Anzac Oval and the ill-fated art gallery: Nothing needed to be changed.

OPINION by ALEX NELSON

Exactly 68 years ago, on Saturday, 17 November 1956, Prince Philip was being shown the sights around Alice Springs.

The Duke of Edinburgh was taking a leisurely trip through the Northern Territory, spending two nights in The Alice, on his way to Melbourne to officially open the 1956 Olympic Games.

He had been to the top of Anzac Hill to view the town, then taken for a grand tour through the streets of the Alice’s first suburb, what we now call the Old Eastside.

The Duke returned to the town centre, taking a hard right opposite the corner of Todd Street and Wills Terrace, which at the time was the main entrance to the Alice Springs Recreational Reserve – better known since the 1960s as Anzac Oval.

While proceeding around the still new oval, there was an impromptu stop as Prince Philip got out to greet a crowd of delighted children who had assembled to catch a glimpse of the Duke in the passing motorcade.

This classic moment was caught on camera (from left: Sandra Mitchell, Elaine Stephens, Valerie Tuncks, Maisie Webb; at rear Thelma Burrows, and Judith Litchfield).

However, greeting the kids wasn’t the reason why Prince Philip was driven around the oval. He was on his way to visit the (still new) Alice Springs Higher Primary School at the top end of the sports field.

What was so special about that school?

The answer lies with a teacher holding a unique distinction in the Alice’s history.

She’s the confident woman in the accompanying photo, Mary “Molly” Healy, the godmother holding a newborn baby after his baptism in mid 1963.

A decade earlier, as Miss Molly Ferguson, she was the first permanent teacher appointed to the School of the Air.

Begun in 1951, the first in the world, the School of the Air was initially based at the public school in Hartley Street under founding teacher Adelaide Miethke.

Molly Ferguson took over as team leader in 1953 and was the sole teacher in 1954 when she oversaw the relocation of the School of the Air to the just completed Alice Springs Higher Primary School at the north end of the Recreation Reserve.

The new site included a purpose-built studio and viewing area, quickly becoming a tourist attraction for the town.

The School of the Air was world-renowned, and that’s the reason for Prince Philip’s visit to the school building at Anzac Oval in 1956.

The School of the Air remained there until 1968 when it moved to the Royal Flying Doctor base in Stuart Terrace, and finally to its current site in the new suburb of Braitling in 1976.

Wherever the School of the Air was located, it is a popular tourist attraction.

In March 1983, of course, it was visited by royalty again – this time by Prince Charles and Princess Diana; and again in March 2000, when Queen Elizabeth returned to the Alice.

In 1961, the Alice Springs Higher Primary School was changed to become the Alice Springs High School, the town’s first secondary school.

After 1972, the campus became the Community College of Central Australia and finally reverted to being a secondary school again in 1986, renamed the Anzac Hill High School, until it closed at the end of 2009.

Notwithstanding the old school buildings remained in very good condition and were of major heritage value to Alice Springs, the Gunner Labor government demolished the campus in late 2019 to make way as its preferred site for the National Aboriginal Art Gallery (now ATSIAGA).

The demolition alone cost the taxpayer in excess of $2.5m, and for what exactly?

Yet another Labor-induced blank space in the middle of town, just like the former Aboriginal Art and Culture Centre that used to exist opposite the Civic Centre (winning national and international awards in the late 1990s) but demolished in 2004, for example.

Why couldn’t the old school have been repurposed, at least in part for the return of the School of the Air, just as it had been based there from 1954 to 1968?

It would have been a much simpler, quicker, far less costly and controversial option than the ill-fated national indigenous art gallery that now looks uncertain it will proceed at all.

And we would already have tourists streaming to the north end of the town’s centre because of it.

Unfortunately, there is a long track record of profoundly ill-conceived and managed major projects in Alice Springs – a veritable herd of white elephants that cost the NT dearly – and the ATSIAGA is just the latest iteration of a very sorry saga.

To the extent that Alice Springs manages to muddle along, recent history shows it’s not because of many (not all) of our community’s leaders but rather in spite of them.

I lament the incessant idiocy of too many people in control of our public affairs who clearly should not have been.

However, 61 years after that infant’s photo was taken held in the arms of Molly Healy, I continue to persevere in the hope that eventually we will start to get things right for Alice Springs and The Centre.