When Fred Alexander wrote his Campus at Crawley 50 years ago, he brought historical eyes trained in the Melbourne school of Earnest Scott to a university only 12 years older than he was. His narrative explored the educational and intellectual influences on the new institution to show that the University of Western Australia (UWA), though part of a centuries old lineage that traced back to the early universities of England and Scotland, sought to forge its identity as a twentieth century institution designed for the needs of an emergent federated nation. From the perspective of UWA’s founders in the early 1900s, the universities of Sydney and Melbourne already looked ancient and not necessarily equipped to tackle the demands and challenges of the new century. They sought a new type of university, one specific and relevant to Western Australia. And so the multiple authors of Seeking Wisdom, coordinated by Jenny Gregory as chief editor and herself a contributing author, build on the idea of UWA’s distinctiveness in order to examine the University’s first centenary.
Seeking Wisdom is organised around two parts – “Looking inwards” and “Looking outwards”, a structure that helps to break down the image of universities as ivory towers. As the book clearly demonstrates, the University has a long tradition in what today is called “public engagement” or “community relations”. In the case of UWA, for many years the only university on Australia’s west coast, the stakes were high. How could it encourage Western Australians to embrace the university as their own? As public institutions, Australian universities attached particular meanings to the idea of a social contract between institution and the public: they not only ensured the education of graduates to fuel the economy, but also provided opportunities and benefits to the community in general.
In the early years, UWA professors took on the role of public educators, writing articles on topical issues for the local newspaper, broadcasting talks on radio, running adult education classes, a programme not unfamiliar in other Australian universities, but essential in Western Australia to build trust between the university and the rest of the state and enable it to share the fruits of knowledge more broadly. UWA was particularly active in developing cultural capital with the creation of such intellectual hubs as the Centre for Western Australian History (1985) and the Centre for Studies in Australian Literature (1992), the latter established by Bruce Bennett to promote the study for Australian and Western Australian writing. These and other similar hubs across the faculties succeeded in contributing to national debates and the getting of public wisdom, while also enabling the pursuit of knowledge about Western Australia. The effect was to cultivate a distinctive regional identity, one that sought to explain Western Australian influence on the national story. Publication programs through the UWA, such as the UWA Press and the literary journal, Westerly, have all helped to ensure that the University gives back to the community in diverse ways. And while perhaps the best known of the University’s achievements in this interdependent public role is the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery (1990), an alternative Perth venue for national touring exhibitions since the 1990s, the University was also the instigator and for many years, its main supporter, of the Festival of Perth first held in 1953. Seeking Wisdom provides many other examples to show how for much of its history UWA sought to support community initiatives as part of its public responsibility and duty, a study that helps redefine the nature of a public university.
“Looking inward” sets a different pace by telling the interesting story of the University’s development, both in bricks and mortar and intellectually. Histories of universities often carefully sidestep the issue of universities as lived space. But the multi-authored nature of this history – there are 23 authors – enable experts to canvas topics not always covered in great depth, including the use of landscape and architecture to help realise the “idea of the university”. Of course, UWA’s early and visionary building and landscaping plans – buildings set in large open spaces, their relationship with each other and the surrounding vistas carefully planned – were enabled by the generous bequest of Sir John Winthrop. Winthrop notwithstanding, UWA remains one of the few Australian universities that was developed along architectural landscaping principles that carefully considered the placement of buildings, playing fields, courtyards, roads, utility buildings and so on, in terms of one another and in the landscape as a whole, making it one of the most, if not the most attractive campus in the country. The architectural styles were given much thought as to what would appropriately serve the needs of a new university that professed to have modern educational views. The account also reveals interesting debates between architects from all over Australia, including Leslie Wilkinson, the foundation professor of Architecture at the University of Sydney and significant in the early twentieth century development of that institution. Yet there were interesting tensions between architects and the public. The architects sought modern design solutions for this new enterprise, while the public expected it to look like a “university”, with Gothic-inspired towers and gargoyles.
Seeking Wisdom is an important addition to a reawakened field of the twentieth century history of universities and tertiary education, recently enlivened by Australian historians including (in alphabetical order) Graeme Davison, Hannah Forsyth, Mark Hutchinson, Stuart Macintyre, R.J.W Selleck, Deryck Schreuder, Geoffrey Sherington and myself. Like these histories, Seeking Wisdom also takes old themes such as governance, pedagogy and leadership, and reinterprets them to explore the university as a living entity. This new focus has resulted in a book that captures the life of a university, its myriad populations of those who study, teach, research and govern, how they go about their university life, what they do and through such discussions, this useful contribution to the debate helps to explain the public character of universities such as UWA.
