Unley High School, South Australia

Foundation as a District High School

In the years after Adelaide High School opened in the city, the South Australian Government committed to extending free secondary education into the growing suburbs. Unley District High School was founded in 1910 under that policy and opened at the end of January with forty-six pupils.

For its first five years the school had no premises of its own. It was housed in two borrowed classrooms at Unley Primary School and placed under the authority of the primary school's headmaster, while its secondary classes were taught by a teacher-in-charge, Arthur Lockyer, and two assistants seconded from the Education Department. The first pupils were the sons and daughters of clerks, shopkeepers, tradesmen and public servants from Unley, Parkside, Goodwood and Hyde Park, most of whom would otherwise have left school at fourteen. The curriculum was ambitious for a suburban school of the period: English, mathematics, Latin, French, science and history, with bookkeeping and shorthand for students heading into office work.

Lockyer gave the school its motto, Truth and Endeavour, and its colours of navy and sky blue, chosen because the pupils' families could buy navy cloth cheaply and sky-blue ribbon cost almost nothing. Both endured for more than a century.

The Penhallow Years and Kyre Avenue

In 1915 the high school was granted independence from Unley Primary and received its first headmaster, Walter Penhallow, a Cornish-born mathematics master who held the post for twenty-five years. Penhallow was a demanding and formidable figure, tall, bearded and famously silent in corridors, who built the school's early reputation for discipline and high academic standards. Under his leadership Unley's results in the public examinations rose to compete with those of the older city schools, and its graduates began to appear in the University of Adelaide's lists of scholarship winners.

Within its first decade the school moved south into new buildings on Kyre Avenue in Mitcham. The site gave the school an identity of its own but brought problems almost from the start. It was hemmed in by housing, short of classrooms as enrolment grew, and above all lacked adequate sports grounds, so that football, cricket and athletics were played on borrowed ovals across the district for decades. Penhallow walked his teams to the Mitcham Reserve himself on Saturday mornings.

The First World War drew the school's older boys and recent graduates into the services. The school community raised funds, knitted for the troops and wrote letters to former pupils at the front, efforts coordinated by the English mistress Miss Thelma Bracknell, who later became one of the first women appointed deputy head of a public secondary school in South Australia. Fourteen former students died in the war. Their names were recorded on an honour board of Tasmanian blackwood unveiled in the Kyre Avenue hall in 1921, which moved with the school to Netherby and hung in its foyer for the rest of the century.

The school magazine, The Endeavour, first appeared in 1920. Edited by Bracknell for its first fifteen years, it carried prize lists, sports results, pupils' verse and essays, and the annual headmaster's report, and it became the principal record of the school's life for the next eighty years.

The Interwar School

The interwar years settled the school's character. Enrolment passed five hundred by the late 1920s. The Depression hit Unley's families hard; several senior students left each year to find work, and the school's Old Scholars' Association ran a fund to pay the book fees of pupils whose fathers were out of work.

Sport became an obsession in spite of the lack of grounds. The annual football match against Adelaide High School, first played in 1923, became the fixture of the school year, and Unley's single victory of the interwar period, in 1934, was celebrated in The Endeavour with a full-page photograph and a poem by the captain.

Penhallow retired in 1940. His successor, Douglas Rennie, a former army officer and chemistry master, led the school through the Second World War. Senior boys left for the services as soon as they turned eighteen, the girls ran a canteen for servicemen passing through Adelaide, and in some of the darkest days of the war the school's Parents and Citizens Association was founded. It met first in Rennie's study and became for the rest of the century one of the most active parent bodies in the state system.

Post-War Growth and the Move to Netherby

The post-war baby boom overwhelmed Kyre Avenue. Enrolment climbed through the 1950s and passed two thousand by 1960, making Unley one of the largest secondary schools in the country, with classes crammed into temporary buildings, corridors and the hall.

The solution lay a short distance to the east. Open land at Netherby, held by the state for agricultural education, was made available for a new Unley High School. Temporary wooden buildings went up on Kitchener Street and were occupied by the school's girls from 1957, and the first permanent building on the site was completed in 1960. For several years the school operated across two campuses, with staff and students moving between them by bicycle and on foot, and with the girls and boys separated for most lessons by the accident of geography.

Harold Fenwick, headmaster from 1958 to 1971, managed the transition. He expanded the science, industrial arts and modern language programmes, introduced the school's first co-educational physical education classes, and established the house system that remained in use for the rest of the century, with its four houses named for the Torrens, Onkaparinga, Murray and Sturt rivers. In 1965, with another secondary school ready to take over Kyre Avenue, Fenwick moved all students to Netherby. The move gave Unley High the space it had lacked for half a century: open lawns, its own playing fields, and room for the science and art wings that followed over the next decade.

The Netherby campus drew its students from the inner southern suburbs and increasingly from the hills, as families moved into Mitcham, Belair, Blackwood and the subdivisions along the foothills. Many students arrived each morning on the Belair line, walking down from the station through the streets of Netherby and Kingswood.

The 1970s and the Okely Principalship

The 1970s brought the reorganisation of the state system, the replacement of headmasters with principals, and a broadening of the curriculum towards social sciences, legal studies and the creative arts. Margaret Okely, appointed in 1972, was the school's first woman principal. A former languages teacher who had spent two years in Indonesia, she introduced Indonesian to the curriculum, abolished the separate playgrounds for boys and girls, and opened the school to its first international students.

