"IT HAD BETTER BE A GOOD ONE"

The first ten years of Murdoch University

Acknowledgements

In compiling this history of Murdoch University I was helped by the

invaluable assistance of Su-Jane Hunt as research assistant and Russ
Elsegood’s cheerful and efficient editorial work. Noel Bayliss, Arthur
Beacham, and Dan Dunn read the manuscript and commented helpfully;
however the responsibility for all statements of fact and opinion is my own.

Geoffrey Bolton

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 Conception

He was very old and very frail, and his career included compromises and
failures of imagination; but he had gone on writing into his nineties,
grumbling at pretension and philistinism until he came to symbolise for his
community the values of liberalism, scepticism, and social responsibility.
There was an afternoon in July, 1970, when his wife came to his bedside and
told him that Western Australia was to establish its second university, and

the State government wanted to name it after Sir Walter Murdoch, professor
Sir Walter Murdoch. A 1959 sketch by Louis Kahan, which was purchased for
the University by foundation members of the Senate and senior staff. The
70 portrait now hangs in the foyer of the Senate suite.
of English at the University of Western Australia from its foundation in 1913
until 1939 and subsequently six years chancellor. The old man was moved:
what a marvelous tribute, he murmured; yes of course he was agreeable.
Then a pause, and a glint of the essential Walter Murdoch: ‘But it had better
be a good one’. He was too ill to be interviewed by the local press, but no
doubt he appreciated it a day or two later when an editorial in The West
Australian praised the aptness of the name. ‘Murdoch will have its special
inspiration’, said the editorial. ‘If its undergraduates respond to it there will
be no humbug or pretence and no ready acceptance of convention on their
campus. Murdoch will be characterised by idealism, thoughtfulness, and,
above all, humour’. There could have been no better summary of that
debatable concept, the Murdoch University ethos.

Before July was over Walter Murdoch died. It was immediately evident that
he was a suitable godfather to the new campus. In the same morning
newspaper which broke the news of his death there appeared a full-page
advertisement in the form of an open letter to the Western Australian
government, urging that the grant of mineral rights on Crown land should be
deferred until an official conservation policy was formulated and announced.
Among the two hundred scholars, environmentalists, and other citizens who
called for the priority of civilised values over a narrow emphasis on resource
development the name of Sir Walter Murdoch stood prominent. It was a
reminder that Murdoch University need not always be expected to follow the
paths of safe conformity.

By naming the new university after Murdoch the authorities appeared to

accept that it would possess a critically independent, perhaps even wayward
character of its own, and yet this notion emerged only at a comparatively late
stage. To understand its emergence we must look at the wider context of
recent educational history. Until the 1960s the State’s requirements in
advanced tertiary education were amply served by one institution, the
University of Western Australia. Even in 1962 its student enrolment was no
more than 3800. But there were portents of rapid growth; partly because of
the resource-led boom, which was transforming the Western Australian
economy during the 1960s but also because of changing policies at the
national level. Australia’s universities had undergone many years of
difficulty with the depression of the 1930s, the postwar demand for places
for ex-service students, and a period of inadequate funding in the early
1950s. Prime Minister Menzies launched a great reform with the
appointment of the Murray Committee, whose 1957 report led to heavily
increased federal funding and the creation in 1959 of the Australian
Universities Commission (A.U.C.) as the instrument of growth.

During the same years some important precedents were set for siting new
universities. The established practice had been a university in each of the
State capitals, with the University of New England and Newcastle
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University College as examples of a possible model for the future through
which established universities set up undergraduate colleges in country
towns in the expectation that they would one day achieve autonomy and
become full universities. (There was also the Canberra University College;
an offshoot of Melbourne University, but in 1960 it was federated reluctantly
with the postgraduate Australian National University.) This decentralised
pattern of university development followed British precedent and also
appealed to Australian advocates of rural growth, but it flew in the face of
the settled preference of most Australians for living in large cities. A more
appropriate model for the future was found in the New South Wales
University of Technology, which was formed in 1949 out of the old Sydney
Technical College thus giving that State a second metropolitan university,
and reconstituted in 1958 as the University of New South Wales. Victoria’s
second university, Monash, was founded in 1958 also on a metropolitan site
and South Australia followed in 1963 with Flinders in the Adelaide suburbs.
To appease rural politicians Flinders was not planned as an autonomous
university but as a college forming part of the University of Adelaide on a
separate campus.

So when the time came for Western Australia to establish a second

university there were four models to choose from. First, there might be a
rural university like New England, and in 1960 the University of Western
Australia urged the State government to set aside possible sites at Bunbury
and Albany as long-range planning for the future; but as elsewhere in
Australia most Western Australians lived in the metropolitan region and this
factor came to dominate thinking on the subject. Second, there might be an
independent metropolitan university like Monash. Third, following the
Adelaide-Flinders example, a second campus of the University of Western
Australia could be established among the suburbs outside the range of easy
access to the Crawley site. Finally, although the notion does not seem to
have been much canvassed, there was the possibility that the Western
Australian Institute of Technology (W. A. I. T.), established in 1967 under
the very energetic directorship of Dr H.S. Williams, might expand along the
lines of the University of New South Wales. Any of these options seemed
feasible.

In 1962 the Metropolitan Region Planning Authority recommended that

approximately 400 acres (162 hectares) of Crown land at Bull Creek should
be reserved for the purposes of a future university, a regional hospital, and a
teachers’ college. This was the region where most metropolitan growth was
forecast, and it enjoyed access to the proposed freeway system, although as
Sir Noel Bayliss comments: ‘The proposed location of the future campus
gave rise to snide remarks about the “University of Bull Creek”; remarks
which Vice-Chancellor Prescott countered by referring to the ancient
“University of Ox Ford”’. This decision largely killed any expectation that
the second university would be at Albany or Bunbury, but raised speculation
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that the Bull Creek campus would operate as a junior college of the
University of Western Australia, perhaps on the Flinders model or even
confining itself to the first two years of undergraduate study. It could be
argued that Perth, with a population only one-third the number of Sydney or
Melbourne, would find it hard to sustain student numbers for two full-sized
universities of international calibre. On the other hand it was generally
accepted that the University of Western Australia’s uniquely attractive
campus would become unacceptably overcrowded if student numbers,
having advanced by nearly 50 per cent from 3800 in 1962 to 5500 in 1967,
continued growing at the same rate. It was necessary to call into being the
new campus to protect the quality of the old.

By itself this argument may not have sufficed but it was to gain force when
linked to another problem of siting. This concerned the location of a school
of veterinary studies. Despite the importance of the subject for Western
Australia’s rural economy intending students had to seek admission to the
University of Queensland’s veterinary school. There were only two others in
Australia, and they, at Sydney and Melbourne Universities, were full to
capacity. It was accepted that the A.U.C. would soon approve the creation of
a fourth school, and Perth’s claims were strong. But the University of
Western Australia’s main campus was inadequate for the purpose and the
financial commitment was a heavy burden for a university, which had only
recently shouldered the founding of a medical school. The veterinary factor
was seldom absent from the minds of those addressing themselves to the
question of a second campus.

In August 1966, the State government appointed Sir Lawrence Jackson to

chair a strong committee, with broad terms of reference, to examine the
future needs of tertiary education in Western Australia. Its findings were
released in August 1967. Summarising authoritative thought on a wide range
of issues the Jackson Report reflected the optimistic temper of an era of
sustained economic growth. ‘The implications of this kind of growth for
tertiary education are complex’, stated the report. ‘On the one hand it
multiplies career opportunities in technology and helps to hold promising
graduates within the State. On the other hand it requires the immigration of
skilled men into the State who may not resolve to make their homes here’.
Yet the committee was not narrowly vocational or parochial. ‘Educational
institutions in a technological society cannot be expected to bear the
responsibility of tailoring student output to industrial needs both because
demand continually outstrips supply and because they have a higher duty to
their students as individuals’. In the last resort the Jackson Report’s
arguments were national: ‘a community alerted to world trends by
participation in a global war and a widening role in the post-war world was
displaying greater interest than ever in higher education’ and ‘the
extraordinary “explosion of knowledge” in our time has dissolved any
doubts about the advisability of governments making substantial investments
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in tertiary education’.

On the subject of a second university the Jackson Report was the essential
catalyst. The University of Western Australia was advised to limit its
numbers to 8000 full-time and 2000 part-time undergraduates. This meant
that a new campus should be receiving students by 1975 at least. Because of
economic and population factors a country university college was out of the
question for the time being. For the same reasons a metropolitan campus
should be in the first instance a junior college of the University of Western
Australia catering for first and second-year students in arts and science.
‘Whether it then developed higher courses and achieved independence
would be a matter for decision at a later date’; no doubt the Jackson
Committee was mindful that after its three-years planning phase under the
wing of Adelaide, Flinders University was allowed to go it alone in 1966. A
similarly open-ended approach to future growth was evident in the Jackson
Report’s ideas on the siting of the new campus. The Bull Creek site was
considered too small and low-lying in an era when the average size of a new
university was 170 hectares. Instead the Jackson Report drew attention to the
Somerville pine plantation, a 920-hectare block eight kilometres east of
Fremantle, which comprised the largest piece of endowment land held in the
metropolitan area by the University of Western Australia. Larger and finer
than the Bull Creek site, Somerville’s close proximity to the projected
freeway between Perth and Kwinana was seen as offering a promising
catchment area for students. On the other hand, although the Jackson Report
strongly urged the establishment as soon as possible of a Western Australian
veterinary school, there was no explicit mention of the suitability of the
Somerville site for that purpose.

The Jackson Report received a warm welcome. Its recommendation for the
establishment of a university college was referred to the University of
Western Australia for advice. The Senate promptly appointed a site
committee and invited the Professorial Board to set up a working party to
consult with the Vice-Chancellor on the question of a university college.
Both committees worked throughout 1968 and the early months of 1969,
looking towards a deadline about the middle of 1969 when the fourth report
of the A.U.C. might be expected. In some respects the site committee had
the more lasting effect on the future. From the start its members appear to
have been partial to the Somerville site. Originally part of the Fremantle
Common, it had been set aside in 1904 as part of the university endowment
land grant and in 1926 was vested in the State Forests Department as a
commercial pine plantation. Later it was named in honour of William
Somerville, a member of the University of Western Australia Senate from its
foundation in 1912 until his death in 1954 and a great advocate of tree-
planting. (Unfortunately he was also a redoubtable antagonist of Walter
Murdoch and his family complained strongly when the new university was
named.) By 1967 the pine plantation was maturing, and the site committee
70
was impressed by its potential for landscaping. In a breathtaking prophecy
Sir Stanley Prescott forecast that ‘from the aesthetic point of view the new
campus would surpass that of the University of Western Australia’. There
were practical advantages, too. The block was adjacent to the site of a new
regional hospital planned for completion in 1973, so that if a second medical
school was required the facilities would be conveniently close. It was also
important to provide for the possibility of a veterinary school. The
spaciousness of the Somerville site betokened future growth. By December
1967, an area of 565 acres (228.7 hectares) in the south-eastern part of the
plantation was provisionally earmarked for the campus.

