If you’ve lived in Ashburton awhile, you’ll know there is no public or private high school in the suburb.
The closest option is Ashwood High School. For reasons I’ve attempted to uncover in this post, Ashwood High comes with decades of negative pre-conceived notions that for some people seem to consistently override the fact that today, the school is ranked in the Top 10 of public high schools in the state. More importantly, Ashwood High also counts 80s actor and singer Rick “Jessie’s Girl” Springfield as among its alumni. He seems to have turned out fine.
So what’s the problem?
Well, it turns out that there are several, inter-connected reasons why there's no high school and they feed into Ashburton's relationship with Ashwood High School. So thanks go to Katie for asking this question!
Before I begin, I must acknowledge two excellent volumes on the subject of secondary education in Victoria. The first is called Boroondara’s Private Schools (1851-1951) by John L Torpey (2021). The other is called 'A Secondary Education for All'? A History of State Secondary Schooling in Victoria by John Andrews and Deborah Towns (2017).
The authors of these books have taken an enormous three volume history of education in Victoria that, I kid you not, is so thick it would keep your door open in a hurricane and distilled it into useful and succinct information on secondary education in our state.
Understanding Education in Victoria after European settlement
The answer to why there is no High School in Ashburton actually lies all the way back to how secondary education developed in Victoria after European settlement.
It began as primary education did; when the Church (being Protestant and Catholic-aligned faiths) secured themselves a monopoly on providing education to Victorian children.
The main reason they could do this was that they had access to personnel; an in-built cohort of nuns, sisters, and brothers to act as teachers. Unlike the rest of the Victorian population, these individuals did not need to establish themselves financially by opening shops, running sheep and cattle, or searching for gold. Nor did they need to have any teaching qualifications. There was no colonial oversight of teacher education, regulation on what children were taught or how they were treated, or even oversight of educational spaces. So the Church essentially had carte blanche over education for several decades. Numerous pre-Federation reviews by the State Government revealed that what the Church teachers lacked in teaching qualifications they made up for in religious zeal. The quality of the education children received left much to be desired.
The private schools are born
You may also have noticed that despite there being no High School in Ashburton, there IS a higher-than-average number of non-government schools in the Boroondara region, including seven private schools in Kew alone. Now Kew is about as far away as you can get from Ashburton and still be in Boroondara. Driving your kid to any of those schools is a grind that will age you prematurely. It turns out this situation goes all the way back to pre-Federation times too.
The Church did not educate children for free. This meant they primarily concerned themselves with the children of people who could afford to pay for education: the wealthy and powerful elite. This was certainly not unique to Victoria. The working classes of Western civilisation had long ago resigned themselves to the fact that education was a privilege for only those who could afford it.
From 1850, a plethora of Protestant-affiliated schools around Melbourne’s major population centres quickly sprung up, including some short-lived ones in people’s homes. In Boroondara, these were primarily in Kew and Hawthorn where wealthy elites lived and could afford to donate to support the new schools. Nobody wanted the two genders educated together so the Church established ‘boys’ private schools and ‘ladies’ colleges.
As Torpey’s book described, many of these schools died out but some formed the basis of the private schools there today. Over time, the parents attached to the stronger schools united into a powerful private school lobby determined to keep education in the hands of the Church and the Victorian elite.
The marginalised Catholic minority of Victoria took a different path. They regarded education as the primary way to improve their standard of living and participate in power-sharing. They decided that every Catholic child – regardless of social standing – would be educated in a Catholic school. They set up their own fee-based educational institutions. With a goal to infiltrate the upper echelons of state power, Catholic leaders devised Catholic education to achieve success in the examinations for the Civil Service and entrance to university. This elevated Catholics into the government, legal and business power structures dominated by the Protestant majority.
Education in the new Victorian colony
After Victoria gained its independence from New South Wales in 1851, its new leaders considered improving education standards a key priority. This included providing at least primary education for the working classes. For many members of the new Government, it was clear early that Victoria needed some kind of publicly funded post-primary education to fill vocational gaps in the community too.
But the Church and the private school lobby were not about to loosen their grip anytime soon. For the Melbourne elite, any attempt by the State Government to provide education to the working classes was, at best, considered unnecessary and at worst, dangerous and revolutionary to their interests.
In short, expanding even primary education to all Victorian children regardless of class was strongly resisted by very influential people until at least Federation. A few scraps were fed to the lesser privileged – usually the middle class - through 60 State-sponsored scholarships to the private schools.
