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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.

Museums and academics collaborating to create knowledge and learning opportunities is a current innovative strand of museum theory and practice. Working together across boundaries, incorporating a range of communication tools both inside and outside of the exhibition, the objective is to make the past more accessible to adults and children alike. The paper reflects the authors’ respective recent experiences of presenting alternative perspectives and interpretations on history that mattered, namely, a unique exhibition and publication entitled Recovery: Women’s Overseas Service in World War One. The authors offer a number of “signposts” for museums and academics to consider ahead of embarking on collaborative projects. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Theorising and reflecting on the research and curation of a public history museum exhibition that included high levels of community engagement.

The authors offer a number of “signposts” for museums and academics to consider ahead of embarking on collaborative projects utilising a collective impact framework and argue that these “signposts” are likely pre-requisites for successful museum-academic partnerships.

Successful partnerships and collaborations between the museum and the tertiary sector do not happen through goodwill and shared philosophies alone. This paper reflects the authors’ respective recent experiences of presenting alternative perspectives and interpretations on history that mattered, namely, a unique exhibition and publication entitled Recovery: Women’s Overseas Service in World War One.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the contributions of women teachers to the war effort at home in Australia and New Zealand and in Egypt and Europe between 1914 and 1918.

Framed as a feminist transnational history, this research paper drew upon extensive primary and secondary source material in order to identify the women teachers. It provides comparative analyses using a thematic approach providing examples of women teachers war work at home and abroad.

Insights are offered into the opportunities provided by the First World War for channelling the abilities and leadership skills of women teachers at home and abroad. Canvassed also are the tensions for German heritage teachers; ideological differences concerning patriotism and pacifism and issues arising from government attitudes on both sides of the Tasman towards women’s war service.

This is likely the only research offering combined Australian–New Zealand analyses of women teacher’s war service, either in support at home in Australia and New Zealand or working as volunteers abroad. To date, the efforts of Australian and New Zealand women teachers have largely gone unrecognised.

Commencing with publications in the 1970s, the purpose of this paper is to review the historical writing about Australian and New Zealand teachers over the past 50 years.

The paper incorporates men and women who led and taught in domestic spaces, per-school, primary, secondary and higher education. It is structured around publications in the ANZHES Journal and History of Education Review, and includes research published in other forums as appropriate. The literature review is selective rather than comprehensive.

Since the 1980s, the history of New Zealand and Australian teachers has mostly focussed on women educators in an increasing array of contexts, and incorporated various theoretical perspectives over time.

The paper highlights key themes and identifies potential directions for research into Australian and New Zealand teachers.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of ongoing conversations between researchers and librarians. Without such conversations followed by the active purchasing of manuscripts, the important contributions of individual first settlers would likely remain untold. The research review that unfolds here is of one of New Zealand's significant first settlers, William Colenso (1811-1899). Yet, 30 years ago William Colenso was mostly regarded as a local rather than a national figure, renowned and ridiculed for his being dismissed from the Church Missionary Society for moral impropriety in 1852. By 2011, however, a conference dedicated to his life and work attracted both national and international scholars raising awareness and contributing unique knowledge about Colenso as missionary, printer, linguist, explorer, botanist, politician, author and inspector of schools. It is argued that such scholarship was enabled through the purposeful collecting of Colenso's papers over 30 years.

The historical analysis draws from original documents and published papers chronicling the role and the views of one of New Zealand's first inspector of schools. A self-reflective review approach will show how new knowledge can enhance earlier published works and provide opportunities for further analysis.

It will be demonstrated that as a result of ongoing conversations between librarians and researchers purposeful buying of archives and manuscripts have added fresh perspectives to the contributions William Colenso made to education in provincial New Zealand.

This work is perhaps the first critical re-reading and review of one's own scholarship undertaken across 30 years within New Zealand history of education. It offers unique self-reflections on the subject focus and analyses of it over time.