Thus it was taken for granted that the second Perth campus would follow the
Eastern States pattern in being located on an outer-suburban site far from the
amenities and character of older inner-city precincts and poorly served by
public transport. Although the geographer Martyn Webb raised at the time
the notion of a university quarter in what became the Northbridge district of
Perth adjacent to the Cultural Centre, and although several academics
favoured Fremantle - either among the warehouses and delicensed hotels of
its west end, or else the Gaol these alternatives were never taken seriously.
The problems of maintaining a vigorous campus life after teaching hours in a
new middle-class suburb were easily discounted as it was expected that the
northern section of the Somerville plantation would become a planned
suburban development with a shopping centre which would attract student
custom. When Prescott raised the possibility that the growth of Perth’s
northern suburbs might affect the siting of a new university he was assured
by the leading planning authorities that this would cause no problems. So
although Monash and Flinders were already finding in 1968 that isolation
and alienation were leading to a certain amount of student bloody-
mindedness, they were to be the precedents for Western Australia’s second
university rather than Bloomsbury or Washington’s Georgetown. There was
no alternative.

Undeniably the site committee made the most of the Somerville block. Its
members strongly supported an initiative by Professor Gordon Stephenson to
re-route the northern boundary of the campus, South-street, then marked by
a sandy track. As redrawn, its line curved around a knoll at the highest point
of the site, thus including in the campus the area now known as Bush Court.
At this point, Sir Noel Bayliss recalls, ‘there was an enclosure, roughly a
square, free of pines but containing an untidy and overgrown collection of
native and exotic trees and shrubs. These were the indications of a vanished
dwelling, the residence of some forgotten settler or ranger’. It was a crucial
decision, for otherwise the main buildings of Murdoch University could not
have been sited on their present commanding position. By May 1968,
Stephenson and the Town Planning Commissioner, J.E. Lloyd, had drawn up
a plan for developing the quadrangle formed by North Lake-road, South-
street, and the projected Kwinana and Roe freeways, providing for a major
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regional hospital (96.7 hectares), a public recreation reserve (127.1
hectares), and the new university (254.2 hectares). Given government
approval in July 1968, the University of Western Australia then began
negotiating land exchanges with the Metropolitan Region Planning
Authority, the State Housing Commission, and various private land owners
and estate agents so as to form the block required by the Stephenson-Lloyd
plan. The process was to take more than two years, but from mid-1968
Somerville was definitely the site for the new campus.

But what would be its form? In July 1968, the State government ‘had no
intention to depart from the recommendation of the Jackson committee that
the new institution should be a college of the University’. The Professorial
Board working party, however, was moving towards the idea of a second,
autonomous university. One school of thought, notably one advocated by
Professor Alan Boyle, expected that the new establishment could grow to be
a large university of the North American type with between 20000 and
25000 undergraduates, perhaps developing as a constellation of five or six
colleges of about 4000 students each. Others accepted that an academic
structure would be required very different from that of the University of
Western Australia. By August 1968, the professors reported to the Senate
that there had emerged ‘a broad basis of agreement on the need for the
academic organisation and the course structure at the new site to be planned
by those who would be teaching there untrammeled by any commitment to
the arrangements on the present site except to the extent necessary to avoid
wasteful duplication of courses and to ensure that interchange of students
could take place at appropriate levels’. This generous view went a long way
towards implying autonomy for the new site, although at this stage the
working party still favoured a federal structure with each campus having
virtual academic independence under a single governing body.

It remained to take the opinions of vice-chancellors from elsewhere in

Australia who had recently gone through the exercise of establishing a new
university. Invitations were issued to Matheson of Monash, Myers of
LaTrobe, Mitchell of Macquarie, and Karmel of Flinders. The three latter
were able to pay advisory visits between March and May 1969, and spoke to
a series of seminars attended by academics, students, and members of the
Senate and the Western Australian Tertiary Education Commission
(W.A.T.E.C.). Not surprisingly each of the visiting vice-chancellors argued
that the new campus should not be a carbon copy of older universities. Each
favoured interdisciplinary studies flowing from an administrative structure
based on schools of study rather than faculties and departments; and each
placed some stress on participatory decision-making and the provision of
academic advisers and other support systems to help undergraduates find
their way into university studies, thus implying that like most new
universities the second Western Australian campus would largely draw its
student intake from first-generation students without a family background of
70
academic or professional expertise. All this sounded like an accurate set of
blueprints for Murdoch.

In May, 1969, the A.U.C. in its fourth report recommended that a second
university should be established in the Perth metropolitan area in time to
take students by 1975 and that the University of Western Australia should
receive a total of $200000 towards its planning. On 21 August 1969, the
Federal Minister for Education, Malcolm Fraser, announced in the House of
Representatives that the government accepted these recommendations. Four
days later the Senate of the University of Western Australia passed a series
of resolutions based on the findings of the Professorial Board’s working
party. It was unanimously agreed that instead of moving towards the
establishment of a university college, plans should be made for a new
university, which would be autonomous from the beginning. If in the future
the two institutions decided to federate it would be a negotiation between
independent equals. The State government should be advised to set up a
planning committee independent of the University of Western Australia but
including some members of its academic staff as well as representatives
drawn from the newer universities in the eastern states. This planning
committee should be authorised to appoint a vice-chancellor and key staff, to
recommend the terms of an act of parliament, and to proceed with academic
and physical planning. The Senate of the University of Western Australia
offered its full co-operation, including the temporary use of accommodation
and facilities.

It was ten months before the State government followed these

recommendations. This was not because of apathy or negligence. The Senate
included as Pro-Chancellor (Sir) Kenneth Townsing, who as Under-
Treasurer was probably the State’s most influential public servant and a
powerful advocate for the new university. Townsing was well aware that
before his political masters decided finally on the form of the new institution
it was necessary to settle the fate of the new veterinary school. The A.U.C.
during 1968 commissioned Dr R.N. Farquhar of the Commonwealth
Department of Primary Industry to conduct an inquiry into the most suitable
location for the school. He recommended in favour of the University of New
England because of its rural setting and existing facilities. This would not
have gone far to meet the needs of South or Western Australia. In his
announcement to the House of Representatives in August 1969, Malcolm
Fraser agreed to Commonwealth funding for a fourth veterinary school but
left its location undecided. During the next six months the Western
Australian government and the local branch of the Australian Veterinary
Association must have gone in for some persuasive lobbying because in
March, 1970, the decision came down in favour of the new campus in Perth.

This promise of a strong professional school from the outset tilted the
balance in favour of proceeding with an autonomous new university. Events
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then moved fairly quickly. In May 1970, Townsing sounded out Noel
Bayliss, professor of chemistry at the University of Western Australia, with
an invitation to act as chairman of the planning board of the new university.
For Bayliss ‘the opportunity to play such an important part in the foundation
of a new university was so exciting that the only possible answer was yes’. It
was a heartening response from a senior academic of great practical
experience and sagacity, and subsequently many others would follow this
example.

There remained the naming of the new university. Australia’s new

foundations were customarily named after some eminent figure in history or
public life. Four possibilities were canvassed for the second Perth campus,
each of them happening to begin with the letter ‘M’. These were Sir Robert
Menzies, the patron of Australia’s modern university growth; Lord Melville,
the British cabinet minister whose name was given to the locality around the
Somerville site; Sir James Mitchell, an affectionately-remembered governor
and premier of Western Australia, and Sir Walter Murdoch. But Menzies
and Melville lacked specific connections with Western Australia, and
Mitchell though a mighty champion of rural industries was not noted for
intellectual interests. Gently guided by Townsing the authorities settled for
Murdoch. Subsequently, some contended that the name should have been
‘Walter Murdoch University’ to avoid confusion with his great-nephew
Rupert Murdoch, but at the time nobody thought it necessary. So it was that
on 9 July 1970, while Sir Walter Murdoch was still able to appreciate the
compliment the name of the new university was announced at a modest
function at the University of Western Australia at which senior officials and
twelve members of the Murdoch University Planning Board met for the first
time.

The Board’s membership largely followed the recommendations of the

University of Western Australia Senate committee nearly a year earlier,
except that there were no advisers from outside the State. Apart from
Bayliss, who was shortly to resign his chair in order to devote himself full-
time to the Planning Board, five of its members came from the staff of the
University of Western Australia. Three were senior State public servants,
and the others were a businessman, a barrister, and an educationist. At its
first meeting the Planning Board decided that a registrar should be appointed
as soon as possible because of the need to meet the deadlines set by the
A.U.C. Within a fortnight the position was accepted by D.D. Dunn, deputy-
registrar of the University of Western Australia. A popular administrator and
sportsman Dan Dunn brought to the post qualities of experience, legal
training, an uncommonly retentive memory, and a coolly relaxed manner,
which was often very effective in deflating academic pomposity. He was to
be called ‘secretary’, rather than ‘registrar’ or ‘principal’, a title suggesting a
role as the essential linch-pin of Murdoch’s future administrative structure.
This assumed that the vice-chancellor, when appointed, would work happily
70
with this arrangement or possess the skill to make changes acceptably. As
things fell out this expectation was not entirely fulfilled.

The Planning Board’s responsibilities covered every aspect of the first phase
of development for Murdoch University: the creation of an academic plan,
estimates of student numbers, maintenance of liaison with the University of
Western Australia and the Federal and State governments, appointment of
foundation staff, planning for accommodation, equipment, and expenditure,
and much else. During its three years of existence from July 1970, to June
1973, the Board’s task was complicated by wildly-fluctuating official
estimates of the scope and number of Murdoch’s potential student intake.
Incredible as it seems with hindsight, it was commonly thought in the early
l970s that by 1984 Murdoch would reach the 10,000 undergraduates which
the conventional wisdom held to be the desirable maximum for an
Australian university, so that in 1985 a third university would be needed at
Wanneroo. In mid-1975 a planning committee was set up for a teachers’
college at Cockburn, which if it had come into being must have looked for
students in the same catchment area as Murdoch. Under such promptings the
Planning Board naturally expected to have to plan for rapid growth instead
of the relatively slow and frugal conditions, which in fact characterised the
later l970s and early l980s.