Vocational or secondary schooling for anyone else was inconceivable.
Frank Tate and the push for government-funded secondary education
Things began to change after Federation. A major influence on pushing for improved educational standards for all came in 1902 from the appointment of former teacher and educator Frank Tate as the Director of the Victorian Department of Education.
This was obviously a time when the people in charge of State Government Departments actually had experience and expertise in the department they oversaw. Imagine that!
Now that Victoria was in competition with other states to establish itself within the new Federation, the Government managed to use this as leverage to loosen the hold of the Church on primary schooling. State primary schools emerged and the Government mandated that all children were to be educated until the age of 14 (Grade 8). Gradually, elite acceptance of primary school education for all emerged.
But Tate believed it should go further. It was his opinion that all children should have the opportunity to attend a post-primary school and even enter University if they desired it.
In 1905, he experienced his first major win: the establishment of the first government post-primary school that anyone could attend. He called it Melbourne Continuation School and it was designed to provide teacher training and prepare students for university entrance. Its name changed to Melbourne High School in 1910.
The private school lobby digs in
Facing massive backlash from the Melbourne-based private school lobby, Tate instead pushed the Continuation School concept into regional towns. He also worked hard on establish Agricultural Schools. The Government opened Ballarat High School in 1907 and Shepparton High School in 1909. A rare Melbourne-based school opened in 1910: University High School in Parkville.
However, despite Tate’s best efforts, the reality remained throughout Melbourne’s suburbs that very few young people studied post-primary subjects. The vast majority left a state primary school at age 14.
‘Secondary education is still the privilege of the well-to-do,’ Tate lamented in 1907. ‘It should not be seen as competitive of governments to establish secondary schools but as a national well-being project.’
Nevertheless, Tate did not give up. He pushed for better educated teachers through the compulsory acquisition of the new Diploma of Education. Then Tate pushed through the Education Law Further Amendment Act 1911. It gave the State the blanket right to establish state-funded secondary schools.
This was a bridge too far for the powerful private school lobby. They dug in. They ensured most of the new high schools were established outside of Melbourne.
The dearth of High Schools in 1920s Melbourne suburbs
During the 1920s and 30s, there were three options for eastern suburbs children in the public system at the end of Grade 6. All ensured children finished their education at age 14:
Remain at primary school to complete the Merit Certificate and finish up in Grade 8 then go out to work;
For boys, apply for entry into a three year course in junior technical schools either at Swinburne, Caulfield, or Box Hill; or for girls, the East Camberwell Domestic Arts School, then go out to work; or
Enrol at a local central school, such as Malvern East Central School, for two years of secondary classes, then go out to work.
For boys, ‘work’ consisted of anything from factories, the public service to business. Unlike today, these professions did not require any formal qualifications to enter. Girls became dressmakers, factory, office, hospital or domestic workers. Despite girls performing just as well as boys at school, their career trajectories were nowhere near as broad or generous as the boys. Many highly intelligent young women toiled in low-level jobs far below their capabilities and retired after marriage.
Very rarely, a student transferred to an academic State high school in the city, such as Melbourne High School (for boys) or MacRobertson Girls School (for girls) and took the Leaving Certificate to try and gain a place at University. The number of girls taking this path was very small. Most parents believed that tertiary education for girls was a waste of time and money.
Why there is no High School in Ashburton
By 1929, there were still only 36 state high schools in the whole of Melbourne. All of these High Schools were located north of the Yarra.
So there is no public High School in Ashburton because none of the eastern suburbs of Melbourne had one. They were too close to Kew and Hawthorn: the heartland of the private school lobby. Even Camberwell could not get a public High School because of it until 1941.
Ashburton could never have obtained a private high school either. As we will discover, this is because it did not have enough of the right kind of children for one.
The battle to establish Camberwell High School
Until 1958, the only option for public high school for Ashburton teenagers was Camberwell High School, established in 1941. The battle to establish it showed that it was not just Ashburton residents that struggled to get the City of Camberwell on their side.
By the 1930s, there was still only a small minority of parents of limited means in the area who aspired to post-primary education for their children, let alone university.
As Robert Ewins noted in Camberwell High School’s excellent history, ‘there was a general impression [that Camberwell residents] had not accepted general education for the masses at the secondary level as it had at the primary level.’
