Adelaide private school mums hunt in packs. Very well-dressed packs.
They send their offspring to top-tier schools: Saints, PAC, Pembroke, Pulteney, Wildy, Walford, Seymour, Loreto, Scotch and Saints Girls’. We won’t bother spelling out the full names. If you know, you know. If you don’t, you probably don’t belong here.
Shh – don’t tell anyone – but the poshest of all quietly ship their children to Geelong Grammar over the border, looking down their noses at Adelaide’s most elite institutions with the serene confidence of people who have never once questioned their own taste.
Geelong Grammar offers maximum bragging rights: a prestigious mystique that no local school can match, and – crucially – an excuse to fly to Victoria several times a year for exeat weekends at Timbertop.
Adelaide’s private school mums can be reliably found in the members’ car park at Morphettville on cup day, deep into a bottle of Pol Roger, loudly shocked that half the pavilion is wearing the exact same $600 Sally Phillips dress. “Is that a Sally?” is the in-girls’ greeting.
Her husband is a surgeon, runs a family building company or is a partner in a law or accounting firm. They’re all old boys called Matt, Dan, David and Josh, who married old girls called Jessica, Sarah, Emma and Rebecca. They are all descended from the Barr Smiths, the Bonythons and the Playfords. Nobody is entirely sure how, but ask them – they’ll tell you. At length.
The Adelaide private school mum met her husband on the verdant lawns of Adelaide University, where progress was lubricated by cheap beer and ‘90s grunge rock. The deal was sealed on a single bed at Saint Mark’s College with two drunk mates passed out on the floor. Two decades, a Porsche Cayenne and three children later, they’re still going strong.
You can catch Jess, Sare, Em or Bec at the year six mums’ coffee morning in Toorak Gardens, Burnside, Medindie, Unley or Stirling, holding a skinny cap and holding forth on the importance of rowing for an adolescent’s self-esteem, the side-effects of Wegovy and the cost of snow tyres for the Cayenne.
More importantly, whether the school is justified in hiking fees by seven per cent to fund a $15 million wellness and mindfulness centre that will be completed approximately a decade after Hazel and Theodore graduate.
Don’t get us wrong. The Adelaide private mum deserves respect. She is an accomplished professional, juggling kids, husbands, work and a demanding 27-step beauty regimen. She’ll rise at dawn to squeeze in a pilates class before doing double drop-off at two different schools and still make it making it to a speaking engagement at a UNHCR women’s rights breakfast by 9am.
She has a pool at home, a holiday house at Pt Willunga, a farm at Oakbank and still manages to enjoy not just a Euro Summer, but a northern one as well.
Right now she and her gal pals are scattered across St Tropez, Puglia, Majorca and, if cash-strapped, Portugal
As she will tell anyone who feigns interest: “We take a villa”. She will also humble-brag about her travel mode: “Oh it’s so embarrassing but Cordelia and Harry couldn’t work out how to use the plastic cutlery as they’d never flown economy before!”
During termtime weekends you’ll find her at the village (Burnside Village, of course) picking up a little something from Scanlan and Theodore, Morrison or Zimmermann, and buying her husband a Ralph Lauren puffer – specifically one with the logo on the outside, so everyone at the Intercol barbecue knows it’s RL.
Or it’s a few hours browsing on Rundle St, followed by a session at 2KW, EOS, Paloma Bar, or La Buvette on Gresham St for those who love a French bistro because they get to show off how fluent their kids are after the primary school language immersion program.
The younger mum is also loving Kinney (ordered online), and no one is above popping into designer recycle shop on King William Rd, Better Together, for top labels from past seasons. Always a risk, though, that someone at the alumni drinks recognises that she’s wearing their cast-offs.
Although she will complain loudly about the private school coverage in The Advertiser, the Adelaide mum has read every word of it. Twice. And she is absolutely riveted by the latest alcohol-fuelled teen exploits at Intercols, not to mention the dramatic retelling of last year’s Saints Year 12 parents’ drinks – which, depending on who’s telling it, was either a complete disgrace or the best night of the year.
Probably both.
Idols: Susie Nugent, Bec Morse, Kate Meade, Lucy Holmes, Kristi Centofanti, Rosanna Mangiarelli, Alice Monfries, Elspeth Hussey, Isobel Marshall, Amelia Mulcahy, Natasha Stott Despoja and Jane Lomax-Smith. And Poh Ling Yeow. Of course. Everyone loves Poh.
Thanks to Zara Wong, who can be found at the Substack Screenshot This, for the field guide inspo, although we’ve compiled our own version.
As Wong puts it, “This is all fictionalised so if you recognise yourself, that’s purely by coincidence”.
Have we nailed it or failed it? Leave a comment below or email us at education@news.com.au