Australian History
Book Details

A Place Apart

The University of Melbourne: Decades of Challenge

John Poynter and Carolyn Rasmussen

A highly readable history of the University of Melbourne.

Opinion

' . . . a beautifully produced hardback volume, elegant of design, scholarly but not too serious, pleasingly weighty in the hand.'
Nick Walker, The Australian

About this Title

A Place Apart charts the fortunes of the University of Melbourne during a period of great change--the decades between 1935 and 1975--when Australia's older universities had to respond to the demands of a changing society and evolving government policies.

After successful improvisation in the years of post-war reconstruction, the University's ill co-ordinated expansion in the 1950s brought financial and administrative catastrophe in the 1960s. After a long period of reform, complicated by the student and staff agitation for radical change in the early 1970s, the University emerged better managed and much stronger in both teaching and research.

Implicit in academic thinking throughout the century has been the idea that a university is a special institution, 'a place apart' with obligations that stretch beyond its local society to the international world of intellectual discovery and critical thinking. That ideal has survived, though with difficulty, at the University of Melbourne during the decades of challenge.

Table of Contents

Foreword; Acknowledgements; Conversion of Money Values; Introduction Past and Present; Overture: Hard Times; Episode: The Barretts of Collins Street; 1. The Old Curiosity Shop 1938-1939; 2. War and Peace 1939-1948; Episode: Up the Country; 3. The Days when the World was Wide 1946-1951; Episode: Headlong Hall; 4. Paton's Place 1951-1956; 5. The Doctors' Dilemma 1952-1957; Episode: Put Out More Flags; 6. Great Expectations 1957-1962; 7. Measure for Measure 1959-1967; 8. The Importance of Being in Earnest 1962-1965; 9. Bleak House 1964-1965; 10. The Turn of the Screw 1966-1968; Episode A Tale of Two Cities; 11. The Return of the Native 1968-1969; Episode: Paradise Regained; 12. Desperate Remedies 1970-1875; Episode: Erewhon; 13. Such is Life 1972-1975; Epilogue: The Way We Live Now; List of Persons; Abbreviations; Notes; Bibliography; Index

About the Author

Professor J. R. Poynter, AO, former Assistant Vice-Chancellor (Cultural Affairs) at the University of Melbourne, has had a long and distinguished academic career in the arts. He is the author of Society and Pauperism, Alfred Felton and Russell Grimwade.

Dr Carolyn Rasmussen is a Research Associate in the History Department at the University of Melbourne and has published widely.

978-0-522-84584-6