Camberwell now had a population of 69,000 and several high-fee private schools had recently opened, including Camberwell Grammar for boys (1926), Church of England Girls’ Grammar (1919); and Fintona Girls’ Grammar (1924). Even without the private school lobby, the fees for these schools were a massive barrier to the less well-off. The average wage was a little over 3 pounds per week and a school like Presbyterian Ladies College cost over 25 pounds per term.
City of Camberwell records reveal that attempts to get the Council to back the establishment of an Eastern Suburbs High School began in the early 1920s. The State Government showed interest in the idea and several wealthy people offered land to establish a high school. However, the State Government did not buy private properties from individuals; this was the Council’s domain. For years the Council brushed the requests aside.
Even Kew Council, with oversight of seven different private schools, succumbed to pressure to buy land for the establishment of a public high school (Kew High School) before Camberwell. The Box Hill High School opened in 1930. Eventually, Camberwell Council supported the establishment of a Girls High School in Mangarra Road Canterbury. The school taught Domestic Arts: cookery, needlework, and other boring skills men deemed necessary to obtain in a wife.
But it took until 1939 for sufficient momentum to build for Camberwell to obtain its own public High School. Eventually, a site was acquired on Prospect Hill Road near Riversdale Park and the school opened on 27 May 1941.
Ashburton’s lack of space for post-primary education
By the time Camberwell High School opened, only the southern section of Ashburton had any available space for large new buildings like a high school. Since this was already allocated for the Housing Commission Estate and the area that is now Markham Reserve was a rubbish dump, there was really no suitable land available for it.
Even if there was, socio-economic prejudices would have played a strong part. It would have been automatically and prejudicially assumed that none of the Housing Commission residents of the area would go to high school. Even if one was built, it was extremely unlikely that the established Ashburton residents would be willing to send their kids through the Housing Estate to attend the school. The divide was very deep: they did not even allow Housing Estate kids to attend Ashburton Primary School.
Residents who could afford to sent their kids to private school, such as Jim Leftley, who lived in Baker Parade and went to Wesley College in St Kilda Road. Those in the public school system who wished to attend High School went to Camberwell High School.
Jordanville Technical School (‘Jordy Tech’)
For this section, I am grateful to Jeff Turnbull’s 2007 publication, Once there was Jordanville.
Although there wasn’t an official rule, Technical Schools were mainly for boys. These were self-governing institutions specialised in the professional training of engineers (except mining), industrial chemists and accountants. Academic studies were offered, earning the schools the reputation of ‘poor man’s universities’. The first Technical School in the Eastern Suburbs was established in 1909 and later became Swinburne University.
After Frank Tate’s 1911 Act allowed for post-primary vocational education, a junior technical school model arose. These provided pre-vocational education to school-aged children and night classes for working youth to prepare them for the industrial workforce. As Jeff Turnbull put it, parents believed ‘if a boy is good with his brain, send him to high school and if he is good with his hands, send him to a technical school.’
As the Boomer Generation grew up in the Housing Estates of Ashburton, Chadstone and Jordanville in the 1950s, the need for a nearby Technical School arose.
In 1953, the Education Department bought 20 acres of land at the bottom of High Street Road for it. Bounded by Vannam Drive, Gardiner’s Creek and Damper Creek, it was hardly prime building land for houses as it was subject to heavy flooding. The Technical School was built on the Vannam Drive side.
As the boys waited for the new school to be built, they were housed in former Nissen huts at Ashburton Station. They went to Ashburton oval for recreation.
The school eventually opened with 179 Form 1 (Year 7) boys and 93 Form 3 (Year 8) boys. Evening classes were offered for women in millinery, lampshade making and dressmaking.
Ashwood High School
The large expanse of land for Ashwood High School was originally called ‘Summerhill’ and was owned by three generations of the Jordan family. The former Jordanville area (known from 1956 as Ashwood: a portmanteau of Ashburton and Burwood) was named for them.
Like Jordanville Tech, Ashwood High also began its life in the collection of ex-railway Nissen huts in Ashburton. They were freezing in winter and stiflingly hot in summer. The original caption for this photograph below read ‘"This is Ashwood High School - more like a prison camp than a place of learning. The only things missing from the six rusting Nissen huts are the bayonets and barbed wire."’
The building of Ashwood High School in the late 1950s represented the beginning of a fundamental shift in the provision of secondary education in Victoria. The post-War baby boomers and the masses of immigrants desperately needed educating. For the Federal Government, education was a vote winner. It began pumping federal funds into schools in an effort to seek a greater say in what it had previously considered a state responsibility.
