Re-naming of Maitland’s public high schools in 1987 and 1990
Maitland Boys’ and Maitland Girls’ high schools operated as single-sex public schools for more than a century. In early 1987 the New South Wales Minister for Education, Rodney Cavalier, announced that they would become co-educational and take the names Evatt High School and Maitland High School respectively. The former Boys’ High was to be named after the Evatt family, who the minister said was the ‘finest family that Maitland has produced, arguably the finest family that Australia has produced.’ This family, Hansard had Cavalier saying, had been ‘intimately associated with the history of Maitland for a long time.’
Rodney Cavalier
The community reaction
The minister’s statement was not well received in Maitland. By far the best known Evatt was Herbert Vere (‘Doc’) Evatt, who was born in East Maitland in 1894 but had left the area for Sydney with his family at the age of ten. He had gone on to highly impressive careers in the law, politics and the United Nations but he never again lived in the Maitland area. He had no adult impact on the place.
Evatt’s parents lived in Morpeth from 1885 to 1901 and in Melbourne St, East Maitland from 1901 until 1904. At different times they managed the Hunter River Hotel and the Bank Hotel in Melbourne St. Neither became particularly noteworthy or was recognised as a community leader, and they were Maitland residents more briefly than Cavalier seemed to imply. Nor does their association with Maitland’s history appear to have been as ‘intimate’ as he suggested.
Little is known of Herbert’s seven siblings, all brothers (two of whom died in the Great War), but one (Clive) became a barrister and a state politician. Clive Evatt served for 13 years as a minister in the NSW government in several portfolios including Education. But the case for the family being the finest that Maitland had produced was unconvincing, seriously hyperbolic and hard to take seriously. More relevant to Cavalier’s decision, perhaps, ‘Doc’ Evatt had been a member of the Labor Party’s left wing, as was Cavalier. Many in Maitland concluded that Cavalier’s change of the name of a local high school was simply honouring a factional soulmate: using Evatt’s family was just a ruse to make it more palatable.
HV (‘Doc’) Evatt in 1948
Cavalier’s announcement of the changing of the names of the two schools caused uproar in Maitland. Old Boys especially were outraged, some by the shift to co-education (an issue whenever it comes up as has been shown more recently by the case of Sydney’s Newington College) but most by the imposition without consultation of the name of a Labor icon. Tradition, they thought, had been thrown away for base political reasons, and for the Girls’ High the loved, tradition-rich badge was rendered inappropriate by the removal of the letter ‘G’ from its title. Some staff members at the Girls’ High at the time, including Heather McLaren, felt that the ‘historical value’ of the schools was being taken away from the community.
The Girls’ High School badge
Many Maitland people thought Cavalier’s action in re-naming the schools was all about his ego and nothing more than self-indulgent over-reach. There was little evidence of community input to or enthusiasm about the decision.
Former students of both schools took political action, and the matter reached state parliament in Macquarie St. There, Elisabeth Kirkby of the Australian Democrats said in the Legislative Council that changing the names had ‘caused enormous resentment . . . particularly among students whose parents and grandparents had attended [the schools].’
Virginia Chadwick, the Liberal leader in the Legislative Council and, like Kirkby, a resident of the Hunter, agreed. She called the change to Evatt High School ‘frivolous, churlish and unworthy [of Cavalier].’
The re-namings overturned
After Labor lost power in 1988, Evatt’s name was removed from the Boys’ High title by Nick Greiner’s Coalition government, and the school that had borne it became Maitland High School. Meanwhile the re-naming of the Girls’ High as Maitland Grossmann High School after a legendary and long-serving early headmistress (Janette Grossmann) was accepted. It helped that the new name facilitated the retention of the long-lived badge with the initials MGHS. The ‘G’ now stood for ‘Grossmann’ rather than ‘Girls’.
(Maitland Mercury)
Cavalier’s re-naming of the schools had lasted but a few years. The incident showed how much the names of significant community institutions can mean to people, and that tampering with those names can be full of risk. Cavalier survived the controversy politically, but the incident also demonstrated the dangers politicians take when seemingly driven by self-centred motivations.
References
Maitland Mercury
Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: the controversial re-naming of Maitland’s public high schools’, Maitland Mercury, 22 January 2021
Heather McLaren, personal communication.
