Coonabarabran High School
public high school in New South Wales, Australia
Coonabarabran High School (abbreviated as CHS) is a public co-educational secondary day school, located on the Newell Highway in southern Coonabarabran, a town located in the Central West and North West Slopes regions of New South Wales, Australia. The school is operated by the NSW Department of Education with students from Year 7 to Year 12. The school was originally established in January 1942 as the Coonabarabran Intermediate High School, providing primary and secondary education, and later reconstituted in 1962 as a comprehensive high school.
History
Following an appeal by the Parents & Citizens' Association of Coonabarabran Public School to the Minister for Education, Clive Evatt, in late 1941, the NSW Department of Education made the decision to upgrade the existing Coonabarabran Public School (established in 1870) to the status of "Intermediate High School", with the existing school now providing primary and secondary education. The headmaster of the public school, A. C. Innes, BA, continued as the first headmaster of Coonabarabran Intermediate High School. On 18 March 1942, Minister Evatt formally opened the school, laying a memorial stone to mark the occasion.
In January 1962, a separate "Coonabarabran High School" was established, again separating primary and secondary education between Coonabarabran Public School and the new Coonabarabran High School, respectively. In 1972–1973, a new purpose-built school campus to the south of the public school site was completed. On 16 October 1974, the school was visited by Charles, The Prince of Wales. In the 2006 Queen's Birthday Honours, the school principal from 1999 to 2006, Michael Robert McEntyre, was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for "service to secondary education in rural New South Wales and to school sport through Rugby League coaching and administrative roles."
Notable alumni
Kylea Tink – Independent Member of the Australian House of Representatives for North Sydney.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Coonabarabran High School” is public high school in New South Wales, Australia. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Coonabarabran, High and School, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “public high school in New South Wales, Australia” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 24, 2023. The linked authority identifier is Q122181961. Authority coordinates are -31.283, 149.284. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1942, 1962, 1941 and 1870.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. 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
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Coonabarabran High School”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Coonabarabran High School primary sources, Coonabarabran High School archive and Coonabarabran 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
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Coonabarabran High School”?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Coonabarabran 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.