Term 3 starts Monday 14 July
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“I’ve been at Marradale sixteen years. I walk out to the gate to meet every new family myself — that’s just how it’s done here. I know every kid’s name, most of their dogs’ names too. The gate’s open. Come and find me.”
Kaye Marsh Principal
A hundred and forty years, kept by hand and still being added to. Same ground. Same gate. Same families, still coming.
1883
The district’s selector families built the first schoolroom themselves in a working bee — the same way they built the hall and the show pavilion. Red brick and timber, it still stands.
1883
Two ironbark posts, a hand-painted sign across the top rail. It’s been repainted by hand for three generations — the Dodds — and never replaced. The rail is worn smooth where a hundred and forty years of hands have pushed it open.
1914–1945
Through droughts, wars, and the years the wheat failed, the school stayed open. Other district schools closed. Marradale did not.
1958
A Renshaw first walked through the Founders’ Gate as a Prep-aged child. The surname runs down the enrolment records for the next seventy years — and, in a moment, you’ll meet three generations of them.
The record runs to today — and there’s a great deal more of it.
Read the full history of Marradale, 1883 to today
Val Renshaw came through this gate in 1958.
Wayne Renshaw came through it in 1985.
Ruby Renshaw came through it in 2018.
Same gate. Same family. We’ve known every one of them by name.
The gate still has the same catch. Baz Tolley taught Wayne to draft sheep, and now he teaches Ruby the same thing in the same yards. The sign’s been repainted, never replaced.
If you’re new, the depth is the thing you’re afraid of — that everyone here has known each other for three generations, and you never will. Here’s how it actually goes.
Mai Nguyen — district nurse. Arrived eighteen months ago.
Tom Nguyen — knew no one on the Monday. Known by name by Friday.
Kaye walks out to meet every new family. Baz Tolley’s thirty years in — he taught one generation and now teaches the next. A kid here is never one of thirty strangers: the slice gets brought round, the head meets you at the gate, and the newcomer’s on the team by Friday. Tom was at a Renshaw kid’s birthday by week three.
The farm, the Ag shed, the working bee, and Show Day — the day the whole district comes into one paddock.
On your last day — whatever year you leave — you brand your own name into the ironbark post beside the gate, low, under the same hand that helped the one before you. Not marks. Not a leaderboard. Your name, in the wood, beside your grandmother’s.
— still being added to.
