Madeline Rees George emulates English girls' schools at Adelaide's Advanced School – equal to the best for boys
Madeline Rees George (second from left, front row) with her sister Marian (far left, front row) and other Advanced School for Girls staff (all Misses) around 1900. Back row: (from left): M. Maughan, Ethel Holder, Ellen Lewis. Others in front row: C.E. Sells and K. Cooke. Inset: The Advanced School for Girls building in Grote Street, Adelaide city, and Madeline Rees George (seated to the right of headmaster William Adey) with the foundation staff of Adelaide High School in Grote Street in 1908.
Images courtesy State Library of South Australia
Madeline Rees George was third headmistress of Adelaide’s Australia-first Advanced School for Girls for 22 years and another six years as girls section headmistress when it merged into Adelaide High School in 1908.
Madeline Rees George (known as Madge) started at the Advanced School for Girls as a German teacher and her younger sister Marian (Bibs) was a French teacher there and at Adelaide High School. The Advanced School for Girls was the first public high school, for boys or girls, in Australia.
The Rees George sisters were raised in London and went to Germany, where they worked as teachers/governesses, Madeline attended boarding school in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1866-69. Proficient in German and French, she became a governess in Kissingen and Munich. In 1875, Madelaine and Marian came to Adelaide where their widowed mother Nancy was already settled from 1869. She had contacted Julia Farr, notable social campaigner and wife of former St Peter's College headmaster George Farr, to see if she was interested in employing Madeline as a governess.
The year 1875 also saw South Australia’s parliament passing the Education Act making schooling compulsory for children aged seven to 13. This created the need for more women to become teachers. To this end, Adelaide University was permitted to admit women to all its degree courses from 1881. The Advanced School for Girls would supply those graduates, including Edith Dornwell, first female graduate at Adelaide University and Australia’s first bachelor of science, and Helen Mayo, the university’s second female graduate in medicine who become a prominent medical practitioner and campaigner.
The Advanced School for Girls opened with a few students in a converted house in Franklin Street, Adelaide city, in 1879, before moving in 1891 to a new purpose-built building in Grote Street with 180 students enrolled. After teaching the children of several Adelaide families, Madeline Rees George was appointed in 1880 as part-time German and French mistress at the Advanced School for Girls. South Australia's only state secondary school. Leaving in 1885 to start her own school in North Adelaide, she returned in 1886 as Advanced School headmistress.
Working with South Australian government education inspector general John Anderson Hartley, Madeline Rees George maintained high academic standards, encouraged esprit de corps and increased enrolments. Emulating English girls' high schools, Madeline Rees George provided higher education for girls equal to Adelaide’s best private boys' schools. In 1900, she presented a wide-ranging report on girls' education to the South Australian government, adding Greek and chemistry to the syllabus and introducing inter-school tennis matches.
The Advanced School influenced attitudes to academic standards and public examinations at Adelaide’s private girls schools, increasingly staffed by its old scholars and former staff, including Caroline Jacob and Ellen Benham. Until 1898, all Adelaide University female graduates were former Advanced School students. Rees George herself passed several university subjects between 1880 and 1902. She set state school teachers' and public examination papers, helped traini pupil teachers, and was on the Teachers' Guild of South Australia and the Collegiate Schools' Association committee.
In 1908, the Advanced School for Girls, the model for the state's secondary schools, was incorporated into the new Adelaide High School. Madeline Rees George was headmistress of the girls' section until she retired in 1913. In 1915-22, she taught at the Methodist Ladies' College and, in 1928, was acting headmistress for a term. Madeline and Marian Rees George continued to live together and forge independent lives, with neither marrying.
