Following construction of the railway, schools were opened at Cooran in 1890, Eumundi in 1893, Mooloolah in 1894, and Eudlo in 1897. On the Blackall Range, schools were established at Razorback (Montville) in October 1896, Maleny in 1897 and Mapleton in 1899.

The original building of the Maroochie Provisional School may have been of poor quality, for by 1890 it had to be abandoned. The northern railway line was then under construction as far as Yandina, and Matthew Carroll decided to construct a better hotel closer to the new Railway Station at Petrie’s Creek which was nearing completion. In later years, the new Carroll’s Petrie’s Creek Hotel was sold and became Currie’s Nambour Hotel. The site is presently occupied by Nambour’s Commercial Hotel.

There was some space available in Matthew Carroll’s superseded Petrie’s Creek Hotel on the site of the present Nambour Showgrounds. He offered this to the Maroochie Provisional School teacher, Mr John Riordan, to provide accommodation for the pupils until a new school was built. Accordingly, the classes were transferred to the hotel where they used the large ballroom.

The parents were rather dubious about sending their children to school in such temporary accommodation, so efforts started immediately to provide a proper school building in a more central location for the thirty children on the roll. With the opening of its new Railway Station on 1st January 1891, the settlement of Petrie’s Creek was renamed ‘Nambour’, so the school in the hotel changed its name to Nambour Provisional School.

A site for a new school building was finally found in what is now Mitchell Street. The new Nambour Provisional School was built there by voluntary labour for ₤44/6/9d, and opened early in 1892. Five years later, the Moreton Central Sugar Mill was built next door.

The State Education Act of 1875 established a new Department of Public Instruction, which was charged with the duty of providing free, secular and compulsory education for children between the ages of six and twelve years. The Act supported the concept of two classes of schools - State schools and Provisional schools.

If the local residents contributed one-fifth of the total cost of a building and furniture, and could guarantee an average attendance of thirty pupils, the Department erected a State school. Provisional schools were established where only a lower average attendance of between twelve and thirty pupils could be maintained, and required that local people provided a suitable building at their own expense.

While the Department paid for the maintenance of State schools, the School Committee was responsible for maintaining a Provisional school. The only expenditure incurred by the Department in approving a Provisional school was in paying the teacher’s salary and providing a minimum of expendable supplies to keep the school functioning.

When the average attendance of a Provisional school rose to more than thirty, the Committee was expected to raise the necessary one-fifth local contribution towards the cost of replacing the building with a new State school. The Provisional school was intended to be a temporary expedient which would eventually be replaced by a State school. Often, when a district prospered into a large, stable settlement, this happened. Sometimes, however, the Provisional school withered away as population shifted, the gold played out or the railway moved further on.

The Provisional school teacher was usually an unclassified teacher who was not provided with a residence by the Department, and who received a salary less than that of the lowest classified teacher. Such teachers often had a barely adequate education themselves, and little or no training, but some of them were well-educated people who had been unsuccessful in other occupations, or educated women forced to provide for themselves.

These teachers often had to work under very primitive conditions, a roof that didn’t leak and a wooden floor in the classroom being above average appointments. Their annual salary, only ₤70 in 1897, was less than a labourer’s, and living accommodation was basic in the extreme. Yet they educated the pioneers’ children, and most of them were women. It was widely regarded that women teachers were better than their male counterparts, and in 1881 District Inspector John Shirley wrote:

The Provisional school teacher has neither the comfortable buildings nor the suitable furniture of the State school teacher; he works under many difficulties and with little encouragement from those among whom he is placed; yet he does cheap, useful work for the State, and work that could not well be done otherwise. For such work a female teacher is much more suitable and more readily obtained than a male teacher, and, as a matter of fact, but few Provisional schools gaining credit by inspectors are taught by men.

In the Regulations of 1892, the Department altered its policy, agreeing to pay for up to half the cost of the building and furniture for a Provisional school, if it were built on Crown land. The building and furniture would also have to conform to certain specifications. Nevertheless, numerous Provisional schools came into existence in tents, bush huts, railway huts, rooms and verandas in private homes, deserted hotels, and farm sheds.

In 1908, there were only 461 State schools in Queensland, but 640 Provisional schools. An improving economic situation and a growing interest in equality of educational opportunity resulted in more generous funding for the establishment of State schools. Changes to the Education Act introduced the concept of secondary schools to Queensland for the first time, and provided for the professional training of teachers. 

New Regulations gazetted on 1st January, 1909 also provided for the construction of a State school if an average attendance of only twelve pupils (previously thirty) could be guaranteed, and eliminated Departmental financial assistance for Provisional schools. The result was that hundreds of Provisional schools with enrolments between twelve and thirty suddenly found themselves reclassified as fully-fledged State schools.  

Provisional schools in the Sunshine Coast area that became ranked as State schools from the beginning of 1909 included Bald Knob, Belli Park, Bli Bli, Bollier, Burpengary, Coochin Creek, Coochin Lower, Cooran, Cooroora, Delaney’s Creek, Diddillibah, Dulong, Durundur, Eudlo, Fairhill, Highworth, Kenilworth, Landsborough, Maleny, Mapleton, Montville, Mooloolah, Mooloolah Plains, Obi Obi, Palmwoods, Pinbarren Creek, Pomona, Rosemount, Skyring’s Creek, Stanley River, Stanmore, Teutoberg, Toorbul and Wararba. By the end of 1909, the number of State schools had risen to 1059, and the number of Provisional schools had fallen to only 79.

By 1898 the Nambour Provisional School had grown sufficiently to be classified as a State School. The first Nambour State School building was constructed alongside the six-year-old Provisional School building. To provide additional space for the children, the adjacent Moreton Central Sugar Mill donated an acre of land, thereby doubling the size of the school reserve.

Nambour State School in 1900
Photograph courtesy Sunshine Coast Libraries  

Pupils of the Nambour State School in 1900
Photograph courtesy Sunshine Coast Libraries

Nambour State School in 1915
Photograph courtesy Sunshine Coast Libraries    

Nambour Rural School in 1919
Photograph courtesy Sunshine Coast Libraries

Going to primary school in the 1940s and '50s:           Click  here.

 
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