This paper highlights ways in which understandings about masculinity intersected with concepts of vocation, career and character in the life and work of an Australian teacher, Victor Pavia. Firstly, it outlines his vertical career path from teacher to headmaster and then inspector, made possible in a bureaucratised state school system that…

In this article, the author focuses in what counted as a "good" teacher on the cusp of a significant change in the profile of the teaching workforce from single to married women. As Jackie Blount notes, single women had dominated state school systems numerically for the century preceding the Second World War but by the late 1940s the…