LITTLE BENDIGO PRIMARY SCHOOL

Little Bendigo Primary School (Nerrina) is a picturesque brick building in a Victorian rustic Gothic style, built on foundations of bluestone, and opened in 1878 to a design by the Education Department architect H.R. Bastow. The school has a rectangular plan of one room of approximately thirteen by six metres. It has a small entrance porch facing Monte Street and a half-hipped Welsh slate gable roof with iron finials. This half hip roof form is repeated on the smaller transverse gable, and on the porch. The windows are narrow Gothic double hung sashes. The interior has a timber lined ceiling and prominent timber roof frames. 

Little Bendigo Primary School is of architectural significance to the State of Victoria. It satisfies the following criterion for inclusion in the Victorian Heritage Register: 

Importance to the course, or pattern, of Victoria’s cultural history.

Importance in demonstrating the principal characteristics of a class of cultural places and objects.

 

Little Bendigo Primary School is historically significant for its representation of the prosperous early days of the town of Little Bendigo (later renamed Nerrina). Its relatively large size and sophisticated form reflects the size and the wealth of the community in the years after the discovery of gold in 1851. 

 

Little Bendigo Primary School is architecturally significant as a surviving intact example of a small country schoolhouse, consisting of only one large room with an entry porch. It is an unusual but fine example of a picturesque Gothic school with a half-hipped gable roof, still covered with its with its original slates, and with decorative iron finials on the ridge ends.