This article examines the national and international connections made by women graduates of the School of Home Science in their efforts to develop the scholarly expertise and professional capacity that would enable them to pursue academic careers and to improve the position of women in universities. It argues that despite the obstacles, many women were able to pursue academic pathways and to establish their own authority. By undertaking a transnational analysis, this article examines webs of influence that linked women scholars in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States as well as those in the so called “centre” (Europe and the United Kingdom). It explores the networks formed by a select number of middle class women ‐ scholars such as Ann Gilchrist Strong, Elizabeth Gregory and Neige Todhunter ‐ as they attempted to expand the range of their scholarly work beyond national borders. It considers the influence of appointments of women academics from the United States and the United Kingdom on; the significance of post graduate study opportunities for home science graduates; and the role of scholarships and awards that enabled two way travel between the southern and northern hemispheres. A number of tensions are evident in the way women scholars located their work in new and emerging fields of academic knowledge within the university. This article explores interrelationships between women academics and graduates from the School of Home Science at the University of Otago and academic women in the United Kingdom and the United States. The final section of the paper examines the academic and scholarly life of Catherine Landreth who exemplifies the experience of a select group of women who gained personally, culturally and professionally from their international opportunities, experiences and networks. It considers Landreth’s transnational travels in search of scholarly expertise, the influence of her personal and professional networks, the significance of her pioneering work in the emerging field of early childhood education and the constraints experienced in a highly gendered academic enclave. To begin however it gives a brief overview of the introduction of Home Science at the University of New Zealand and the influence of initial international appointments on the expansion of women’s academic work at the University of Otago.

From the mid‐nineteenth to the early twentieth century universities and colleges were founded throughout Australia and New Zealand in the context of the expanding British Empire. This article provides an analytical framework to understand the engagement between changing ideas of higher education at the centre of Empire and within the settler societies in the Antipodes. Imperial influences remained significant, but so was locality in association with the role of the emerging state, while the idea of the public purpose of higher education helped to widen social access forming and sustaining the basis of middle class professions.

The purpose of this paper is to set out three dilemmas that challenge historians of education who write for both professional and academic audiences. It focuses on the example of using fiction as a source for understanding the informal education of girls in the twentieth century. It contributes to the debate over the purpose of history of education and the possibilities that intersecting and contested analytical frameworks might contribute to the development of the discipline.

The paper discusses the rules of engagement and the duties of a historian of education. It reforms current concerns into three dilemmas: audience, method and writing. It gives examples drawn from research into girls’ school stories between 1910 and 1960. It highlights three authors and stories set in Australia, England and an international school in order to explore what fiction offers in getting “inside” the classroom.

Developed from a conference keynote that explored intersecting and contested histories of education, the paper sets up as many questions as it provides answers but re-frames them to include the use of a genre that has been explored by historians of childhood and literature but less so by historians of education.

The vast quantity of stories set in girls’ schools between 1910 and 1960 necessarily demands a selective reading. Authors may specialise in the genre or be general young people’s fiction authors. Reading such stories must necessarily be set against changing social, cultural and political contexts. This paper uses examples from the genre in order to explore ways forward but cannot include an exhaustive methodology for reasons of space.

This paper suggests fiction as a way of broadening the remit of history of education and acting as a bridge between related sub-disciplines such as history of childhood and youth, history and education. It raises practical implications for historians of education as they seek new approaches and understanding of the process of informal education outside the classroom.

This paper suggests that the authors should take more seriously the impact of children’s reading for pleasure. Reception studies offer an insight into recognising the interaction that children have with their chosen reading. While the authors cannot research how children interacted historically with these stories in the mid-twentieth century, the authors can draw implications from the popularity of the genre and the significance of the legacy of the closed school community that has made series such as Harry Potter so successful with the current generation.

The marginal place of history of education within the disciplines of history and education is both challenging and full of possibilities. The paper draws on existing international debates and discusses future directions as well as the potential that girls’ school stories offer for research into gender and education.