The A.U.C. at first pressed the Planning Board to proceed with the setting up
of the veterinary school as quickly as possible and at one point Bayliss was
informally requested to consider a date as early as 1972. This was clearly
impossible, but after visits from the deans of the three existing Australian
veterinary schools in September 1970, it was accepted that 1974 would be
the opening date for both the veterinary school and the rest of the university.
Consultation was accordingly hastened. In December 1970, the Vice-
Chancellor of Macquarie (Professor A.G. Mitchell) and the Deputy Vice-
Chancellor of Flinders (Professor A.M. Clark) met the Planning Board,
followed in January, 1971, by Professor P.H. Partridge of the Australian
National University. Then, faced with the first rumblings of the 1970s
recession, official thinking went into reverse. By September 1971, the
A.U.C. was not merely recommending the postponement of Murdoch’s
opening to 1975 but also suggesting cutbacks in staff, student numbers and
buildings. At the end of the year it was even suggested that the opening of
the veterinary school might be deferred while a start was made with less
costly areas of scholarship. Unimpressed with these vacillations the Planning
Board resolved in January 1972, that such a delay ‘would seriously prejudice
not only the veterinary school alone but also the whole university in the
mind of the public’. The issue dragged on for some months amid
recriminations between State government ministers and the Federal Minister
for Education, Malcolm Fraser. By May it was clear that the veterinary
school would be kept, but the episode revealed the vulnerability of an infant
university to the shifting whims of official convenience.
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Murdoch was fortunate in that veterinary science was not to provide its only
professional school. In September 1970, the Western Mining Corporation
announced its intention of endowing the new university with a chair of
environmental studies. This chair remains alone to this day as an example of
private endowment, but at the time it was hoped that others might follow the
good example. Early in 1971 the W.A.T.E.C. recommended that Murdoch
should enter the field of teacher education, probably with emphasis on
primary teaching. The Planning Board agreed at its meeting on 5 April,
1971. These developments meant that in contrast to its peers among the new
universities - Griffith and Deakin - Murdoch was comparatively well
endowed with vocational disciplines, an important point in its favour when
in future years its survival was under question. As these decisions were
taken early it was possible to accommodate them easily in planning the site
and costing.

In budgeting for the 1970-72 triennium the Planning Board requested an

allocation of $1.161 million supplementary to the $200,000 already
earmarked for planning in the University of Western Australia grant. For
1973-75 the request totalled $4.5 12 million for recurrent expenses such as
salaries and maintenance and $l5.907 million for capital, equipment, and
buildings. In reply the A.U.C. suggested cutbacks in the proposed number of
students and foundation professors, as well as recommending the
postponement of a student union building and a biology block and rejecting
outright a student hall of residence. The eventual allocation was $8.641
million with an additional $700,000 for equipment. Given these figures it
was then possible to proceed seriously with the physical planning of the site.

This task was entrusted to Gordon Stephenson, who in order to devote his
attention fully to it resigned his chair of architecture at the University of
Western Australia and entered into partnership with R.J. (Gus) Ferguson.
One of the ablest and most innovative of Perth’s younger architects,
Ferguson was noted for his use of colonial idiom and materials harmonising
with the sands and rocks of the Perth region. He also possessed the virtue of
imaginative inexpensiveness. A good example could be found in his
attractively simple holiday cottages at Rottnest. The landscaping firm of
Blackwell and Cala was a felicitous choice among the consultants appointed
for site planning. To them the campus owed the early recommendation to
concentrate on indigenous trees and shrubs so that the phased withdrawal of
pines from much of the site was soon to be followed by an attractive variety
of new growth.

The Planning Board soon assented to the proposal to locate Murdoch’s first
buildings on the highest point on the site, the knoll which was included
through Stephenson’s initiative in securing a deviation in South-street and
which contained one of the few significant stands of native trees remaining
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in the Somerville plantation. Gradually the concept matured as Bush Court, a
quadrangle open on its north side to take advantage of the view towards the
Perth city skyline. To the south on a ridge dominating the rest of the campus
would lie the library, symbolising its central importance as a resource for
every branch of learning. The first academic buildings would flank Bush
Court to east and west. As others were needed they would fan out from the
central block southward down the slope of the knoll until they formed a
crescent with Bush Court in the keystone position. At the foot of the knoll
was a small swamp, which might in time be converted into an ornamental
lake. (Fashions have changed, and it is now intended to retain the swamp in
its pristine condition as a sanctuary for native flora and fauna.)

At some point it was decided that the academic buildings to the west of Bush
Court would be devoted to social sciencies, humanities and education while
the east academic buildings would be designed for physical and biological
sciences. The veterinary school would be sited at the southern extremity of
the east academic wing, from which position it would command easy access
to the paddocks and animal houses and would be also well placed to share
facilities with the nearby regional hospital and the medical school which
might one day grow there. Unfortunately, the only building erected on the
hospital site was a laundry for the service of all Perth’s public hospitals.
With tightening finances it came to be thought that Perth needed no new
public hospitals or schools for medical practitioners. However, the siting of
the veterinary school has proved generally satisfactory.

All this was readily accepted by the Planning Board. Far more contention
was aroused by Ferguson’s choice of building materials. He proposed using
a light-coloured cement block set off by copper guttering and down pipes,
with corrugated asbestos sheeting as roofing material. This concept would
give the buildings something of the low-slung lines of a pastoral homestead,
with covered walkways suggesting a mixture of the verandah and the
cloister; an idea which works brilliantly in the long walkway on the library
side of Bush Court, with its east end framing a view of the shifting colours
of the Darling Range scarp.

When he saw its jarrah beams the historian Sir Keith Hancock commented:
‘The oak beams of New College in Oxford have lasted for six centuries and
there is no good reason why the jarrah beams of Murdoch should not last
even longer’. But the asbestos roofing roused a storm of protest. Those
accustomed to the handsome Mediterranean tiling of the University of
Western Australia could not imagine any more suitable material. Besides,
the prospect of Murdoch University had upgraded the social expectations of
neighbouring suburbs, so that subdividers were exhorting homebuyers to
build ‘near the $12 million Murdoch development’ and taking it for granted
that substantial brick and tile homes would follow. Asbestos roofing was
associated with industrial estates and the working class.
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The Planning Board had by far its most animated series of debates on this
issue but in December 1972, accepted Ferguson’s recommendation by six
votes to four. By this narrow margin Murdoch’s architecture came to
symbolise a willingness to attempt the innovative rather than submitting to
safe precedent. Of course there were critics. The mayor of Melville spoke for
many when he asserted that Murdoch ‘looked like a prison... It has no colour
- just grey bricks’. Nevertheless, with the planned growth of native trees and
shrubs in their surroundings, the Ferguson buildings have come
harmoniously and successfully into their environment. Instead of being
Victorian sham-Gothic or modern international-glasshouse they constitute
that rare achievement among Australian university buildings of sustaining an
authentically Australian idiom. Their fellow-professionals knew what
Stephenson and Ferguson were about. In 1976 they received an architectural
citation from the Royal Australian Institute of Architects for the design of
Murdoch University.

Meanwhile the appointment of staff continued. On the administrative side

Geoff Field, now chief finance officer, was Dan Dunn’s first aide, being
joined in 1971 and 1972 by Brian Cosgrove as senior administrative officer,
E.S. Ballinger in charge of buildings and property and a number of others. In
seeking a vice-chancellor the Planning Board advertised widely, attracting a
respectable field. On 31 May 1971, the Board unanimously resolved to
invite Stephen Griew, the forty-three year-old professor of psychology at the
University of Dundee. Griew accepted. Quick-witted and modern-minded,
he had risen rapidly in his field including four years of Antipodean
experience as professor at Otago, and looked the right choice to give
Murdoch an energetic and unorthodox start. As Dan Dunn recalls: ‘He was
seen as excited and exciting and imaginative; with some sort of political feel
and a talent for bringing people’s ideas together’. On a visit to Perth in
September, 1971, Griew confirmed this impression. There was, he said, ‘no
excuse for a new university to make the same mistakes as the older
universities which had been handicapped by tradition’. He also predicted that
all members of the university, including students, would have a say in its
administration. Thus by the time he took up appointment in August, 1972,
Griew was already confirming the expectation that Murdoch University
would deliberately break with the practices of established universities, would
encourage participatory decision-making rather than control by senior
administrators and would welcome innovation.

Coming at a time when traditional universities in the Western world, and not
least in Australia, had borne the brunt of four or five years of student
demonstrations, it was understandable that Murdoch should attempt to meet
a demand for fresh and socially-relevant approaches to learning. By 1972 the
Planning Board in fact had gone a long way towards adopting many of the
academic innovations for which Murdoch would be noted. The Board was
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committed to the encouragement of interdisciplinary students on the basis of
Schools of Study; it also favoured the kind of special provision for first-year
students, which led to the formation of the Board of Part I Studies. Beyond
this it was not certain that more was required. In the face of the established
and fairly traditional University of Western Australia whose confidence had
not been much shaken by student protest, as well as the energetic and
thrusting W.A.I.T. with a student catchment area overlapping Murdoch, the
new university needed to devise strategies, which would attract students
quickly. It was unclear how far Western Australian students were demanding
innovatory approaches. As at all times many were simply looking for
qualifications, which led to jobs.

One vital opportunity was handed to Murdoch on a plate. Many academics at

the University of Western Australia were worried that Murdoch would draw
away a large number of full-time students. R.F. Whelan, the Vice-
Chancellor, candidly admitted to Stephen Griew ‘that senior staff,
particularly in the natural science departments, are currently feeling very
threatened indeed by the prospect of Murdoch University in 1975’.
Believing that because of its more central position it would always carry the
major load of part-time university students, the University of Western
Australia sought to achieve balance by encouraging Murdoch to take
responsibility for the tuition of external students. Murdoch accepted, and
soon found that although external tuition had been underdeveloped and
neglected at the University of Western Australia there was major scope for
growth in the light of recent advances in audio-visual technology. Griew was
quick to see the opportunity of reorganising external study as a mode open to
all students, whether studying off or on campus. Previously, external tuition
was available only to those living outside the metropolitan area. Murdoch
was to grant eligibility to all, thus bringing tertiary education within the
reach of housewives, people holding full-time jobs and others whose
circumstances made it difficult for them to attend regularly on campus. This
was innovative thinking at its best, and in the early years of struggle the
external students represented for several of Murdoch’s programmes the
essential margin, which made for viability.

After Griew’s arrival the pace of preparation quickened. Much time was
spent in the selection of senior academic staff. As librarian Murdoch was
fortunate enough to recruit W.G. Buick, a scholarly conchologist who as
foundation librarian at the University of Papua-New Guinea possessed rare
experience of the problems and opportunities of pioneering universities. It
was unthinkable that a Planning Board chaired by Bayliss would overlook
the three foundations of the physical sciences, mathematics, physics, and
chemistry. Four chairs remained to cover the range of humanities, social
sciences, and biological sciences. Griew preferred not to pre-empt decisions
about the subject areas for these appointments. Instead the Planning Board
should choose four candidates of individual excellence who, between them,
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promised to cover a wide range. In the end appointments were made in
biology, history, literature, and what was termed ‘social inquiry’ - a name
avoiding some of the methodological implications of ‘social sciences’. The
latter appointment was made in the knowledge that during 1971 and 1972
requests came in from a variety of sources (ranging from the Australian
Labor Party to the Mount Lawley Rotary Club) urging that Murdoch should
set up a course in peace and conflict studies. Unwilling to rebuff a hopeful
initiative but unprovided with funding, the Planning Board chose an
appointee willing to foster peace studies. Altogether more than two hundred
candidates applied for the foundation chairs. The process of selection was
complete by April 1973. All the successful applicants were males aged
between thirty-eight and forty-eight. At fifty Dunn, the Secretary, and Buick,
the Librarian, were the oldest of Murdoch’s appointments. The foundation
professors were scheduled to take up duty on 1 July 1973, and from that date
Murdoch would be on its own.

