Junction Park History

The Junction Park State School History Project will soon cumulate into the publication of “No Regrets in the Evening of Life.” Publication date is September 2015.

 On the 30 April 2013, Junction Park State School will officially have reached 125 years. The date in 1888 marked the first day of enrolment at the Thompson Estate Provisional School, in Oxford Street.

The primary school in Junction Park, Brisbane, is an unusual place.  The old community parkland was originally a manure depot with the Junction’s earliest cricket and football ground. For most of its history, Junction Park was simply the State School in Annerley. At its inception the institution became the meeting ground between a well-to-do middle class township, on the hilltop, and the struggling working class estate in the valley below.  In its first fifty years it was a place where the school was run by a few of Queensland’s political elite and prominent businessmen, including Premier Digby Denham.

That early historical advantage enabled Junction Park State School to build a brilliant reputation, from the site of the first state school swimming pool to top scholarship classes to being a major location for teacher training. And that is all before 1963. In the rapid and continuous whirlwinds of curriculum development since the early 1960s, Junction Park stands as a leading educational innovator. No regrets in the evening of life is the full historical account. And it will put to rest Dempsey’s fear “that things done badly or left undone, regrets which dwell with us old fellows in the evening of life.”