First Day of Term 1 – Unley High School (1991)

Unley High School opened for the first term of the 1991 school year with 965 students enrolled from Year 8 to Year 12 and a teaching and support staff of seventy under Principal Graeme Whitford, then in his seventh year in the post. The school opened on the day after the Australia Day public holiday, which had been observed on the Monday.

The year began against a heavy backdrop. The air war against Iraq had begun less than a fortnight earlier, Royal Australian Navy ships were on station in the Gulf, and the nightly television coverage had made the conflict the first subject of conversation in classrooms and the staffroom alike. At home, South Australia was sliding into recession, unemployment was rising, and several families at the school had already felt the effects through lost jobs and failing businesses. Whitford acknowledged both in his address at the opening assembly, asking students to be mindful of classmates with family members in the services or under financial strain.

The new Year 8 intake was the focus of the day. Two hundred and four students began their secondary schooling, drawn from primary schools across Unley, Mitcham, Goodwood and the southern hills, among them Blackwood and Belair. Some arrived with older siblings already in the senior years; most knew only the handful of classmates who had come with them from the same primary school. They gathered in the hall for their own welcome assembly before the rest of the school arrived, where Whitford and the Year 8 coordinator explained the timetable, the bell system, the layout of the campus and the expectations of conduct and uniform.

The intake was divided into seven homerooms and allocated to the school's four houses, named for the Torrens, Onkaparinga, Murray and Sturt rivers, with siblings placed in the same house as their older brothers and sisters. Each homeroom spent the rest of the morning with its teacher, collecting timetables, locker allocations and booklists, and walking the Kitchener Street campus in small groups led by senior students. The new students wore the summer uniform of sky-blue shirts.

The returning year levels resumed with less ceremony. Years 9 and 10 collected new timetables and settled into their classrooms. The Year 11 and Year 12 students spent much of the day in meetings with subject teachers and the senior school coordinator, confirming subject choices that would shape their final examinations and, in a weakening job market, their prospects beyond school.

The afternoon was given to the first full lessons of the year. The day closed at the final bell, with students dispersing to the buses, the trains on the Belair line and the cars of waiting parents. No incidents were recorded.