Birth

Optimism was buoyant. The election of the Whitlam government in

December 1972, suggested that Canberra would welcome Murdoch’s
commitment to experiment and to the nurture of the academically
disadvantaged. On 28 May the Planning Board held what was to be
practically its valedictory meeting. Stephen Griew informed them that the
A.U.C. seemed determined to reward resourcefulness and innovativeness in
educational planning; he would be pessimistic about Murdoch’s chances of
attracting support for a programme that did not evidence a healthy and
realistic commitment to innovation. In the discussion, which followed, some
members commented on the tendency of students to play safe, especially in
professional faculties, but more were interested in the prospects for mature
students, either for professional retraining or as newcomers to university
study. On 29 June the act of parliament establishing Murdoch University
was proclaimed. Seeking to crystallise reforming enthusiasm and to bond
together his foundation staff into a united group, Griew was receptive to an
idea suggested by Dan Dunn that the foundation staff should be brought
together for an intensive preliminary discussion. A three-day ‘think-in’ was
arranged at the Contacio Motor Inn at Scarborough on 10-12 July 1973.
From this would emerge a statement of the Murdoch ethos and a set of
guidelines against which to develop the future growth of the University.

In the isolation of an out-of-season beach hotel, away from any distractions

beyond a brisk walk along the wintry shore of the Indian Ocean, the
founding fathers of Murdoch subjected themselves to an intensive exchange
of ideas. Stephen Griew had few preconceptions to impose on the gathering
beyond a leaning towards the new and the exotic and perhaps a
corresponding tendency to undervalue anything, which seemed to smack of
the conventional wisdom of Western Australia, particularly the University of
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Western Australia. He saw his role rather as that of the impresario,
stimulating the foundation professors to develop their ideas, picking and
choosing those that seemed best fitted to his concept of the Murdoch ethos,
but never allowing himself to seem the constant ally of one particular view
or faction. Sometimes unspecific on long-term strategy, he relied on his
prowess as a nifty tactician and found it uncongenial to entrust responsibility
to an academic bureaucracy whose structures restricted manoeuvre. Contacio
was to be his great moment, the point at which all the exciting potentialities
for Murdoch could be sketched out and admired before being submitted to
the tests of the workaday world.

Of the ten foundation professors present at Contacio six were appointed

chairmen of Murdoch’s Schools of Study. Robert Dunlop was already in
charge of veterinary studies, having previously worked at Makerere in
Uganda and as head of physiological sciences at the Western College of
Veterinary Medicine at Saskatchewan. Broad-shouldered, energetic, and
possessed of a yeoman sense of humour, he was a tireless worker for
veterinary studies but sometimes lacked proportion in intervening in matters
outside his field. Jack Loneragan, formerly of the Institute of Agriculture at
the University of Western Australia, was a plant biologist who became Dean
of the School of Environmental and Life Sciences. Unassuming and
practical, he was one of the most thoughtful and consistent influences on the
early years of Murdoch. Jim Parker became Dean of Mathematical and
Physical Sciences. One of the most distinguished products of the chemistry
school at the University of Western Australia, Parker made his name as a
kineticist and subsequently at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the
Australian National University for his researches in mineral chemistry. He
brought with him to Murdoch a number of patent rights administered
through a company known as ANUMIN. Serious-minded and passionately
devoted to his subject, he was yet able to recognise quality in fields far
removed from his own, and was a great influence in ensuring that Murdoch
did not neglect research and postgraduate studies.

Brian Hill, Dean of Education, came from a senior lectureship at the

University of Wollongong but was by origin a Western Australian who
followed Dan Dunn as secretary of the Jackson Committee. He was an
admirably systematic administrator, whose reputation as a committed
evangelical Christian did not hinder him from operating tenaciously and
successfully in the sometimes cut-throat world of educational politics. John
Frodsham, Dean of what he wished should be called the School of Human
Communication rather than humanities, came from a chair at the University
of Dar-es-Salaam, which he held on secondment from the Australian
National University. The most eloquent of all the foundation professors, he
was credited with understanding seventeen languages and enjoyed a
profound scholarly reputation in classical Chinese studies. Committed to an
intellectual course, which diverged from many of his colleagues, he
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withdrew after a while from administrative responsibilities to concentrate on
adding the study of paranormal phenomena to his scholarly interests. John
Raser, Dean of the School of Social Inquiry, belonged to that group of
American students of international relations who, having mastered the new
disciplines of simulation and games theory, were repelled by the United
States involvement in Vietnam and turned to the Californian ‘third wave’
school of psychoanalysts with their emphasis on personal self-awareness. An
exuberant personality who sported an ear-ring and enjoyed surfing, Raser
more than any of his colleagues embodied for many ‘the Murdoch ethos’.

The remaining professors negotiated themselves into appropriate Schools.

Desmond O’Connor, Professor of Environmental Science, momentarily
considered linking with Parker but joined Loneragan in what became the
School of Environmental and Life Sciences. Originally a lecturer in
engineering at the University of New South Wales, O’Connor served some
years as chief of the environmental sciences division of the United States
Army Research Office, acquiring a trace of American accent. A wry,
unaggressive character, O’Connor was a keen amateur aviator and
yachtsman. Bruce Mainsbridge came to the Chair of Physics from a similar
rank at the University of Papua-New Guinea, having been previously one of
Sir Ernest Titterton’s team at the Australian National University. A robust
and independent-minded controversialist, he sometimes found himself in a
minority of one, but was respected for his resourcefulness in finding new
approaches to the teaching of physics at a time when the subject was under
challenge. He was attached to the School of Mathematical and Physical
Sciences together with Alex Robertson who came to the Chair of
Mathematics from a similar post at the University of Keele in England.
Robertson shared to the full the Scottish love of argument from first
principles and the Scottish scepticism about ambitious plans for human
improvement. He soon found himself stereotyped as Murdoch’s resident
Doubting Thomas, and his prudent reservations sometimes received less
attention than they merited. Geoffrey Bolton was attracted to Murdoch after
serving on its Planning Board while Professor of Modern History at the
University of Western Australia. With Loneragan, Parker, and Hill he was
one of the four native-born foundation professors. Although he strongly
asserted the need to respect Western Australian sensibilities in presenting
Murdoch’s innovations he was too easy-going and conciliatory to have much
influence on policy. After consultation with Raser and Frodsham it was
decided to place history with the former in Social Inquiry. Later Bolton
became Pro-Vice-Chancellor and chaired the Board of External Studies.

Raser in 1981 described Frodsham, Hill, Mainsbridge and himself as the

‘radicals’ among the foundation professors with Robertson, O’Connor,
Parker, and Loneragan as the ‘conservatives’ and Bolton and Dunlop
occupying some ill-defined middle group. At the Contacio meeting,
however, these lines of ideology were not easy to discern. Stephen Griew
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asked each of the foundation professors to write a statement of their
expectations for Murdoch. Robertson and O’Connor joined Dunlop and
Raser in urging that Murdoch should not be dominated by its bureaucracy;
Hill and Mainsbridge said that teaching should not be subordinated to
research, where Parker put the claims of research somewhat higher.
Frodsham struck a global note: ‘the human race is growing so fast that it
threatens the stability of the biosphere itself…’ He urged his colleagues to
see themselves ‘as custodians of established humanist values, creators of
new standards, critics of society and prophets pointing the way to the
future… As secular missionaries academics must be out to educate, instruct,
persuade, convert, and save’. Bolton was mildly skeptical of Murdoch’s
capacity to fill this role: ‘Western Australia is not adequately noticed or
consulted by the rest of Australia and Australia is not a major power. If we
take the responsibility for disturbing these people out of their present
complacency, we should be quite clear why we are doing it, and what we
expect to come of it’. But Griew, although he stressed the importance of
close relationships between Murdoch and the community it served, found
this pragmatism disappointing.

In the end it was Raser whose submission was accepted by all as best
expressing the views of those present. He argued that Murdoch’s students
would be not only part of the first generation whose parents and teachers
were themselves products of the post-atomic age but also the first products
of the electronic revolution and the counter-culture. Past experience would
not be a useful guide for teaching and planning in the future. Loneragan said
that the Contacio consensus could be summed up in a passage from Raser’s
paper:

…I believe Murdoch should respond to that need for humane

and vital intelligence. Humane in that it is oriented towards
development of the maximum human potential for creativity,
growth, love, community and joy rather than towards
exploitation of man and nature. Vital in that it is deeply rooted in
the real emotional, spiritual, and physical needs of men rather
than being mere cleverness. If Murdoch is to succeed in
fostering such humane and vital intelligence, it must play the
role of a healer. At first glance this may seem an unusual goal to
suggest for a university, for universities (at their best) have
traditionally tried primarily to nurture critical thought by
preserving, exploring, and goading. While I do not denigrate
either this goal or these means, I believe that in a world as
profoundly troubled and pathology-ridd1ed as ours, the highest
calling may be that of healing.

This was the Murdoch ethos as accepted without dissent at Contacio. Raser
saw well enough that areas of potential disagreement remained. ‘Some of the
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foundation professors were of the opinion that what commonly exists is now
a betrayal of the idea of education. Others felt that the problems are minor
enough; that they require simply better techniques and policy rather than a
revolutionary vision’. Some accepted existing definitions of excellence,
others sought new and less exclusively cerebral standards. Beyond these
issues however there were other problems, which simply were not faced at
Contacio. In the euphoric first year of the Whitlam era few could have
foreseen the scale or length of the economic recession, which was about to
overtake the Western world, turning students to the single-minded pursuit of
job qualifications and to political neo-conservatism. But even in 1973 more
might have been done to find out the qualities, which would entice students
to enrol at Murdoch rather than the safer (because better known) alternatives
of the University of Western Australia (now becoming referred to as
U.W.A.) and W.A.I.T.

In succeeding months Griew nailed his colours to Murdoch’s ‘commitment

to make a university education available to all people with the ability and
inclination, regardless of their age or where they live’. Nor would Murdoch
care for students alone:

We see ourselves as going out into the community with the

services we can offer. And we are opening our campus not only
to our students, but to anyone who wishes reasonably to use
them. Our library, for instance, will be open to the people of
Perth to use fully… It was also hoped that parents would come
into the university: Perhaps a university child care centre could
serve them also, so that mum can attend a few courses, browse
in the library, sit in on a discussion, while the kids are at the
campus child care centre.

