Recent ethnographic research (Macpherson, 1984) into the realities of three regional directorships in Victoria in the early 1980s stimulated this examination of the influence that politicians and leading educational administrators have had on regionalization policy in earlier decades. Data from that study consistently indicated that politico-historical forces explained much of what later emerged as ‘policy’.
This paper begins with the bureaucratic and political machinations of the late 1950s and 1960s, concerned with regionalism, before relating the establishment and development of regional administration to wider Australian contexts and to assumptions and practices in the Education Department during that period. The descriptive treatment serves to emphasize the status of Victoria's regionalization policy in education between 1955 and 1979 as a political artefact that was largely and reluctantly negotiated among centrally located bureaucrats and politicians.
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