Australian Schools

Antique Prints of Australian Schools and Educational Institutions

This category brings together original antique prints, engravings and illustrations depicting Australian schools, colleges, universities and educational institutions, produced from the colonial period through to the early 20th century. These works document an important dimension of Australian colonial and post-colonial life — the establishment and development of educational institutions that shaped the intellectual and professional formation of successive generations of Australians.

The illustrated press of colonial Australia — the Illustrated Sydney News, the Illustrated Australian News, the Australasian Sketcher and their counterparts — produced engraved views of notable public and private schools, grammar schools, collegiate institutions and the new universities founded in the colonial capitals from the 1850s onwards. These illustrated reports, combining architectural views of school buildings with scenes of school life, assemblies and prize-givings, provide a visual record of Australian educational development that is available in no other form.

The great colonial grammar schools — Sydney Grammar School, Melbourne Grammar School, Geelong Grammar School, Scotch College and their counterparts in other states — were depicted in engravings that celebrated their architectural ambitions and their place in colonial civic life. Views of school buildings, chapels, quadrangles and playing fields document the physical environment of colonial education with a specificity that architectural records and written histories alone cannot supply.

University buildings and collegiate facilities — the sandstone buildings of the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne, the institutions founded in other colonial capitals — appear in illustrated prints that capture the aspirations of a colonial society committed to establishing institutions of learning on the model of the great British universities.

Antique prints of Australian schools and educational institutions are collected by former students, institutional archives, historians of Australian education and collectors of Australian colonial social history. They document a formative dimension of Australian colonial life that has received less collector attention than more prominent categories of Australian historical print, and represent a genuine area of rarity and historical significance.