In looking for such interactions with the local community Murdoch was not
indulging in visionary trendiness. Such ideas had been urged by one of the
finest of Australian academics, Hugh Stretton, only a few years earlier. But
would they be accepted by the inhabitants of the new suburbs around
Murdoch and would they be funded by an Australian Universities
Commission which was too cost-conscious to take readily to new demands?

With hindsight it can be seen that not enough was done to spell out the
practical implications of the Murdoch ethos. Did it simply mean, as was
agreed at Contacio, a commitment to interdisciplinary studies and other fresh
approaches to learning which broke down the restrictive practices of
discipline-centred departments? If so, would students still be expected to
master conventional disciplines before moving on to interdisciplinary work
or would they be thrust immediately into problem-oriented studies, picking
up the necessary intellectual skills as they went along? How would Murdoch
graduates compete with others educated more conventionally elsewhere?
70
And to what extent would these new approaches and the widely held disdain
of academic bureaucracy commit Murdoch to participatory democracy, with
students exercising a larger voice in decision-making than was customary in
Australian universities and with mass meetings taking over the function of
representative committees? It was a fine thing to launch Murdoch with a
statement of ideals but a good deal of subsequent trouble would have been
avoided if their implications had been spelt out more clearly.

The experience of Monash, La Trobe, Flinders, Macquarie, and other new

foundations suggested that a small new university always had to struggle to
establish itself securely in a city dominated by a large older-established
foundation. There was no reason to believe that Perth would be different,
particularly with the added competition of W.A.I.T. It was unwise of
Murdoch to handicap itself by arousing expectations, which it might not be
possible to fulfil. As it was criticism was soon voiced by some at the
University of Western Australia. At a meeting in October 1973, a lecturer in
politics, Patrick O’Brien, denounced Murdoch’s aims as ‘appalling in their
irrationality’. He was saying aloud what many of his colleagues thought
privately.

Perhaps because of these reactions the foundation staff at Murdoch did not
long persist with an offer of temporary accommodation in a house belonging
to the University of Western Australia. Instead arrangements were
negotiated for the use of portion of the Noalimba migrant hostel in the Bull
Creek area, about two and a half kilometres from the permanent site.
Because of cutbacks in overseas migration the buildings were not required
for their original purpose and could later be adapted for student
accommodation. Here planning was to go on for the next eighteen months.
In July and August the membership of the first Senate was announced.
Government nominees included Noel Bayliss, Robert Hillman, John Ahern,
and Sir Stanley Prescott from the old Planning Board, with Sir Thomas
Wardle (‘Tom the cheap grocer’), the lawyer Michael Lewi, and the Director
General of Education, J.H. Barton, as newcomers. The Labor Party
nominated A. D. Taylor M LA and Philip Adams (formerly on the Planning
Board), and the Liberal-National Country Party coalition chose Andrew
Mensaros MLA and Althaea McTaggart, the first woman to serve on
Murdoch’s governing body. The academics elected Bolton (formerly of the
Planning Board), Dunlop and Robertson.

Many took it for granted that Bayliss was the obvious choice as first
chancellor after his services as chairman of the Planning Board, but he
declined to let his name go forward. It might have been difficult for a
seasoned academic to serve comfortably as figurehead to an energetic vice-
chancellor and a foundation team with a marked inclination to carve out their
own path. However he agreed to take the chairmanship of the Senate’s
general purposes committee. The chancellorship was accepted by Mr Justice
70
Wickham of the Western Australian Supreme Court. John Wickham was a
humane, thoughtful, and fair-minded jurist and an excellent choice in most
respects except for a lack of previous experience of the international world
of scholarship from which many of Murdoch’s innovations were drawn.

The Senate’s early meetings were occupied considerably with the formal and
ceremonial aspects of the new university. When it came to the choice of
formal academic dress the Chancellor, showing some instinct for the
Murdoch ethos, ‘wondered whether it was necessary to invent personal
paraphernalia for academic purposes… Prestige came from the person inside
the clothing rather than the clothing itself. We should establish our own
position’. By May 1975, Senate agreed on robes in the magenta, which was
to become Murdoch University’s colour, a reluctant Wickham commenting
that they were ‘sufficiently vulgar to impress’. The Senate then confirmed its
commitment to innovation by circulating the port at dinner anti-clockwise.

It proved more troublesome to find a suitable motto for the University. The
works of Walter Murdoch were ransacked in vain for a phrase, which was
suitably pithy and inspirational, and to this day Murdoch remains without a
slogan. The choice of a coat of arms was almost as difficult since the
Murdoch family crest consisted of two ravens transfixed by an arrow and
was neither aesthetically nor ecologically apt. A number of amateur heralds
tried their hand at a substitute until the impasse was broken late in 1975 by
Noel Bayliss who appeared one day at a Senate meeting with a fine
specimen of the Banksia grandis which grew in great profusion on the
Murdoch site. A chance conversation with Sir Hugh Springer, Secretary of
the Association of Commonwealth Universities, had alerted Bayliss to the
idea of choosing some flower characteristic of the Murdoch locality, and
Murdoch’s botanical consultant Marion Blackwell immediately suggested
Banksia grandis when Bayliss consulted her. Placed under a chevron
suggesting the Murdoch initial ‘M’ this proved an appropriate choice,
particularly since the banksia is one of those peculiar Australian shrubs
which regenerate only after burning - and Murdoch University would pass
through the fire before its flowering.

For the ten foundation professors 1974 was a busy year. In May the
Academic Council was established by statute. This was intended as
Murdoch’s major academic policy-making body. Its members were the Vice-
Chancellor, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, librarian, chairmen of schools, director of
external studies, five elected members of academic staff and a postgraduate
student. Its duties were to report and recommend on issues referred from
Boards and Schools, advise the Senate and Vice-Chancellor as requested,
and submit recommendations to Senate on academic policy, development,
student admission, studies, examinations and discipline. Its numbers were
soon augmented by the chairmen of three major boards reporting to
Academic Council, each of them representing an important area of
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Murdoch’s commitment: the Board of Part I Studies, the Board of External
Studies, and the Board of Research and Postgraduate Studies.

The Board of Part I Studies testified to the pivotal role of first-year teaching.
Mindful of the needs of students without tertiary experience and anxious to
avoid early over-specialisation, Murdoch intended that the first year of study
should include, as 25 per cent of its content, a ‘trunk course’ embracing
some broad theme of contemporary relevance to which contributions would
come from a variety of disciplines, thus ensuring the students’ exposure to a
spectrum of academic insights and illustrating the value of an
interdisciplinary approach. It was also proposed that Part I students should
not be required to undertake more than half their courses in prescribed
compulsory units. This was intended to combat specialist narrowness,
particularly in professional schools, but had to be modified almost
immediately for veterinary students whose certification depended on taking
a range of courses comparable to those offered elsewhere in Australia.
However, in general, Part I was meant .to enable students to try new options
which they had no opportunity of encountering previously and to provide
some of the breadth of outlook embodied in the Contacio statement. It was
also expected that all staff would participate in Part I teaching. It was not a
chore to be left to part-time and junior members.

In like manner it was expected that senior as well as junior staff would play
their part in external tuition. It was accepted that external courses would not
form a separate and potentially second-grade branch of Murdoch’s activities.
Courses would be drawn from the normal undergraduate curriculum and
taught by academics who usually worked internally. Teaching should
employ the best technology available rather than follow the old
‘correspondence course’ methods, because external tuition was to be
regarded as a viable mode available to all students wherever resident, and
not just a substitute for the geographically disadvantaged.

Murdoch was fortunate in appointing in 1974 as Director of External Studies

Patrick Guiton, deputy regional director in South-East England for the Open
University, who proceeded to make a swift and efficient start in taking over
external studies from the University of Western Australia. The north of
Western Australia was considered particularly in need of attention, and in
July, 1974, Griew, O’Connor and Frodsham visited the Pilbara to assess the
prospects for distance education, followed by Dunlop, Raser and Bolton who
went to the Kimberleys. In 1975 Murdoch and W. A.I.T. established joint
arrangements for their students in the Pilbara in collaboration with the staff
and resources of the Australian Inland Mission, and this worked well until
superseded in 1980 by the setting up of two regional colleges at Karratha
and Port Hedland. But it was from the metropolitan area and the South-West
that Murdoch would make its main harvest of external students.

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Academic Council also created a Board of Research and Postgraduate
Studies, despite initial reluctance from both the A.U.C. and the Vice-
Chancellor to support an early move into postgraduate studies. Several
foundation professors insisted that Murdoch should take postgraduates in
1974, partly to establish its credibility as a fully functioning university and
partly to bring on campus an age-group who, through part-time tutoring and
in other respects, would bridge the gap between first-year students and
mature academics. Some would become members of Murdoch’s staff in
time, but they would face ample competition. Already the universities of
Britain and North America were encountering hard times and eight hundred
applicants came forward for twenty-five sub-professorial posts advertised in
1974. The process of selection was not laggardly but with so many to
consider a number were barely finalised in time to take up duties for the
1975 academic year.

The formal inauguration ceremonies began on 17 September 1974, the

centenary of Walter Murdoch’s birth. This was marked by the laying in Bush
Court of a suitably-inscribed commemorative stone, a piece of granite from
Murdoch’s birthplace at Rosehearty in the burgh of Pitsligo in
Aberdeenshire. Next to it was a striking abstract sculpture by Mans
Raudzins. The ceremony was performed by the Governor-General, Sir John
Kerr, who spoke movingly of the recent death of his wife and his
appreciation of study as a consolation as well as an enlivening interest for
those of mature years. He also observed that a university tagged with the
name of Murdoch would need to match Walter Murdoch’s standards. He
probably never met with a warmer reception on an Australian university
campus.

Towards the end of November the library was ready for occupation, the third
floor being reserved temporarily for Administration. During the following
summer months the academic staff gradually left Noalimba for their new
quarters. The teaching facilities were slower to reach completion; in the
main lecture theatre the workmen were still screwing the armrests on to the
seats as the students arrived for their first lecture at the beginning of March.
But the neighbours came over to pay courtesy calls, the University of
Western Australia Senate late in 1974, the W.A.I.T. Council in February
1975. By the end of February the first students were on campus for
orientation. They were greeted on 24 February by an audio-visual
programme, ‘Murdoch is’, which began with a quotation from Walter
Murdoch and led by way of the slogan ‘Let us change promise and idealism
into fact’, through various lyrics from Moody Blues and Deep Purple to the
conclusion ‘To know and be yourself Murdoch is’.

