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From the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century universities and colleges were founded throughout Australia and New Zealand in the context of the expanding British Empire. This article provides an analytical framework to understand the engagement between changing ideas of higher education at the centre of Empire and within the settler societies in the Antipodes. Imperial influences remained significant, but so was locality in association with the role of the emerging state, while the idea of the public purpose of higher education helped to widen social access forming and sustaining the basis of middle class professions. The Ambassador Down UnderOn 19 July 1912 a special congregation of the University of Adelaide convened to award the seventyfour year old right Honourable James Bryce a doctor of laws. British Ambassador in Washington, soon to be Viscount Bryce of Dechmont, already recipient of honorary degrees from more than thirty universities throughout the world, Bryce was once a Gladstonian Liberal but now more a cultural imperialist. His own life reflected many of the changes in higher education in nineteenth century Britain. Descended from a Scots-Irish family of educational and clerical distinction, a graduate of Glasgow University, James Bryce became an Oxford scholarship student who refused to take the religious tests. A close acquaintance of university reformers such as Mark Pattison, T.H Green and Matthew Arnold, he was one of the young 'lights of Liberalism' in the 1860s who soon became a prime supporter of women's higher education; a commissioner on English secondary education in the 1860s; acclaimed historian of the Holy Roman Empire; Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford; member of Parliament 1880-1907; one of the founders of the English Historical Review; chair of the 1895 Commission on English and Welsh Secondary Education and finally Chief Secretary for Ireland 1905-07. 2 By the early twentieth century Bryce was a leading proponent of imperial education. He chaired the opening session of the 1903 Allied Colonial Universities Conference calling on staff and students of the Universities of the Empire to engage and so advance the 'civilisation' which Britain had spread throughout the world. 3 A renowned world traveller, he decided to use his time as Ambassador in Washington to visit the Antipodes where he was already known for his classic American

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