Sport and Colonialism in 19th Century Australasia - LA84 Foundation

securely on the universal opinion that his peerless endowments
to education and sport in Victoria would be permanently acknowledged.
However, nearly forty years later strong criticism of
the Wesley headmaster, and his influence upon the educational
developments within the Victorian public schools, was to surface.
When James Darling arrived in Adelaide in early February
1930, en route to his new position as headmaster at Geelong
Grammar School, the train journey to Melbourne gave him the
opportunity of observing his first bushfires and he was mildly
surprised by the casual attitude taken to them by his fellow
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passengers. Darling was about to join the exclusive ranks of
men who controlled and ran the six prestigious public schools
in Victoria, and offer that education system something of his
knowledge and background of the English public schools that he
had just left. 6
In 1969 Darling was to recall his impressions
of this Australian baptism and record his views on the public
school scene he found in the state in the 1930s. These recollections
give credit to some advanced aspects of Victorian education,
particularly the registration of teachers in the state,
but in the main Darling's overriding reminiscences reveal a
school system that apparently knew little of, and appeared unresponsive
to, the progressive movements in education. Plainly,
the changes and trends that were exerting their influence and
altering the face of English public school education during the
1920s had not been transmitted to Victoria. Darling's chief
condemnation was reserved for an entrenched educational philosophy
in the schools that continued to revere the doctrine of
strenuousness and sentiment. He was equally dismayed at schools
that seemingly gave the highest priority to organised games and
competitive sport. Athletic glory had no principal role in the
plans of the new Geelong headmaster and it was a stance he
wanted to make clear at the outset of his office.
The school scene that Darling objected to more than anything
else related to sport and the prominence it was given in
the organisation of the school's activities. His assessment of
the situation produced a vigorous denouncement of a mens sana in
corpore sano that had been allowed to "run riot" - a state of
affairs that Darling attributed to the work and influence of
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