Bundaberg State High School

Bundaberg State High School is a heritage-listed state high school and technical college at 37 Maryborough Street, Bundaberg South, Bundaberg, Bundaberg Region, Queensland, Australia. It was built from 1920 to 1956. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 22 June 2017. History Bundaberg State High School (SHS) was established in 1912, and was opened on its current site on Maryborough Street in Bundaberg South in 1921 as Bundaberg State High School and Technical College. The school is important in demonstrating the evolution of state education and its associated architecture. Bundaberg SHS retains the first two timber teaching buildings constructed on the site: a large variant of the suburban timber school building type (1920, Block D); and an early vocational building (1920, extended 1937 and 1956, Block G); plus two saw-tooth workshop buildings: Workshop No.1 (1956, Block R), and Workshop No.2 (1959, Block M). The school has been in continuous operation since its establishment, and Block D is the earliest surviving purpose-built state high school building of its type in Queensland. The European presence in the Burnett River area, traditionally the land of the Kalki people, began with pastoralism in the 1840s and 1850s, while timber cutters arrived in the mid-1860s to work the coastal scrub. By the 1860s there were five pastoral stations on the lower Burnett River. Selection of land around Bundaberg began in 1867 under the "Sugar and Coffee Regulations" of the Crown Lands Alienation Act 1860, and the Crown Lands Alienation Act 1868 enabled the resumption of half of the Bingera and Branyan Runs in November 1869. The site of Bundaberg was officially surveyed the same year. Bundaberg's development as a port and service centre was boosted by growing coastal traffic and by its designation as the port for Mount Perry's copper mining from 1881. Surrounded by sugar plantations and the site of two sugar refineries, Bundaberg became an important sugar town. The first South Sea Islander (SSI) indentured labour arrived in Bundaberg in 1879 and the sugar plantation system reached its peak in Queensland in the early 1880s. However, large sugar plantations with their own mills and a SSI workforce were eventually replaced by European small farmers supplying central sugar mills.