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Adult education has often been on the margin of university offerings in Australia and elsewhere, sometimes regarded as 'non-core' business or at least as a financial drain on the institution. Arguably the longest-running and most successful university continuing education program in Australia is offered by the University of Sydney, currently through the Centre for Continuing Education. Sydney University has been providing some form of structured adult education, alongside its formal undergraduate and graduate programs, for more than 140 years. This paper charts the early, sometimes tumultuous, years of that development, to the end of the first world war, and discusses some of the features established in that period which enabled an adult education program to be sustained at the university through sometimes turbulent times into the present century.