A new school for Coonana

Author’s Note: This report is taken from The West Australian – 15 Aug 1941¹.

Farthest-east School.

“The State Government is about to provide a school for 20 children at Coonana, 100 miles east of Kalgoorlie on the trans-Australian railway. It will be the Education Department’s farthest-east school. The Commonwealth Government is building cottages for its railway employees at Coonana, where there are about 12 married men with families, and the department took advantage of the presence of builders to have the school erected at the same time. It will consist of a wooden classroom (20 ft. square), for the construction of which the tender of Henry Martin and Co., amounting to £627, has been accepted.”

The Coonana Primary School operated from 1942 until 1980². Coonana Siding was named after a nearby hill that was first recorded as Coonaanna by W.P. Goddard in 1890. The possible meaning of the word is “hill of ashes”³. 

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Sources

1. NEWS AND NOTES (1941, August 15). The West Australian (Perth, WA : 1879 – 1954), p. 6. Retrieved October 25, 2025, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article47156702 ↩︎
2. Wikipedia (2025). List of schools in rural Western Australia. Retrieved October 25, 2025, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_schools_in_rural_Western_Australia ↩︎
3. PocketOz (2025). Let’s Go Travelling: Railway Ghost Towns and Sidings on the Nullabor Plain. Retrieved October 25, 2025, from https://pocketoz.com.au/rail/ghost-towns-nullarbor.html ↩︎