Australian History/Education
Book Details

The Shop

The University of Melbourne, 1850–1939

R. J. W. Selleck

A vivid social, educational and cultural history of the University of Melbourne from 1850 to 1939.

Opinion

‘The Shop is an unexpected delight: lively, thought-provoking, and frequently laugh-aloud funny, it ranges across the history of the ‘learned professions’ and interrogates the whole ‘idea of a university’. They’ll be choking on their tea down at the Melbourne Club.’ (Australian Book Review, August 2003)

The Shop is 'a great book in every sense . . . By any standards this is a work of the highest scholarship, erudition, insight and commitment. It is, indeed, a definitive volume . . . The Shop has 85 black and white illustrations but these are complemented and at times surpassed by the colourful word pictures contained in Selleck's prose.' (History of Education Review)

About this Title

This is a warm, wry narrative, gentle but persistent in its ironies, and marvellously attuned to the untidiness, drama and farce of the birth and progress of a self-consciously prestigious institution. Selleck tells stories very well, displays a rare mastery of context, and carefully reminds his reader of the contemporary resonances of his story.
Mark Peel

Amid the excitement and disorder of the gold rush, Melbourne’s middle class created the University of Melbourne—known to many generations as ‘The Shop’—to serve the interests of its sons. The foundation professors were well acquainted with the ancient universities of England and Ireland, but they swiftly realised that colonial society had different needs and visions.

The Shop vividly recreates the university’s struggle to determine what knowledge was of most value (and who should make that decision), to limit access to that knowledge (women were belatedly and grudgingly admitted) and to settle the conditions of admission to it.

Richard Selleck adroitly places the university in its historical and political context. He examines its relation to government, the press and the school system, and its mutually self-serving links with the professions such as law, medicine, engineering and teaching. He analyses the contemporary intellectual debates: the significance of evolution and political economy, the power and promise of science, the challenge to religious belief, the status of classical education, the growth of socialism, the equivocal liberation of women, the still more equivocal treatment of indigenous people, the birth of a research university, the vagaries of Empire, and the precariousness of academic freedom.

Everyday events and struggles spring to life. The eternal follies of management are graphically outlined, as are its moments of inspiration. Professors gruff and graceful bore or dazzle their students; governments impose economic cuts; rivalries enliven and disrupt academic life. Brilliant researchers and dedicated teachers are sometimes celebrated, sometimes lonely. Students are variously rivalrous and idealistic, set for glittering careers or plain refractory. The grounds grow untidy or beautiful as vicissitudes of funding and gardeners dictate. The committees are clamorous, the examiners disputatious and the libraries mostly crowded.

This wry, passionate book challenges those who work or study in universities today, and those who fund them, to measure themselves against their predecessors. The inescapable conclusion is that most of the issues that convulsed the University of Melbourne in its formative decades are still alive and troublesome today.

About the Author

Richard Selleck is Emeritus Professor at Monash University, and Professorial Fellow in the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne. His books include The New Education, 1870- 1914, Frank Tate: a biography (MUP); Not So Eminent Victorians, with Martin Sullivan (MUP); Family, School and State in Australian History, with Marjorie Theobald; and James Kay-Shuttleworth: journey of an outsider.

Book Preview

978-0-522-85051-2