A plethora of high schools sprung up in Melbourne suburbs almost overnight.
Ashwood High School opened in 1959, directly across the road from Jordanville Tech. The spacious grounds created considerable supervision problems for teachers, with many areas off limits to students.
Far more accessible than Camberwell High School, you would think Ashburton residents would embrace the new high school. But it was not the case. One of the reasons for this was the rise of the Jordy Boys.
Jordy Tech + Ashwood High School = The Jordy Boys
Most of the kids in the Jordanville Housing Commission and the present-day Ashwood surrounds attended the now defunct Ashwood Primary School. According to one former resident, the population of the primary school was homogenous and, as a result, relatively harmonious.
These were kids sharing the burden of alcoholic fathers self-medicating their war-related PTSD and mothers who spent their days cooking, cleaning, worrying about money, and dodging their drunken husbands. As a result, Ashwood Primary School kids were almost to a person, poor. Even those who were not living in the Housing Commission Estate were only one step up the social ladder and children of the lower-end of the middle class.
These shared circumstances gave the kids a unity that disintegrated the day they were split between Jordanville Tech and Ashwood High School.
To the Ashwood High students, Jordy Tech was for the boys who barely got through primary school. This was not a time when the community valued apprenticeships or vocational training. They considered these boys to be on the rougher side of rough because they predominantly came from the housing estates of Ashburton, Chadstone, and Jordanville.
Ashwood High School was for the more academically inclined – relatively speaking – and housed students from the more established section of Ashwood (around May Park Avenue); the Fakenham Road side of Ashburton towards Burwood; and the newer areas around Mt Waverley.
Battlelines were drawn almost immediately.
In a 2019 video on his YouTube channel, a former Ashwood High student commented on the relationship between Ashwood and Jordanville Tech students in the 1960s, ‘We used to stand at the fence and abuse the Jordanville Tech guys with all sorts of colourful adjectives.’
Another resident remembers what he called ‘outright warfare’ on Vannam Drive that involved fists, chains, and the occasional knife. The police attended on many occasions.
As the 1960s progressed and the music revolutions arrived in Melbourne, Jordy Tech bred its own sub-culture of young people. They became known as ‘sharpies’ for their distinctive style of dress and their readiness to use violence at any opportunity. The sharpie culture emerged across Melbourne and Jordanville’s sharpies called themselves the Jordy Boys.
Every weekend, Jordy Boys would pile into cars and go out brawling with other sharpie groups in Prahran, Collingwood and Richmond. Weekend football matches that involved a Jordy Boy contingent often ended in fights, especially if the Jordy team was losing. The police – far away in Oakleigh – did little.
During his time at Ashwood High, musician Rick Springfield joined a band called The Jordy Boys. ‘The other members had been in jail for things like armed robbery. They were 25 and I was 16. One time we were parked near a milk bar and they ran into it and held it up. I stayed out in the car. Lucky we didn't get caught or it might have started me on the wrong foot,’ he said in an interview.
Ashwood High and the Housing Commission kids
The massive growth of secondary schools meant there was a dearth of qualified secondary school teachers available to teach in them. Schools like Ashwood High employed very young, woefully inexperienced and unqualified individuals to attempt to teach a population of disenfranchised and economically disadvantaged teenagers. They were ill-equipped to handle the seething melting pot of Ashwood High.
In addition to the antagonism towards Jordy Tech kids, the social divide emerged immediately between the Housing Commission kids and the non-Housing Commission kids. The school had its fair share of bullies always willing to draw attention to disadvantage.
‘The local bully lived in Fakenham Road,’ one former 1960s student told me. ‘He was a big fat slob of kid, a total sociopath. He bullied me because my mother bought my school shirts from Coles. The top of the hill kids made it known that they bought their shirts from the Squire shop in Burwood. They called us ‘povos’.’
For girls, it was especially difficult. One woman commented, ‘A teacher named Mr Trent told my mother I would have been better in my work if I was better behaved. I may not have been the best scholar but I was definitely a well brought up young girl and never played up. As you can tell, I never forgot this.’
One woman who attended in 1970 told me that despite being in the ‘A’ form for the smarter kids (usually comprised of original Ashwood residents rather than Housing Commission ones), she was treated differently because she lived in the ‘slums’, as some parents called it.
