Sea Water and Scholarly Success? Private Venture Education for Boys and Male Entrepreneurship Along Adelaide’s Coastline During the Victorian Era

Abstract

Accounts of Australian private venture schools for boys during the Victorian era can provide us with a greater understanding of the relationships between education and physical locations. This article will highlight the links between the digitisation of Australia’s Victorian era newspapers, the expansion of our knowledge of private venture schools for boys in coastal areas and the circumstances that prompted male head teacher-proprietors to move to the seaside during the colonial period. Relatively little attention has been devoted to the male proprietors of private venture schools for boys in Australia during the Victorian era. Historians interested in social access to elite colonial groups, Victorian-era school curriculum offerings and cultural capital, as well as definitions of male gender identities, have tended to focus on corporate and church-affiliated schools for boys. Private venture schools during the Victorian age were not always shoddy establishments, captive to the worst aspects of exploitation found in Dickensian fiction.  Private venture schools were usually smaller than corporate or church-affiliated schools. However, they could be valuable gateways to significant social networks. Private venture schools for boys located in Adelaide’s coastal areas gave their proprietors and parents distinctive opportunities to protect student health at the same time as promoting family fortunes through the acquisition of cultural capital.