Ninety Million Acres: Public Education and Land Endowments in Australia and the Anglo-settler World

Abstract In the United States, Canada, Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, at least ninety million acres were granted or reserved by states as a means of funding the establishment of public schooling in the period up until 1930. Yet, for the most part, Indigenous land is missing as an analytic in our histories of public education. This article charts the prevalence of land endowments as a funding mechanism for schooling in the US, Canada, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. It establishes Australia as part of this picture and shows the influence of Anglo-settler models there. It also provides a case study of the South Australian educational lands and their relationship to Indigenous dispossession. Finally, the article argues that attending to educational land endowments has implications for the ways historians think about the political economy of settler colonial democracy in Australia and the Anglo-settler world.