annual events that former pupils across several generations would recognise. Hills Harmony Week brought music and performance into every classroom. Learning Through Nature Day returned the whole school to the outdoors. The Readers and Writers Festival invited local authors and illustrators to work with pupils, and the spring fete established by the Parents and Friends Association in the 1960s continued to raise money for the school's facilities.

School newsletters regularly carried pupils' poetry, reports on sustainability projects and accounts of intergenerational programmes run with nearby retirement homes. Through its many changes in size, staff and method, Blackwood Primary remained what its founding families had petitioned for: a school grounded in the bushland of the hills, built and sustained by its community, and devoted to the steady growth of each child in its care.