For the more formally minded there was a ceremony at the Perth Concert
Hall on 23 April at which the first honorary degrees were awarded to Noel
Bayliss, Sir Lawrence Jackson as Chancellor of the University of Western
70
Australia, and Peter Karmel, chairman of the Australian Universities
Commission. This was combined with an orchestral concert at which
Brahms’ ‘Academic Festival’ overture was deliberately not part of the
repertoire. Four Indonesian universities were represented by senior officials
as well as the vice-chancellor of the University of Papua-New Guinea and
every Australian university, since the Australian Vice-Chancellors’
Committee was meeting for the first time at Murdoch. They were only the
first of a stream of visitors who came that first year to the Murdoch campus:
Princess Anne, the United States ambassador Marshall Green and, with
scrupulous impartiality, the USSR envoy Alexander Borasova, the
diplomatic representatives of Malaysia and West Germany. Murdoch
dispatched a party of four members of staff and Senate to tour China in May,
and in September Walter Murdoch’s biographer, John La Nauze, gave the
first Walter Murdoch Memorial Lecture, an occasion held annually on or
near the anniversary of his birth. In many ways Murdoch seemed to be
receiving its due meed of recognition from the outside world.

Yet confidence on campus was shaky. Murdoch had offered its ethos to the
community but the community’s response was doubtful. Even the emphasis
on opportunity for mature-age students may have misfired. Although more
than one thousand applicants sought admission to Murdoch by the beginning
of 1975, few came from among the ranks of the better-qualified school
leavers - apart from the applicants for veterinary studies who required a high
matriculation aggregate. Some of the local high schools falling within
Murdoch’s catchment area were dubious or even antagonistic about the
academic philosophy of the new university, and it may be that more
attention should have been given to understanding and overcoming their
reservations. Murdoch’s laboratory facilities could not yet match those
offered to science students at U.W.A. or W.A.I.T. On the other hand
Murdoch’s arts courses attracted a number who, if not all radical, were
thoroughly disaffected with conventional educational methods and saw hope
of a new dispensation in such programmes as Peace and Conflict Studies,
Human Development, and Communication Studies.

Of 684 students who eventually took up places in Murdoch’s first year only
46.7% were under 23 years of age compared with the national average of
7O.7%. On the other hand 33.9% of Murdoch’s students were 30 years old
or more, as against a national average of 10.2%, and 47% were women by
contrast with a national average of 34%. Older students and women were
especially strongly represented among the 130 part-time and 155 external
enrolments. None could deny that in meeting one of its aims Murdoch was
an unqualified success. Murdoch provided the means of bringing university
education to many mature students, particularly women, who might
otherwise never have experienced the opportunity. Not only was this a
marked characteristic of Murdoch’s early years but it probably had the effect
of encouraging the older tertiary institutions in Perth to liberalise their
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policies. But the price, which had to be paid, was that Murdoch was not
taken seriously according to the only conventional criterion, and this was its
capacity to recruit seventeen-year-old achievers direct from secondary
schools. Nor was the situation helped by the unwillingness of the older
tertiary institutions, U.W.A. and W.A.I.T., to surrender claims to new areas
of teaching and scholarship, which might have been of value in building up
Murdoch.

The six Schools were all affected in various degrees. Veterinary Studies and
Education, the two professional schools, were relatively unworried. Both
secured a satisfactory intake of well-motivated students. Veterinary Studies,
despite the lingering personal commitment of Bob Dunlop, was unabashedly
skeptical about the ethos. Within a year its students would be demanding
exemption from the Part I trunk course so that they could concentrate on
their vocational skills; and from the start it was impossible to impose the
rubric that only half the Part I content should consist of compulsory units.
The School of Education staff, on the contrary, were among the staunchest
advocates of trunk courses, showing a healthy innovativeness in their use of
caravans to bring teaching technology to schools and also in the appointment
for three-year terms of tutor-supervisors, experienced teachers who were
seconded from their schools to Murdoch in order that their practical
experience could be placed at the disposal of the trainees undertaking
Murdoch degrees. Environmental and Life Sciences also proved a success
from its earliest days. Where other institutions taught biology in separate
components Murdoch met a demand by developing a broad biology degree
carefully planned to make maximum use of available resources. Its staff,
notably Roger Lethbridge, put a lot of effort into cultivating school leavers.
On the environmental side there was fruitful co-operation between Peter
Newman and a group of likeminded practical idealists in Mathematical and
Physical Sciences such as Keith Roby, Phil Jennings, and John Cornish. This
led to a very active and sustained interest in community science and in the
Population and World Resources programme. In all these respects
Murdoch’s first year was well on target.

Mathematical and Physical Sciences was troubled by low student

enrolments. It was simply impossible to compete with the more ample
facilities of larger institutions. In compensation several members of the
school - Mainsbridge and the physicists set a vigorous example - worked
hard at devising service courses for non-specialists, and there was some
satisfying postgraduate work but the future remained worrying. Poor
numbers also affected two of the four programmes in Human
Communication, Chinese Studies and Southeast Asian Studies. The situation
was not improved by dissension as to whether classical Chinese civilisation
or an understanding of the post-imperial 20th century should have higher
priority in Chinese Studies. Nor was it helped by the decision of W.A.I.T. to
push Indonesian Studies at the same time as Murdoch was embarking on
70
Malay; but the problem was not merely a local one. Contrary to the
expectations of most educational pundits Australian students were not
showing widespread interest in neighbouring Asian countries. Instead they
were increasingly excited by Australian studies.

At this time the School of Human Communication placed Australian

literature very low on its list of priorities, thus losing an opportunity to its
competitors. However, it was important to establish Murdoch’s interest in
world literature as distinct from what was seen as the narrowly Leavisite
emphasis of many English departments. Postgraduates were working on
fields such as African literature and science fiction, which were nowhere
previously available. Human Communication’s largest recruitment came in
Communication Studies, but despite many interviews it seemed impossible
to agree on a satisfactory professor (at one desperate moment an expert on
birdsong was under consideration) or to give any direction to the programme
without an excessive quantity of costly equipment.

Social Inquiry’s numbers were good - the school benefited considerably

from external teaching - but of its four programmes, Economics, History,
Human Development, and Peace and Conflict Studies, the two latter were
under some strain as portmanteaus into which many diverse and even
contradictory approaches to learning were thrust. Some seemed a little exotic
for Perth. Dream therapy was offered in a few seminars, and the Social
Inquiry common-room contained a large cardboard packing-case which was
dubbed a Reichian orgone box. In a large university such things might have
been accepted as harmless eccentricities, but with a new institution
struggling to establish its name it was easy for the unfriendly to allege that
Murdoch University was full of trendy unorthodoxies.

It was in vain that the Vice-Chancellor exhorted Academic Council to take a

firm grip on programming. Murdoch had never spelt out the limits of its
commitments to participatory democracy, with the result that junior staff and
students understandably expected to have as much say in decision-making as
their seniors. Coming into being at the end of a decade when university
administrations throughout Australia spent much time and energy conceding
representation to new elements on campus, Murdoch sought to move with
the times by a flexible anticipation of likely demands. The result was a
proliferation of consultative groups, each of which needed administrative
servicing and threw responsibility on the bureaucracy which Murdoch’s
founding fathers had been so ready to decry. Each School of Study not only
possessed a board comprising representative staff and students but also a
forum following the procedure of a Quaker meeting which all might attend.
In addition each programme had a committee responsible for the devising of
course offerings and the acceptance of honours and postgraduate students.

The intention was that the programmes should look after purely academic
70
matters and the Schools should administer what Brian Hill termed ‘rum and
rations’ - material and financial resources and the allocation of teaching time
and part-time staff. In practice the roles of Schools and programmes were
soon muddled together. Programmes put up submissions without adequate
awareness of resource implications and School Boards accepted,
compromised, or less often rejected. Schools were then expected to report to
Academic Council, but a new hurdle was created in the form of a Board of
Part II Studies which was meant to report upon and rationalise course
proposals; however its role became superfluous as dissatisfied applicants got
into the habit of appealing to Academic Council and fighting the battle
anew. The Vice-Chancellor found Academic Council too large and
amorphous (particularly after the admission of student members) to act as a
privy council, so he created two informal consultative bodies. One was a
committee of chairmen of Schools (later committee of Deans, and including
the Director of External Studies and the University Librarian) and the other a
resources allocation advisory committee deliberately selected from among
senior academics who were not on the committee of Deans and hence might
be seen as disinterested parties. This was certainly true but R.A.A.C.
(Frodsham’s acronym, soon popular currency) was both powerful and
constitutionally irresponsible, so it was very difficult to appeal against its
decisions.

Thus within its first year of operations Murdoch saddled itself with a
fragmented and piecemeal administrative partly giving lip service to the
participatory ethos, partly enabling the Vice-Chancellor to take ad hoc
advice from whatever source suited the needs of the moment, and in few
respects affording a clear allocation of responsibility enabling decisions at
any level to be taken confidently and conclusively. The buck stopped
nowhere. The professional schools which could draw on external codes of
standards were least affected by these inadequacies, but many students were
understandably confused and came to believe that the success or failure of
Murdoch depended on staying participatory. This view found a voice in the
student newspaper Metior (a name formed from the acronym Murdoch
Empire Telegraph and Indian Ocean Review. Like so much in that turbulent
first year it indefinably lacked class). As early as July 1975, Metior was
editorialising with heavy sarcasm about the decay of Murdoch’s youthful
idealism, largely because it was already evident that student demands for a
stronger voice in University government would not be met.

The Planning Board had insisted that the Act establishing Murdoch
University should entrench provision for a Guild of Students. This was a
deliberate attempt to discourage either government intervention on the one
hand or a takeover by Maoist mass meetings as had occurred to the weak
Student Representative Council at Monash. The first generation of Murdoch
students considered a Guild too bureaucratic. They strongly preferred some
form of community government, which included academic and
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administrative staff, and which, as well as ministering to student clubs and
societies and managing on-campus facilities (all traditional Guild functions)
should have a voice in assessment, work loads, course content, staff
selection, admissions procedures, and similar academic matters. On 11 June,
1975, a well-attended forum resolved that two-thirds of the Senate should be
members of the Murdoch community, at least one-third being students, and
that students should make up at least one-third of Academic Council.
Predictably the request got nowhere.

Such demands were not at all what Griew and the Contacio meeting meant
by the Murdoch ethos, but with the dismal precedents of unrest at Monash
and Flinders before them the senior echelons were unwilling to provoke
campus unrest by negative confrontation. Murdoch lacked a trusted and
effective system of decision-making: neither open consultation resulting in
accepted agreements nor a unified Praetorian Guard of seniors secure in the
exercise of their responsibilities. Griew’s earlier emphasis on consensus was
giving way to a tendency to play his cards close to the vest. Neither the
Chancellor nor the Secretary was enabled to make the contribution
appropriate to their positions. The Secretary’s position was in fact
diminished by the creation of the co-equal post of Business Manager,
overseeing all financial, building, and personnel matters. The appointee, Ray
Campbell, a tall, shrewd, totally unflappable executive, gave excellent
service. But more was required beyond administrative adjustments and in
any case Griew’s style of leadership, so effective in small groups, was
coping less happily with the problems of a functioning university.

