When spinster sisters, Dorothy and Winifred Fleming set up their own, small private school, HOPETOUN, at Brighton, South Australia, in 1922, little did they realise that they, and they alone, would still be conducting the school some forty years later.
Many women, some educated, others not, had attempted similar set-ups, so essentially Hopetoun was typical of that unique and bygone style of schooling. But most of those schools survived inly a few years, so why then did Hopetoun survive?
To answer that, we must look to the women themselves. We trace their lives from their home at Edwardstown to their school and pupils at Brighton and St.Marys, and finally to the archaeological dig on their property on South Road, Edwardstown.
This book is a balance of school and the lives of the women who ran it, because each belongs to the other and cannot be isolated.
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