History
Established as Sydney High School in 1883, the school grounds were originally located on Elizabeth Street in the Sydney central business district, where the David Jones store now stands. At the time, the school building was two storeys, blocked off by a high wall. The ground floor was occupied by male students, while the females occupied the first floor. This was usual in the 1800s.
Because of high levels of noise pollution from transport and other activities, the boys' school moved to a different location, followed by the girls' school, which became Sydney Girls High School. Ironically, the two streets currently adjacent to the school, Anzac Parade and Cleveland Sreet, are both large and busy roads that still make classrooms noisy from time to time.
In 1921, SGHS moved to the former Sydney Zoo site, which was formerly known as the 'Billy Goat Swamp' but is better identified as being opposite Moore Park, Fox Studios and the Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG). The new building incorporated many modern features necessary for twentieth century education, provided large areas of greenery and was more quiet, but students were sad to leave the original school site. The bear pit from Sydney zoo still stands within the schools 'lowers' grass area, shared with Sydney Boys 'the flat.' SGHS students supported the war effort on the homefront in both World War I and World War II by organising care packages and knitting socks and other important clothing items for the soldiers on the front.
In April 1999, a severe hailstorm in Sydney caused significant damage to the school grounds, destroying areas of the roof and causing water leakage into many of the classrooms. To repair and prepare for restorations, students were given two weeks off school. This storm also destroyed much of the obsolete computer technology and paved the way for a large base of new technology throughout the school.
Read more about this topic: Sydney Girls High School
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“History takes time.... History makes memory.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)