Okely also oversaw the school's response to the migrant families who arrived in the inner south through the 1970s. Unley High was among the first schools in the state to trial targeted literacy support for students from non-English-speaking backgrounds, coordinated from 1979 by Kourosh Danesh, a former migrant student from Iran who had graduated from the school in 1976 and returned as its English as a Second Language coordinator. Okely retired at the end of 1984.

The Whitford Years

Graeme Whitford was appointed principal in 1985 and led the school until 1997. A former history teacher with a quiet manner and an exacting eye for detail, he ran the school through a period of declining enrolment as the baby-boom generation passed through and newer high schools opened across the southern suburbs. By 1988 Unley enrolled 940 students, less than half its 1960 peak. Whitford used the smaller numbers to strengthen pastoral care, introducing a homeroom system that kept each group of students with the same teacher from Year 8 through to Year 10.

The humanities flourished in those years. Fiona Dalrymple, a long-serving history teacher, revitalised the history curriculum with oral history projects, archive visits and local heritage studies, and her students' work on the history of the inner southern suburbs was later deposited with the Unley Museum. The Bicentennial year of 1988, when Whitford made the national anniversary the theme of the year's history and social studies programmes, became one of her best-remembered projects.

Legal Studies became one of the school's strongest senior subjects. Heather Crain, the school's teacher-librarian, coached its mock trial teams through the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Unley teams reached the state finals of the schools' mock trial competition three times in that period.

The Jenkins Siblings

Among the students who came down from the hills in those years were Karl and Jessica Jenkins of Panorama, both former pupils of Blackwood Primary School.

Karl Matthew Jenkins entered Year 8 on the first day of the 1988 school year, the morning after the Bicentenary. He was a serious, self-contained student who preferred subjects with definite answers and performed well through thoroughness rather than brilliance. His teachers remembered his strong sense of fairness, his discomfort with ambiguity and his habit of monitoring the behaviour of those around him. He found his element in Legal Studies, where Crain's mock trial team gave him a structure in which methodical preparation was rewarded, and he was a member of the team that reached the state semi-finals in 1991. He completed Year 12 in 1992 and went on to study criminology at the University of Adelaide. Karl later became a detective with Tasmania Police and disappeared at Granton, Tasmania, in August 2018.

Jessica Anne Jenkins followed her brother in 1991, entering Year 8 while Karl was in Year 11, and was placed in the same house. Away from Blackwood Primary, where their mother had been principal during her final years there, Jessica found the distance to establish an identity of her own. She discovered an aptitude for human biology, took part in peer mentoring and the student wellness committee, and in Year 11 joined a vocational programme that placed her alongside nurses at a local hospital, an experience that settled her choice of career. She completed Year 12 in 1995 and went on to study nursing at the University of South Australia, later becoming Director of Nursing at the Royal Adelaide Hospital.

School Culture and Identity

Unley High maintained a culture of quiet achievement across its changes of site and size. Its motto and its navy and sky-blue colours carried its early identity forward, and its uniform of navy blazers and sky-blue shirts changed little from the 1960s onwards.

The school had a long history of teaching foreign languages, beginning with Latin and French and adding German and, from the 1970s, Indonesian. Student voice was expressed through an active student representative council, environmental action groups and strong participation in debating and academic competitions. Its music and drama departments, though modest, produced a steady line of performers and teachers, and the Unley Arts Festival, introduced in 2003, became the highlight of the school's year. Camps to the Flinders Ranges, social justice partnerships and Year 12 research projects formed part of its rhythm for generations of students.

The School into the Twenty-First Century

Whitford retired in 1997 and was succeeded by Peter Varga, who led the school until 2011. Enrolment recovered through his tenure as the inner southern suburbs became popular again with young families, and Unley once more became one of the larger public high schools in the state. The school celebrated its centenary in 2010 with a reunion that drew former students from every decade since the 1930s, and the blackwood honour board was restored for the occasion.

The Netherby campus was redeveloped in stages over the following decade, with a STEM wing, an upgraded performing arts hall and improved disability access across its buildings. The library was renamed the Dalrymple Learning Centre in 2018 in recognition of Fiona Dalrymple's decades of service. Gabrielle Tranfield became principal in 2019. When Year 7 moved from primary into secondary schools across South Australia, Unley took its first Year 7 intake.

The campus grounds, shaded by mature jacarandas and eucalypts, retained the open lawns that had first drawn the school to Netherby, and the nearby reserves and Brownhill Creek were used for outdoor learning and recreation.

Alumni

Unley High's former students distinguished themselves across law, medicine, education, public administration and the arts. Among those of the late twentieth century were Dr Mira Solokov, an epidemiologist and adviser to SA Health; Neville Horner, a long-serving mayor of the City of Mitcham; and Aida Papageorgiou, a playwright and recipient of the State Premier's Young Artist Award in 2009. Many former students maintained ties to the school, returning as mentors, guest speakers and the parents of new students, and the Old Scholars' Association marked the centenary by funding scholarships for students from families in hardship, as it had done in the Depression eighty years before.