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The purpose of this paper is to examine how Australian universities commemorated the First World War, with a focus on the University of Melbourne as an institution with a particularly rich history of wartime participation and of diverse forms of memorialisation.

A case study approach is taken, with an overview of the range of war memorials at the University of Melbourne. These include memorials which acknowledged the wartime role of individuals or groups associated with the University, and took the form of architectural features, and named scholarships or academic positions. Three cross-campus war memorials are examined in depth.

This paper demonstrates that there was a range of war memorials at Australian universities, indicating the range of views about the First World War, and its legacies, within university communities of students, graduates and staff.

University war commemoration in Australia has not been well documented. This study examines the way in which the particular character of the community at the University of Melbourne was to influence the forms of First World War commemoration.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the development of vocational education for girls, focusing on how curriculum and pedagogy developed to accommodate changing expectations of the role of women in the workplace and the home in mid-twentieth century Australia. As well as describing how pedagogical changes were implemented through curriculum, it examines the way a modern approach to girls’ education was reflected in the built environment of the school site and through its interactions with its changing community.

The paper takes a case study approach, focusing on the example of the J.H. Boyd Domestic College which functioned as a single-sex school for girls from 1932 until its closure in 1985. Oral history testimony, private archives, photographs and government school records provide the material from which an understanding of the school is reconstructed.

This detailed examination of the history of J.H. Boyd Domestic College highlights the highly integrated nature of the school's environment with the surrounding community, which strengthened links between the girls and their community. It also demonstrates how important the school's buildings and facilities were to contemporary ideas about the teaching of girls in a vocational setting.

This is the first history of J.H. Boyd Domestic College to examine the intersections of gendered, classed ideas about pedagogy with ideas about the appropriate built environment for the teaching of domestic science. The contextualized approach sheds new light on domestic science education in Victoria and the unusually high quality of the learning spaces available for girls’ education.

In this article we focus on two women, Catherine Francis (1836‐1916) and Dorothy Dolling (1897‐ 1967), whose lives traversed England, New Zealand and South Australia. At the beginning of this period the British Empire was expanding and New Zealand and South Australia had much in common. They were white settler societies, that is ‘forms of colonial society which had displaced indigenous peoples from their land’. We have organised the article chronologically so the first section commences with Catherine’s birth in England and early life in South Australia, where she mostly inhabited the world of the young ladies school, a transnational phenomenon. The next section investigates her career in New Zealand from 1878 where she led the Mount Cook Infant’s School in Wellington and became one of the colony’s first renowned women principals. We turn to Dorothy Dolling in the third section, describing her childhood and work as a university student and tutor in New Zealand and England. The final section of our article focuses on the ways in which both women have been represented in the national memories of Australia and New Zealand. In so doing, we show that understandings about nationhood are also transnational, and that writing about Francis and Dolling reflects the shifting relationships between the three countries in the twentieth century.

The purpose of this paper is to canvass debates arising from encounters between architectural and educational history and to introduce a themed section of four papers exploring aspects of the history of school design and the spatial arrangements of Australian schooling across the twentieth century.

This is an interpretive introductory essay that characterizes trends in historical and sociological studies of school space and materialities, and synthesizes the arguments and contributions of the four companion papers.

A case is made for greater exchange among educational, architectural and social historians and key insights and findings from the four papers concerning school space, design and educational ideas are summarized. Themes of community, citizenship and progressive education are highlighted.

The value of the paper lies in introducing the context and scholarly debates framing a collection of four papers that seek to open up new avenues for investigating the history of modern schooling through studying intersections between school space and design and educational purposes and aspiration.

The purpose of this paper is to: introduce the topic of the relationship between universities and the First World War historiographically; put university expertise and knowledge at the centre of studies of the First World War; and explain how an examination of university expertise and war reveals a continuity of intellectual and scientific activity from war to peace.

Placing the papers in the special issue of HER on universities and war in the context of a broader historiography of the First World War and its aftermath.

The interconnections between university expertise and the First World War is a neglected field, yet its examination enriches the current historiography and prompts us to see the war not simply in terms of guns and battles but also how the battlefield extended university expertise with long-lasting implications into the 1920s and 1930s.

The paper explores how universities and their expertise – e.g. medical, artistic, philosophical – were mobilised in the First World War and the following peace.

Technical education in the twentieth century played an important role in the cultural life of Australia in ways are that routinely overlooked or forgotten. As all education is central to the cultural life of any nation this article traces the relationship between technical education and the national social imaginary. Specifically, the article focuses on the connection between art and technical education and does so by considering changing cultural representations of Australia.

Drawing upon materials, that include school archives, an unpublished autobiography monograph, art catalogues and documentary film, the article details the lives and works of two artists, from different eras of twentieth century Australia. Utilising social memory as theorised by Connerton (1989, 2009, 2011), the article reflects on the lives of two Australian artists as examples of, and a way into appreciating, the enduring relationship between technical education and art.

The two artists, William Wallace Anderson and Carol Jerrems both products of, and teachers in, technical schools produced their own art that offered different insights into changes in Australia's national imaginary. By exploring their lives and work, the connections between technical education and art represent a social memory made material in the works of the artists and their representations of Australia's changing national imaginary.

This article features two artist teachers from technical schools as examples of the centrality of art to technical education. Through the teacher-artists lives and works the article highlights a shift in the Australian cultural imaginary at the same time as remembering the centrality of art to technical education. Through the twentieth century the relationship between art and technical education persisted, revealing the sensibilities of the times.

The purpose of this paper is to explore representations of Aboriginal people, in particular children, in the Victorian government’s school reader The School Paper, from the end of the Second World War until its publication ceased in 1968. The author interrogates these representations within the framework of pedagogies of citizenship training and the development of national identity, to reveal the role Aboriginal people and their culture were accorded within the “imagined community” of Australian nationhood and its heritage and history.

The paper draws on the rich material available in the Victorian Department of Education’s school reader, The School Paper, from 1946 to 1968 (when the publication ceased), and on the Department’s annual reports. These are read within the context of scholarship on race, education and citizenship formation in the post-war years.

State government policies of assimilation following the Second World War tied in with pedagogies and curricula regarding citizenship and belonging, which became a key focus of education departments following the Second World War. The informal pedagogies of The School Paper’s representations of Aboriginal children and their families, the author argues, excluded Aboriginal communities from understandings of Australian nationhood, and from conceptions of the ideal Australian citizen-in-formation. Instead, representations of Aboriginal people relegated them to the outdoors in ways that racialised Australian spaces: Aboriginal cultures are portrayed as historical yet timeless, linked with the natural/native rather than civic/political environment.

This paper builds on scholarship on the relationship between education, reading pedagogies and citizenship formation in Australia in the post-war years to develop our knowledge of how conceptions of the ideal Australian citizen of the future – that is, Australian students – were inherently racialised. It makes a new contribution to scholarship on the assimilation project in Australia, through revealing the relationship between government policies towards Aboriginal people and the racial and cultural qualities being taught in Australian schools.