Adelaide High School
high school in Adelaide, Australia
Adelaide High School, originally named the Continuation School, is a state high school situated on the corner of West Terrace and Glover Avenue in the Adelaide Park Lands. Following the Advanced School for Girls, it was the second government high school in South Australia and the first coeducational public high school in that state. It was in 1951 split into Adelaide Boys' High School and Adelaide Girls' High School, until it was recombined back into Adelaide High School in 1976.
History
In 1879, John Anderson Hartley, Director of Education, established the Advanced School for Girls in Grote Street, Adelaide. It was the first public high school in Australia, those in New South Wales following in the 1880s. Adelaide High was first named the Continuation School, but in April 1908 was renamed Adelaide High School, in the same year the South Australian state high school system was launched. The new school combined previous institutions: the Advanced School for Girls and the Pupil Teachers School. It also collected bursary-holders, and continuation students from the Grote Street Model School.
Adelaide High School was officially opened on 24 September 1908 by the premier of South Australia, Thomas Price. It was the first public secondary school in the Commonwealth of Australia.
“Adelaide High School” enters the record as high school in Adelaide, Australia. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Adelaide, High and School can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Adelaide High School” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Adelaide, High and School provides the most credible route into that argument.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4681726. Authority coordinates are -34.926, 138.587. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1951, 1976, 1879 and 1908.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Adelaide High School”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Adelaide High School primary sources, Adelaide High School archive and Adelaide research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Adelaide High School” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.