Secularisation in Australian Education since 1910

The phrase "e;free, compulsory, and secular"e; is central to Australia's understanding of its own education system. Yet the extent to which education in Australia, or anywhere else for that matter, can be described as "e;secular"e; is never clear or settled. This work examines the history of education in Australia, from 1910 through to the present, through an interdisciplinary survey of key scholarship and a series of six original case studies. It seeks to uncover the extent to which the education system has undergone a process of secularisation and argues that the very meaning of the term "e;secular"e; is always contingent and changeable.