Fort Street Opportunity School

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Some may stumble onto these pages and wonder what it is all about, hence a few words about why we are here.....

The Fort Street Opportunity Class at Fort Street Primary School in Sydney Australia was a system where the potentially brightest kids were moved from their normal school to the Opportunity Classes for primary classes 5 and 6 before going on to High School at approx age 12.

The idea ostensibly was to provide better opportunities for those brighter kids, but in truth it may more have been a case of removing the bright kids from the normal stream, as some of the possibly over-achievers may disrupt classes more than they should and may also be bored by the normal slow learning pace that has to keep up with the slowest in the class.

Our class of 1952-1953 finally organised a reunion in 2007, people are scattered all over the world so it actually was quite amazing that so many were found. The Internet helped dramatically with this task.

We formed a fairly strong bond because we were mostly kids from the possibly more gentle North Shore areas thrown into a school in the traditionally tough Rocks area of Sydney where the sons of wharf labourers predominated. Out of our comfort zone and separated from our many earlier school friends we maybe drew strength from each other in some way in this strange new place.

Here's a Google Earth view of where the school is still situated.....
sydney
The ring road around the school building was only a deep trench in the sandstone when we were there in '52-53. All our lunch scraps and orange peels were tossed in there, must have taken many truckloads to get all the rubbish out when they finally built the road.

Most of us had to travel to the school via the Harbour Bridge in bus or tram (trams long gone) or via ferries that left from Circular Quay just below that ocean liner. One class member actually lived in the Sydney Observatory right next door. It definitely was an interesting place to go to school. The Opera House on Bennelong Point was not present in those days, only a tram shed was there.

More digging and I bought a 1951 aerial photo of Sydney from the Lands Department, this below is a reduced crop of the part where we were at Fort Street....
1951
© Department of Lands 2008

Next is the whole photo to put it in context, I do remember all the ships so close to the city, in fact when I was working in late '50s and early '60s it was a nice lunchtime walk down to the end of King St and watch the ships.
city51
© Department of Lands 2008

The closest I could get was the 1951 photo above. The first aerial survey of greater Sydney was in 1943 for the purpose of road planning (well, that didn't work, did it?) and that is available online from the Department of Lands in an online viewer form for free, the site to try is www.six.nsw.gov.au  and you need to download and install the SIX viewer (free). The instructions to get to the 1943 maps are here. The public use area now seems to start from http://lite.maps.nsw.gov.au

I had problems getting to the 1943 maps last try but another person did it OK the same day. So maybe finger trouble in my case. Ah, silly me, I had installed the SIX Lite viewer, once I installed the proper full featured SIX viewer it worked like the explanation page said it should.

The RTA also sells the CD of that 1943 survey for $40, but why bother if it's free from Lands.

Here's Fort Street School in 1943, that darn trench is there even then.
1943
© Department of Lands 2008

Note the traffic density and the size of the toll gates on the bridge. I suspect the circular trench around the school was part of the original traffic plan for the bridge that maybe included what is now the Cahill Expressway, but completion was stalled by WW2.

More digging is going on behind the scenes about the Spiral Cut as it appears to be known in the records. There are photos in the Sydney Archives of construction of the cutting  under way in July 1939 but no other clues about it. The design of the Cahill Expressway was not finalised until 1945. Dr Bradfield apparently proposed a plan for Sydney as early as 1912/13 for an overhead roadway at the Quay and the Spiral Cut started (maybe 1937/38 in my guess) some time after the Harbour Bridge was built presumably as a prelude to getting that overhead road going. A separate page may eventually happen talking about the history of the Spiral Cut. The name (Spiral Cut or Circular Cut) seems to have been given to it to differentiate it from "The Cut" which is the much earlier Argyle Cut.

For photos go to http://www.pictureaustralia.org/ and search for 'circular cut'.


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