University anniversaries
Jubilee celebrations 1902
Speech by Mr Alexander Oliver, 30 September 1902
The official reception of guests and presentation of addresses was held at 3.00pm on 30 September 1902 in the Great Hall.
Mr Alexander Oliver, MA Sydney, President of the Land Appeal Court, one of the earliest students of the University and Fellow of Senate, made a short speech of a less formal nature than those delivered by the preceding speakers. He recalled "the early fifties", drawing on his store of whimsical reminiscences and comparing old times with new.
Alexander Oliver, photo G3_224_1777, University of Sydney Archives.
Speech
Mr. Chancellor, your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, - I feel that I am occupying a place which would better have been allotted to that old and esteemed friend of mine, and fellow-student, whom I see sitting in the second row, only as a listener. The son of the great man who gave this State (then a colony) a Constitution, and, what, perhaps, is of more interest to us all today, a University - Fitzwilliam Wentworth - would much more fitly than myself have represented the now nearly extinct twenty-four who, fifty years ago, were all the undergraduates of this University. But the Chancellor seemed quite serious when he paid me the unexpected honour of naming the duty which, with much pleasure, from one point of view, but with sorrowing reminiscences from another, it now behoves me to set about wistfully trying to undertake. And those who know that Chancellor as I do, after the experience of many years of close friendship, know that, when he means what he says, which is not seldom, he generally arranges that his meaning is not to stop short at words - a characteristic of the 'way they have in the Navy' (we owe his coming here to that grand service), and also in the varsity of which he is the honoured representative this day. It was, as you see, an irresistible combination for me. And 'right here', as they say on the other side of the Pacific, let me offer my respectful congratulations to the Chancellor, who, when I last saw him energizing in this Hall, was not yet Sir Normand MacLaurin, the well-earned name by which he will, with the applause of all good men, continue to be known, I trust, for many years to come. The Chancellor has already adverted to the losses in our ranks resulting from death, removal, and resignation; but as an old school-fellow and fellow-student, and a familiar friend of a lifetime, it is not possible for me to say how sadly I miss from this Jubilee platform one of our first students, who was our first graduate, first Parliamentary representative, and our last Chancellor - Sir William Windeyer. By his death, the first students of the University which he loved so well are reduced to six; but all of them may well be consoled for the appearance this day of our depleted roll by such an event as this we are met together to celebrate, even if, perchance, the strains of an Academic Nunc Dimittis are heard in the not far off distance by the few that are left.
Their Naval Excellencies will, I hope, correct me if I misquote a phrase or saying that is said to be current in their service. It is that if any of the Admirals of old renown were allowed to step aboard the ships which now bear their names, so stupefied would they be by the magical evolution from the line-of-battleship of the end of the eighteenth century to the battleship of 1900, that they would even forget to salute their own quarterdecks! Well, something akin to the feelings of these old Admirals would be the condition of a Sydney undergraduate of 1852 revisiting his Alma Mater, after an absence of half a century!
Will you bear with me for a few minutes while I try to bring into comparison a very few features of the past and the present of this University. And first consider the change of site and buildings. In '52 we of the first contingent attended the Professor's lectures in class-rooms in the basement of the Sydney Grammar School, in College Street, and some feet below its level, in cellars. They were true and earnest University missionaries, those first three Professors, Dr John Woolley, Morris Birkbeck Pell, and Dr John Smith; but oh! what sort of material and place did we offer them for the exercise of their educational powers! The average of our ages would be about 16 or 17; the average of our knowledge about that of an indifferent fourth-form boy in (say) the present Sydney Grammar School. Very soon those Professors discovered, to their dismay, that their functions would be something between a private coach for a boy whose education had been neglected, and the tutor of a small English University Hall. The University lecturer was for the future. I can well remember, for I happened to sit next to him, on a form facing, our first Professor of Classics, when, rather unexpectedly, my neighbor was put on to construe a passage in the first book of Livy. The words were, 'Caput obnubito - infelici arbori reste suspenditio.' 'Cut off his head' said the translator, "to an unhappy tree hang up the rest of him'. The Doctor glared sorrowfully at my friend, and, as was his habit at lectures, opened and shut the blade of his penknife very ominously, but was too staggered to do anything more than give forth a long and deep-drawn sigh. We had some very liberal translators in those days, and, for aught I know to the contrary, our beloved Doctor reckoned me up as one of them. After the Classical Lecture came the Mathematical; when Professor Pell would use up all the resources of his seductive manner and methods to coax us to tackle a simple equation, or some mathematical problem of equal obscurity to us, it is hardly thinkable how we must have vexed the soul of that good Senior Wrangler. Then there was Doctor Smith, from Marischal College, Aberdeen. He lectured on Chemistry and Physics, and I fear we remembered too often against him those interesting experiments which did not come off as they ought to have done - the red precipitate would precipitate itself blue or green; but then there was always in attendance the Professor's Demonstrator - Burrows, the University Bedell - and the Professor's well-repressed anger on these untoward occasions naturally fell on the Bedell Demonstrator. Lastly, there was poor Hugh Kennedy, the Registrar - a kindly, scholarly Balliol man, on whom often fell the duty of assisting Dr Wocdley as Classical Lecturer. We had Shakeaperian readings of an evening in those days, at which a frequent participator was our venerable Benefactor, Dr (now Sir Charles) Nicholson; likewise other symposiac entertainments to encourage us. For in those early years there was a very raw embryonic feeling haunting us. The University had not yet got into touch with our people; almost all looked askance at it, and as to us, if we ventured outside the precincts of the Park, into George or Pitt Streets, people stared at us, habited in our strange academic properties, as if we had been Daimyos of Old Japan. Meanwhile, the politician was never tired firing off his jibes at us in Parliament; the clergy saluted us as the novices of a godless institution; we were to be a ridiculously costly failure, whose education at a University was an intolerable burden on the taxpayer. And this state of things lasted too many years.