‘It was a well known thing back then that they would try to weed out a lot of Housing Commission kids if they were any trouble,’ she said. She was never in trouble but when her living conditions at home deteriorated into violence, she was unable to keep her grades up.
‘Mum was called in and told that it was best if the school and I parted company’, she said. There was no support for her nor understanding. ‘I was devastated. I lost all my friends. Their parents didn’t like me anyway because I came from the ‘slums’. Now I was a dropout as well.’ She was unceremoniously sent out to work.
However, she took pains to point out that reconnecting with her former friends more recently revealed that many of them remembered the school much more fondly. From a 1969 School Magazine it’s clear there were dances, bands, plays, school trips, and sports that created firm friendships still going strong now.
A satirical item in the same Magazine called ‘The Truth of the Matter’ shed some interesting light on the school environment at the time. How much of it was the standard objections of a teenage boy against authority and how much was true are anyone’s guess. But then there is usually an element of truth to satire.
‘Everybody knows that if you get into class at one minute past nine you are disgraceful and don’t deserve the right to be taught at the wonderful school that the teachers are always telling us we go to, this great place of learning where everyone except the students are created equal,’ it began.
'It’s a well-known fact that the pupil who sits at the back of the class must be a stupid peasant and the student who sits at the front near the teacher must be a natural born genius,' it continued. 'Another well-known fact about school is that students with long hair are not of the same high class as those students with crew cuts. [Albert Einstein and Ludwig Beethoven] had long hair and you know as well as I do that it made them mentally defective.’
You could survive; but it helped if you were male and academically gifted. It also helped to be good at sport and/or play in a band. This awarded prestige and some immunity from the Jordy Boys.
Fortunately, there were some teachers who took an interest in students. One former student I spoke to was expelled in his final year. Highly intelligent, his growing affinity with left-wing politics in the late 1960s meant he was constantly in trouble for challenging his conservative teachers. Eventually he did not bother attending school at all. Two months after his expulsion, an Ashwood High teacher turned up on his door step.
‘If you don’t finish the year, they’ve won,’ the teacher told him. The teacher arranged for him to finish the year as an external student. He became one of three (of 40) students who went on to tertiary studies in 1970.
The Kennett Government reforms
In the 1980s and 1990s, the sharpies moved on and enrolments at Jordanville Tech declined so much that the Kennett Government decided to amalgamate the school with Ashwood High. Jordy Tech was demolished and the site sold off for housing. Ashwood High became Ashwood College. Kennett also closed the other high school for Jordanville residents, Waverley High.
Parents and children began to prioritise a school’s academic results and the opportunities it presented for them for tertiary education over its convenience or culture.
Ashwood High was not considered academically competitive. ‘Ashwood was always the lowest ranked in pretty much everything [compared to the rest of the district], one person said.
‘Ashwood High was not considered very academic when our children were considering schooling options [in the late 1990s],’ another agreed. ‘Mt Waverley was a bigger school and presented more options and had a strong academic record.’
‘Everyone called it Trashwood,’ another former student said. ‘Not that a nickname defines the school. Looking back, it could’ve been worse. Definitely a higher proportion of delinquents to what I imagine a high school should have. They’ve clearly tried to clean up their image in the last 10 years or so. Also I have a lot of friends that went there too that turned out to be wonderful humans, so it can’t have been that bad.’
An aversion to crossing Warrigal Road
Now bear with me because this is the part where I engage in a bit of pop psychology based on only anecdotal observation of living in Ashburton rather than any empirical evidence.
For a century, Ashburton’s residents have lived on our hilltop and always looked inwards towards Camberwell and the City for business and pleasure. Towards the city was where there was more money, more prestige, more schools, more law and order, and more opportunities. Across Warrigal Road and down the hill, there were only farms and later, poverty and disadvantage in housing estates with gangs and other ‘undesirable’ occupants. From the 1920s, a psychological aversion to crossing Warrigal Road emerged and dug itself into Ashburton’s culture.
Warrigal Road was also, until a decade ago, the public transport border between Zone 1 and Zone 2. Both Ashburton and Alamein Stations were part of Zone 1 while Holmesglen station down the hill was not. Even though Ashburtoners felt neglected by our overlords in Camberwell, we could still say we lived in Zone 1 to anyone outside of it. We may have felt like the ‘poor cousins’ compared to the rest of Boroondara but a Zone 1 address provided us with a level of social prestige and cache absent from our own district.
