University of Melbourne

Across more than five hundred pages and written by thirty-three contributors, Dhoombak Goobgoowana contains stories about the University of Melbourne’s relationship with Indigenous Australians.

During the 1960s and 1970s, student radicals protested that their places of learning were getting too close to industry and government. In 1970, Monash University students occupied the university’s Careers and Appointments Office to oppose the use of the university as a recruiting ground for companies ...

Notwithstanding occasional media focus on misbehaving students or senior members, the residential colleges and halls dotted around or about most Australian university campuses keep a low profile. Their influence has undoubtedly declined since the early twentieth century, when as many as one quarter of Melbourne’s enrolled undergraduate population, and a much higher proportion of full-time students, were attached to Trinity and Janet Clarke Hall, Ormond or Queen’s. But the collegiate ideal to which all these institutions aspire, more or less, still provides a vital alternative to the regrettably prevailing view of higher education as mere vocational training – especially now, when the future viability of universities themselves is called increasingly into question.

Major events in histories of public institutions – museums, galleries, libraries and universities – lend themselves to publications that acknowledge and celebrate openings, building extension projects and anniversaries. This year marks the sesquicentenary of the State Library of Victoria (SLV), which, with the completion of its massive building extension project in 2003, is now able to present a souvenir book on the collections. While this is in no manner a catalogue of the library’s collection, it does serve as a guide and as a useful primary source for seeking the more unusual items – the treasures.

I have a dreadful confession to make: I chose not to study at the University of Melbourne. Got the marks, went elsewhere. My family and teachers attributed this bizarre behaviour to the perversity of adolescence. It is true that I knew little about myself, and even less about the world, but I could see that I would not last a week at the University of Melbourne. One look at the place had put me right off. Coming from a provincial high school, you could feel it in the air – the automatic, often unconscious, snobbery of rich private schools. You can find them today weighing into current debates with their personal testimony, citing the private benefits that their University of Melbourne degree brought them, asserting that they could have paid a lot more for it than they did, attacking compulsory amenities fees in the same breath, and (noblesse oblige!) finding ingenious ways to create safely limited opportunities for the ‘genuinely disadvantaged’.

Many thousands of undergraduates have walked under the stilts of the Raymond Priestley Building, which forms part of Melbourne University’s great wind tunnel, with no thought of the person commemorated by its name. He was, in fact, a remarkable man. His four years as Vice-Chancellor (1935–38) emerge in extraordinary detail and intimacy, thanks to this edition of his journals.