Ethnic masculinities in Australian boys' schools: Scots and Irish secondary schools in late nineteenth-century Australia.

Recent research into the cultural construction of masculinity has shown it to be not a monolith, but multi‐faceted, contested, and changing over time. Masculinities are institutionalised and practised in many arenas of social life, but schools are especially important in endeavouring to shape and inculcate particular models and codes of masculinity. Historians of education in Britain and Australia have examined how Victorian boys' schools instilled an ideal of manliness, which changed markedly in the late nineteenth century. The English public school code of masculinity was a key feature of Australian boys' schools conducted by the Church of England and other English‐oriented churches and agencies. This article examines some schools established by Scots through the Presbyterian Church, and by the Catholic Church which was overwhelmingly Irish. The period from the 1880s to the First World War is focused upon, to ascertain what distinctive ideals or models ofmanhood may have been transplanted through these ethnic traditions, and the extent to which they differed from, resisted, or adapted to, the prestigious Arnoldian English code, supported as it was by the popular cultural ideal of British Imperial manhood. The question of whether a distinctively Australian model of masculinity was emerging at this time, and which ethnic traditions contributed most to it, is also explored.