This, I think, adds some context to the entrenched biases that still exist within Ashburton residents against sending their kids down the hill to Ashwood High.
Ashwood High School in the 21st century
Today, Boroondara Council lists Ashburton as possessing one secondary school: Ashwood High School.
In the 2000s, rising housing prices brought about gradual socio-demographic change that saw more children from professional households attend Ashwood High School. Yet the school still suffered setbacks. In 2010, two teenage arsonists burnt down two wings of the school, including an original 1958 building. Fortunately, the school was already due for modernisation and refurbishment so it’s quite possible the arsonists did it a favour.
Then in 2013 Ashwood’s reputation suffered another hit. A 15 year old boy slashed another with a knife in the school yard one morning. One student claimed a group of boys armed with poles came to the school a day earlier looking for the student because he told on them for wagging. This would just have been a normal Tuesday 50 years earlier.
The Police charged the assailant with numerous offences and paramedics took the victim to hospital with non life-threatening injuries.
Ashwood High turns itself around
Exactly what the affect of this incident had on the school is hard to ascertain from public records. For many people in Ashburton, the incident just reiterated what they had long assumed about Ashwood High; it was as rough and violent as always. Yet after it, a curious thing occurred; Ashwood’s NAPLAN results began to climb up. And stay up.
Ashwood NAPLAN results
2014 | Reading | Writing | Spelling | Grammar | Numeracy |
Year 7 | 541 | 519 | 548 | 539 | 538 |
Year 9 | 587 | 547 | 575 | 581 | 598 |
2021 | Reading | Writing | Spelling | Grammar | Numeracy |
Year 7 | 569 | 536 | 567 | 557 | 572 |
Year 9 | 594 | 559 | 598 | 590 | 610 |
Courtesy of MySchool Website
There is very little academic research on the effect of a violent incident on a school’s community. However, I found an interesting Reddit thread that provided some anecdotal insights into the aftermath of school shootings in the US. Many commenters noted that their school community pulled together and became closer immediately after the incident. In some cases (but not all) bullying decreased considerably. Teachers who had previously been apathetic about the well-being of students began asking kids – especially the known outsiders – how they were and genuinely showed interest in them. Virtually overnight security in schools tightened, helping children to feel safe again in the school environment.
Another influential factor came a year later in 2015, when the Department of Education appointed Brett Moore as an Executive Principal to the school. Back in 2008, the Victorian Government introduced an executive class level for principals that offered lucrative salary packages to qualified principals who could turn around the performance of the state’s most challenging schools. These individuals are known colloquially as ‘super principals’.
Dr Moore, a highly experienced principal with a PhD in Education, implemented an Accelerated Curriculum and Enrichment program into Ashwood to attract and retain high performing and highly motivated students in Year 7.
By 2021, Ashwood High School was in the Top 10 of Victorian Schools academically.
Negative perceptions stubbornly remain
Parents I spoke to for this post reported the stigma is still there and felt today. Some felt it was not the school at fault, but their own biases and preconceptions they needed to personally overcome.
It seems grossly unfair that just one negative incident involving a handful of students could immediately derail years of positive changes. The reputations of the private schools caught up in the 2021 consent scandal seemed to barely suffer a blip and those allegations were far more widespread and insidious.
In conclusion, it’s time Ashburton shook off its negative perceptions of the secondary school down the hill. Ashburton DOES have a high school. And it’s now one of the best in the state.
References
A big thanks go to the people who took the time to answer my inquiries and tell me their stories. See the following sources for more information:
Andrews, John and Deborah Towns, 'A Secondary Education for All'? A History of State Secondary Schooling in Victoria. (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2017).
Chapman, Greg, and Jan Smallwood. Students' Perceptions of TAFE. National Centre for Vocational Education Research, 1991. https://www.voced.edu.au/content/ngv%3A31542
Ewins, Robert. Camberwell High School 1941-91: A Jubilee Retrospective. Camberwell: Messenger, 1991.
James, Richard. TAFE, University or Work? The Early Preferences and Choices of Students in Years 10, 11 and 12. National Centre for Vocational Education Research, 2000. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED463460
Torpey, John L. Camberwell High School 1941-91: A Jubilee Retrospective. Camberwell: Messenger, 1991.
Turnbull, Jeffrey. Once There Was Jordanville. Mt Waverley: Waverley Historical Society, 2007.