This was more the pity because Murdoch was making a substantial
achievement in teaching, research, and the fulfilment of its original academic
aims. The quality of pastoral care between teachers and students drew
something from relatively small numbers but more from a sense of shared
involvement in a pioneering enterprise where the contributions of each
individual counted. But a malaise persisted. Faced with tightening finances,
with rising demands from students and junior staff whose expectations had
been kindled by the university’s own rhetoric, and with a cool public
reaction to its early self-promotion, Murdoch began to look to the difficult
compromises which would make for survival and prosperity in the days
ahead.

Survival

Late in 1975 Henry Schoenheimer, a Monash University educationist of high

ideals, visited Murdoch and wrote up his impressions for the National Times
under the headline: ‘Head for the West for liberated learning before it ís too
late’. Claiming that too many Australian universities gave research priority
over teaching, he praised Murdoch for its student-centred approach and
readiness to experiment. He admired such courses as Great Ideas (a survey
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course of the world’s seminal thinkers), women’s studies, and the trunk
courses; and he was especially impressed with the device of independent
study contracts under which a student could study a subject not in the regular
curriculum provided he or she could find a suitably-qualified supervisor able
and willing to act as a resource person to give guidance and assessment. He
also noted with approval the flexibility of structure, which enabled more
than 30 per cent of students to change their originally-planned courses
during first year, though he may not have appreciated the administrative
burden. But, he wondered:

…how long will it be before the present cross-campus

enthusiasm declines? It is a common phenomenon in
conceptually new and exciting institutions, particularly when
they are small. How long before the arteries harden, the
routine settles down, the machine men take over? How long
before the infighting and backbiting and empire building
that characterises tertiary institutions becomes endemic?

Foremost among ‘the machine men’ for many of Murdoch’s disappointed

idealists would have been the Deputy-Vice Chancellor, Arthur Beacham,
who had been Vice-Chancellor of Otago when Griew was there and owed
his Murdoch appointment largely to Griew. A stocky, combative Welshman
with a distinguished career in economics, Beacham at sixty-one came with
his wife from Liverpool to Perth in 1975 when the Turkish invasion of
Cyprus put paid to his original plans of retirement to a warm climate. His
provocatively common-sense manner drove some to assert that Beacham
was brought in to steer Murdoch away from its brave innovations into
conformist orthodoxy. In reality, he was a shrewd old professional who
relished the challenge of ensuring Murdoch’s survival in adverse times.

Although cutbacks in funding were foreshadowed during the last months of

the Whitlam government, they were associated by many with the coming to
power of Malcolm Fraser’s Liberal-National Country Party administration at
the end of 1975. It gave rise to a certain amount of public and private
acrimony when many Murdoch academics protested against the manner of
Whitlam’s dismissal. Although Murdoch staff were no more vocal than
many other academics, the controversy fuelled the fears of those who
expected that Murdoch would be punished for its educational radicalism.
Despite often-repeated allegations, it cannot be too strongly stressed that
there is no evidence of government pressure against any aspect of
Murdoch’s teaching. On the other hand, if cuts were looming in the tertiary
sector on financial grounds, new universities such as Murdoch and Griffith
were particularly vulnerable because they were so recently established. Once
this possibility was hinted at schools were understandably shy of advising
their students to enrol at Murdoch and private sources were reluctant to
extend financial credit.
70
Beacham knew that among educational policy-makers in Canberra the future
of Murdoch was an open question. He would not excite more consternation
by publicising this factor but it was seldom absent from his mind as he
sought to chivvy staff and students into more businesslike habits. Having
launched twenty programmes in the expectation that staffing would grow
quickly, Murdoch found that with financial constraints there were simply not
enough academics to service all the initiatives, which had been started. As
early as December 1975, it was reported that three courses were in risk of
cancellation because of lack of funds and, although this was only the first of
a series of inconvenient press speculations about Murdoch’s future, it was
clear that a number of bright ideas would drop by the wayside in 1976.

The Human Development programme was superseded in 1976 by a

professionally oriented set of courses in psychology, with R.D. Savage as
professor. At John Raser’s request he was relieved of the responsibility for a
programme in Peace and Conflict Studies, and in its place there was a more
broadly based programme in Social and Political Theory in which peace and
conflict studies could be one component. To some extent this marked a
move away from Raser’s open-ended Californian teaching methods in
favour of a coalition of liberals, conservatives, and Marxists who preferred
approaches to scholarship more compatible with Australian practice, but it
had been clear for months that the spectrum of social sciences could not be
accommodated sensibly under the ‘peace and conflict studies’ umbrella. It
was not, as has been alleged, a case of ‘the University administration losing
its nerve’.

Communication Studies caused most furore. Despite its popularity in terms

of student enrolment the programme lacked direction, largely because it was
impossible to secure agreement on the qualities sought in senior staff and the
task of designing and presenting an academically sound programme proved
beyond the capacity of the junior staff first recruited. Faced with the call for
retrenchment, and encouraged by Griew, the Board of Part II Studies
recommended closure of the programme. After a large meeting of protest by
students early in June 1976, the media reported erroneously that Murdoch
was in such financial trouble that at least five major study programmes
would have to close down and the students currently enrolled in
Communication Studies would not receive valid degrees. This nonsense was
of course no help to morale, but Academic Council accepted that in 1977 no
new students should be allowed to nominate Communication Studies as a
Part II major and set up a committee to review the future of the subject.

In December, 1976, this committee reported to Academic Council that

Communication Studies should be retained as a full undergraduate
programme ‘but with a radically-changed direction and orientation so that its
thrust should be principally social science oriented and its objective
70
substantially more theoretical than at present’. So Communication Studies
survived, but the fuss over its future fed the disillusion of those such as the
editor of Metior who, at the beginning of 1977, described Murdoch as ëA
University in which those in power have almost destroyed the ideals, where
most of the staff are either scared, disappointed, or not concerned about the
original ideals, and where the only hope lies with the students and a few
staff.

This was unfair comment, and in fact the myth of the Murdoch ethos
betrayed probably inhibited the students from addressing themselves
vigorously to the task of forming a Guild. It was not that student activity on
campus lacked liveliness, at least during daylight hours. Within the first year
numerous clubs and societies were formed, and although sporting activities
were limited by paucity of numbers at least a start was made in September,
1976, when the Murdoch club brought home the University’s first trophy,
the Perth Friendly Soccer Association Cup. But the notion persisted that a
Guild structure must lead to all the evils of paperwork and bureaucracy, and
leading students continued to yearn for a complex system of direct
democracy based on open meetings.

Eventually, in September 1976, legislation setting up a Guild of Students

was submitted to the State government, whose ministers as it happened were
at that time contemplating measures to reduce the authority of student guilds
which they saw as imposing a form of compulsory unionism. Once this was
understood the students were galvanised into action. On 20 October 1976,
five hundred students resolved to set up a caretaker guild re-dedicated
‘towards the original innovative goals on which the University was
founded’. But the sequel was disappointing. The core group charged with
drafting regulations over the summer failed to achieve much. Even the
decision to impose parking fees from the start of 1977, an issue which
generated large quantities of vocal indignation, failed to materialise into a
crisis. When in March 1977, the State government at last approved the
Murdoch Guild legislation a secretariat was elected with Mark Ames, a
veteran American student spokesman, as president. Within six months he
and all but three of the members were foreshadowing resignation in a mood
of frustration. It had been too hopeful to imagine that the majority of
students had the stamina or interest for attending community meetings. Of
course the administration was blamed, but in a period of slow growth and
rising unemployment the conditions were no longer favourable for student
activism.

The staff also faced change. As early as October 1975, Griew appointed
Beacham to chair a committee of review on academic decision-making
processes. This committee was serviced by the Deputy-Secretary
(Academic) Bob Tapsell, whose previous experience with the University of
Essex led him to suggest that interdisciplinary experiments should be limited
70
to a comparatively-small proportion of Murdoch’s resources. ‘Agreed - with
nobs on!’ Beacham minuted; and the Beacham Committee duly
recommended stronger links between the responsibility for resource
allocation and responsibility for adopting academic proposals. Some reforms
accordingly followed during 1976 and 1977, none of them without
encountering opposition. The Board of Part II Studies was abolished and its
functions distributed between Academic Council and the School Boards.
Following a basic decision taken in 1974 Media Services and Learning
Skills were brought under the umbrella of E.S.T.R. Unfortunately, the
opportunity was missed of bring R.A.A.C. or the Committee of Deans more
formally into the consultative process.

Beacham struck more controversy through his view that ‘there seems to be
widespread belief that our standards are not as high as they should be. This
may or may not be true but such views are difficult to contest’. His idea of
appointing external examiners, although not without Australian precedent,
ran into too much resistance to be tried, but some changes were made.
Whereas Part I subjects were graded simply as ‘pass’ or ‘fail’, Part II
assessment from its beginning in 1976 was graded with the proviso that
students could opt for pass/fail if they preferred. While some saw this as a
move towards encouraging self-seeking competitiveness among students the
plain fact was that Murdoch graduates would be applying for jobs and
national awards in a community where grades were used as a convenient
guide to student quality so that it would have been unjust to handicap their
chances. The great majority of students chose grading and in 1979 it was
extended to Part I, still with the escape clause that those who disliked the
practice could be exempted on giving notice of this when they enrolled in a
course.

Intellectually Murdoch was thriving. External Studies courses were

developed at a remarkable rate. In 1975 only six were offered. The number
grew to forty-seven in 1977 and doubled to ninety-four in 1980. During the
same period the number of fully-external students grew from 110 in 1975 to
488 in 1977 and 800 in 1980; the numbers could have been enlarged by
thirty per cent if those studying in a mixed internal/external mode were
added. External students from the University of Western Australia were
integrated into the Murdoch system. Between 1975 and 1978 three education
officers were appointed to collaborate with academic staff on the design of
course materials. All this called for great effort on the part of those
concerned, and work of high quality was produced with comparatively little
recognition. Murdoch’s External Studies sector showed a high order of
professionalism and drive. Tertiary education came to many who had never
previously enjoyed the opportunity, and Murdoch was the instrument of this
achievement.

