Purpose: This article explores the childhood, professional life and social activism of Alice Rigney (1942-2017) who became Australia's first Aboriginal woman principal in 1986. Design/methodology/approach: The article draws on interviews with Alice Rigney along with newspapers, education department correspondence and reports of relevant…

This article explores teacher educator Lillian de Lissa's working life in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1944 the McNair report criticised residential colleges and their female staff as isolated and intellectually impoverished. However, in Australia and then as the foundation Principal of Gipsy Hill Training College, de Lissa was not…

In early twentieth-century Australia, men managed coeducational state training colleges (equivalent to normal schools) but teacher education programmes for kindergartners were initiatives of the free kindergarten movement and firmly in women's hands. The Kindergarten Training College in Adelaide, South Australia, was established in 1907 with…