I had left Sydney for Oxford when in Governor Denison, proconsulate, the Royal Charter put this University on the same level, in regard to Degrees, as the old Universities of England. The Charter marks the date of our entry into the goodly society of recognized Universities; and thenceforward jibes and jeers were to lose all their siting. Yet still the wealthy squatter and merchant hesitated to send his sons to join our colours; and it remained for that great man - Charles Badham - to talk, and laugh, and beat down the prevailing aloofness.
There was but one Faculty in those early days - Arts - equipped with three Professors and one Bedell. Demonstrators there were none; for the State Endowment was but £5000 a year, and that was begrudged us. Now we rejoice in the possession of four Faculties - having added Medicine, Law and Science. We have fifteen Professors and the same number of Demonstrators. Counting Lecturers and Tutors, the Teaching Staff now numbers no fewer than eighty men and women. Last year our Students numbered close on 700, and our Graduates 1548, while the Roll of Convocation showed 1271 names. True, we have lost parliamentary representation, but we have gained the inestimable boon of the Woman Student. And still there are several Chairs which we cannot think of establishing for want of funds. So that the occasions for achieving immortality are ready to hand; and indeed there is any amount of room in our University, hampered as she often is by want of pence, for the operations of Aristotle's MeyaXoirpeinjs. We can do with quite a number of them; and their names will be registered and their gifts chronicled in our ' Golden Book of Worthies' by Mr. Barff, in company with the honoured names of Challis, Wentworth, Russell, Fisher, Macleay, and the rest of our Benefactors.
The eloquent and persuasive speakers who have preceded me - and for this you should be duly grateful - have exhausted some topics that otherwise might have been too tempting for me to resist. Expansions in all directions meet our eyes; no novelties to the men of 1902, but very much so to those of '52. For example, the Affiliated and Women's Colleges, the excellently-equipped Laboratories, the Library, the Scholarships, Bursaries, Museums, Exhibitions, this magnificent Hall, and the great pile of buildings now adorning what we knew as Grose Farm; and last, but not least, we have undertaken that most momentous problem, the higher education of the Lady Voter, and the diffusion of sound, but not too serious, views of academic life, by means of an unsubsidized Hermes, But neither your time nor patience could sustain any further drafts - if justice were to be done to these topics - and I must leave them.
The remnant of the First Contingent, whom I have the honour and privilege to represent, deeply appreciates all the kind words our visitors have spoken of our University of 1902. Yet, if I may take the liberty of differing from so distinguished a Visitor and former Student of Sydney as Sir Samuel Griffith, and if I have not misunderstood him, our roll of men who have deserved well of their Alma Mater, and also of the State, is not quite so short or unimportant as he appeared to think. He himself holds high rank among the five Eminent Judges who have been our contribution to the Supreme Court Bench of this and other Australian States. To the District Court Bench we have given at least half-a-dozen highly-accomplished Lawyers. We have educated, academically at least, several Ministers of the Crown. Two of our Graduates adorn our Professorial Staff, and we have been able to spare at least four or five Distinguished Graduates to sister Universities. Astronomy owes Henry Ghamberlayne Russell to this University; and how many eminent King's Counsel and Members of each branch of the legal profession, how many practising medical men of distinction, how many engineers and other votaries of Science, the same benign mother can count as her offspring; and whether reckoned in number or value, we all know, but make no boast of; but her children have certainly not been niggardly of the dpkirrpa due to her for their intellectual nourishment when it is remembered, as in fairness it should be, that for well-nigh half the years of her existence, Sydney University was not a word to conjure with, but a peg for disparagement, a place that it was popular to belittle, and the fashion to avoid.
That it has been allowed even to so few of the Students of 1852 as six to have outlived that bad period, and) to behold this great gathering of sympathizers from nearly every portion of the Civilised World, which is concerned with the higher education of men and women, is matter for our profoundest gratitude and appreciation. We are not at the same time unconscious of our shortcomings; and we trust that our visitors will not fail to tell us candidly wherein they have discovered us to be weak or behind the times. Therefore, to each Professor or representative of a British, Foreign, or Australasian University, while saluting them with the heartiest of welcomes on behalf of the First Contingent, I would) take the liberty of quoting those well-worn Horatian lines: - ' Si quid novisti rettius i&tis candidus imperii.' I may not, however, complete the quotation, and add - ' Si noi, his utere mccum'; for those words would better come from the mouth of one of our Public Teachers more intimately connected, than myself, with the work and methods of our University.