Kalkie State School

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Kalkie State School is a heritage-listed state school at 257 Bargara Road, Kalkie, Bundaberg Region, Queensland, Australia. It was designed by the Queensland Department of Public Works and built in 1877 by Franz Kuhnel and William Starke. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 21 October 1992.HistoryThe earliest building at Kalkie State School was erected in 1877, with the playshed constructed in 1879-80. It was the first state school established in the Woongarra Scrub, and is the oldest school in Woongarra Shire. The playshed is one of the earliest surviving shingle-roofed playsheds in Queensland.The school was established to serve the needs of the small farming community of Kalkie, which developed in the early 1870s in the heart of the Woongarra Scrub, about 4 miles east of Bundaberg. The area was open to selection from 1869, following resumption of half of Branyan Station (taken up in 1855) for closer settlement under the 1868 Crown Lands Alienation Act. In the early 1870s, the area attracted a substantial number of British, German and Scandinavian families. In the early years the principal cash crop was maize, but in 1876 the price of maize fell by 600%, and by the early 1880s, the Kalkie/Woongarra farmers had turned to sugar. In 1882 the large Millaquin sugar refinery was established, and numerous juice mills, whose output was piped to the refinery, were erected in the Kalkie/Woongarra district in the following decade.