Another way in which Murdoch took a fresh path was in the establishment
70
of a unit concerned with promoting and improving the quality of teaching
and learning in the university. The Educational Services and Teaching
Resources Unit (E.S.T.R.) was established in 1975 with Rod McDonald at
its head, Irma Whitford in charge of media services, and Lorraine Marshall
with learning skills. Murdoch was one of the first universities to set up such
a unit. Its staff were soon heavily involved in the evaluation of teaching,
courses, and programmes in every School. Their research covered not only
advice on teaching techniques but also more general aspects of staff
development such as committee work, time management, and use of the
news media. Among student services particular attention was given to
numeracy skills and to the needs of students whose first language was not
English. Media services provided all Murdoch’s photographic, graphics, and
technical needs as well as the audio material required for External Studies - a
demand which eventually ran at 30,000 cassettes per year.

Many innovatory courses succeeded. For example in 1976 Murdoch

introduced the first full course in women’s studies in Western Australia (and
one of the first in Australia) under a tutor in Social Inquiry, Frances
Rowland. Consisting of an introductory Part I course ‘Woman in society’
and a Part II course ‘Sex, psyche and class’, women’s studies deliberately
refrained from establishing a separate programme in an effort to provide an
integrated interdisciplinary approach. Despite some opposition the
interdisciplinary team included a male tutor and about twenty per cent of the
students were male. The Library built up a specialist interest in women’s
studies, acquiring the Pankhurst collection in 1978, a considerable amount of
material from the veteran Perth feminist Irene Greenwood, and also the
Gerritsen and Women in History Collections. Similarly the interdisciplinary
programme in Population and World Resources brought together a
committed team of environmental, physical, and social scientists. In a
number of single-discipline subjects such as physics, literature, and history
innovative teaching methods were pioneered at Murdoch and later imitated
elsewhere.

Not that Murdoch’s achievements were confined to the undergraduate level.

Its research effort in many fields was gauged by success in winning from the
Australian Research Grants Scheme and elsewhere a higher amount of
support in relation to staff numbers than most other Australian universities.
As early as 1975 the biologists Mike Dilworth, Jenny McComb, and Jan
Elliot reported an important breakthrough about nitrogen fixation in the root
systems of legumes. Also in Environmental and Life Sciences Marilyn
Renfree embarked on an impressive career of research on marsupial
reproduction, gaining substantial grants from a number of sources and
concluding in 1980 when she became the first woman ever to receive the
Gottschalk Medal awarded by the Australian Academy of Science for the
most outstanding young scientist in the medical and biological fields. The
Veterinary School was also early into research, gaining support from the turf
70
and farming organisations as well as official grant-giving bodies. In Social
Inquiry Jim Macbeth and Dave Hitchins were commissioned in 1976 to
undertake a pioneering survey of information needs and provisions in
Region 12, the consortium of local authorities surrounding Murdoch.

Masters’ degrees by coursework were initiated in 1977 by the School of

Education and followed in 1978 in applied psychology and environmental
science. Education also set up an Institute for Social Programme Evaluation
in 1977 and an Institute for Environmental Science soon followed. Perhaps
the greatest community impact was made by Jim Parker’s Mineral
Chemistry Research Unit which won strong support from the State
government and which contributed a number of important improvements to
the technology of Western. Australia’s major export industries. Concurrently
with these research efforts Murdoch continued to expand its postgraduate
sector despite some rather discouraging noises from the A.U.C. Beacham
and R.A.A.C. made a practice of allocating considerable resources to
postgraduate work in the belief that Murdoch’s standing and capacity to
attract outside support would be enhanced. This policy paid off handsomely
and the postgraduate students were a rewarding element in Murdoch’s early
years.

One of the surest ways of securing the future for Murdoch was to invest so
substantially in buildings and plant that the University’s closure would be
seen as a waste of resources. In April, 1976, Griew commissioned the firm
of Liewellyn Davies Kinhill Pty. Ltd. to advise on campus planning,
particularly the location of buildings, roads, and services. Their report
simply confirmed the earlier work of Stephenson and Ferguson in proposing
a series of custom-built blocks linked by garden courtyards. Even before the
survey was commissioned Murdoch had gained the A.U.C.’s permission to
build a second West Academic block, and after some modifications to
reduce the expense funds came through. There was a valuable spinoff from
this building. Ever since Murdoch opened to students a child-care centre had
been one of the highest priorities for a university with so many mature
students. The various contractors engaged on the West Academic 2 project
combined to present the University with a full day-care centre, so that from
1979 it was considerably easier for married women and single parents to
attend classes. The arrangements were the responsibility of Ray Campbell
whose careful husbanding of Murdoch’s resources and investments,
although little publicised, enabled a number of hopeful schemes to come to
fruition in those years.

Enterprise took various forms. The School of Veterinary Studies, learning

that the old police stables at Herdsman Lake were in danger of demolition,
put in a bid to have these buildings dismantled and reassembled on the
Murdoch campus for their historic interest, and this was accordingly done in
May-June, 1976. During the early months of 1977 a large party of students
70
and staff devoted themselves to digging out an amphitheatre on the western
side of the campus, which could be used for open-air performances. At the
end of November it was used for the first time for a staging of Toad of Toad
Hall. Meanwhile in March 1977, Alcoa announced a gift often thousand
trees to be planted on the Murdoch campus. Other donors with faith in
Murdoch’s future included the Perth Building Society who endowed a
research fellowship in finance and Sir Frank Ledger’s family trust who made
up a grant for the purpose of creating a loan fund for needy students. All
these were promising portents.

Yet the future was still cloudy. This impression was deepened and partly
created by the grizzling of some of Murdoch’s own staff and students, who
were so engrossed in lamenting lost ideals that they did not give nearly
enough publicity to the University’s not unimpressive record of
achievement. Objectively, however, times were harder. The Fraser ministry
suspended the triennial funding of universities. From May 1976, rumours
abounded that fees for tertiary education would be reintroduced, perhaps
coupled with a scheme for student loans. Both were likely to discourage
enrolments at Murdoch. In September 1976, P.P. McGuiness, writing in the
Australian Financial Review, nominated Murdoch among a number of minor
universities which could be closed down and their staff redeployed.

Throughout 1977 Murdoch students shared in protests against changes in

educational policy. On the weekend of 9-10 July when the Liberal Party held
its annual conference at Murdoch the Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, and
the State Premier, Sir Charles Court, were confronted at their arrival by
forceful heckling by a large crowd including a proportion of Murdoch staff
and students. The press carried reports of ‘ugly clashes’. Given the
embattled mood of many on campus it was easy to doubt the continuance of
government support. The cutbacks would have a perceptible influence on
Murdoch’s rate of growth. An energetic and capable schools liaison officer
was appointed in 1976, but Rob Osborn was starting behind scratch in the
endeavour to promote Murdoch. By 1977 Murdoch’s enrolments had grown
to 1900, of whom 935 were full-time including the bulk of school-leavers.
During the next three years the number of full-time students would drop to
867 in 1980, and although an influx of external and part-time enrolments
would boost the total to 2440 it was still a problem to attract the seventeen-
year-olds.

In these circumstances Stephen Griew announced his resignation in July

1977. He was moving to the University of Toronto to become head of the
psychology section in its faculty of medicine, and would later be president of
a university devoted to external tuition, Athabasca. If his original dreams for
Murdoch fell short of fulfilment he could still see much to repay the efforts
of the past five years and could reflect that if Murdoch had not begun by
aiming high it might not have achieved the many innovations which
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survived. The Senate confirmed Arthur Beacham as Deputy-Vice-Chancellor
until the end of 1979 with the intention that he should be in charge of
Murdoch until a successor to Griew was carefully chosen. But who would
throw in his fortunes with a university whose future was still obscure?

Some comfort could be derived from the federal government’s decision to

restore triennial funding of universities as from 1978, while at the same time
the old A.U.C. was remodelled as the Universities Council, one of the three
agencies of a new Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission (C.T.E.
C.). The Council’s visit in May 1978 was a somewhat tense experience for
Murdoch staff because it was known that the real growth rate for Australian
universities was to be reduced by one-third. Beacham found it necessary to
issue a press statement to the effect that there was no foundation for
believing Murdoch to be under threat. After searching scrutiny the Council’s
strictures went no further than a recommendation that Murdoch should look
critically at its courses and programmes, as they were rather numerous for a
small university. Accordingly, the acting-Vice-Chancellor and deans
resolved that, except in Veterinary Studies, there should be no expansion and
that a new course could be mounted only by discarding one of equal weight
in credit points.

This caused only muted grumbling because many were aware of another
potential source of critical comment. In October 1976, the Federal
Department of Education had appointed a strong committee under the Vice-
Chancellor of the University of Sydney (Sir) Bruce Williams to conduct a
major inquiry into education and teaching. The Williams Committee visited
Murdoch in July 1977. As 1978 wore on without any word of its findings
speculation arose that changes might be contemplated which would affect
Murdoch’s future.

Perhaps this delay was beneficial. During this period the first Murdoch
graduates were completing their degrees and finding that they could compete
as successfully on the job market as the products of U.W.A. and W.A.I.T.
Some who came to Murdoch with partially-completed degrees were given
their bachelors’ hoods at a conferring in June, 1977, and the first award of
completely Murdoch-grown degrees took place in the Perth Concert Hall on
5 April, 1978. Before a crowded audience the Chancellor conferred three
PhDs, two MPhils, seventy-three BAs, sixty BScs, forty-five education
qualifications, and one Diploma of Mineral Science. Five students were
awarded certificates of honour and the address was given by the former
Governor-General, Sir Paul Hasluck. It was at this ceremony that the custom
originated of including an interlude by Murdoch’s own choir, but it was not
until 1980 that the choir introduced its most popular innovation, a cantata
based on the wording of the Murdoch parking regulations.

The graduation ceremony was the best possible advertisement for Murdoch’s
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continued viability. Another hit was scored at the end of the year when a
Murdoch graduate, Wendy Carlin, became the University’s first Rhodes
Scholar and the second Western Australian woman to win this distinction.
Meanwhile in September the second vice-chancellor’s name was announced.
He was F.M.G. (Glenn) Willson, a fifty-three-year-old British political
scientist with professorial experience at the University of Rhodesia and
professorial and senior executive experience at Santa Cruz in California.
More recently he had served as head of Goldsmiths College in London and
for three years as Principal of the University of London. Willson had no
previous Australian experience except that his name was under serious
consideration when Murdoch was seeking its first vice-chancellor, but his
seven years at Santa Cruz had acquainted him with the problems and
opportunities of innovative new universities. With a style, which combined
British phlegm and British polish, he was a solidly defensive strategist. It
turned out that this was what the times demanded at Murdoch.

When Willson arrived at the end of 1978 he ‘had a notion of everyone sitting
on the edge of their chairs’. It surprised him that Perth people saw Murdoch
as uniquely wayout and radical, ‘but’, he said, ‘the plain brutal truth, and one
perhaps not altogether welcome to some people, is that it’s nothing of the
kind’. He had been hardly three months in office when the report of the
Williams’ Committee arrived - all three volumes and 1800 pages of it. One
sentence was electrifying: ‘We have come to the conclusion that Murdoch
University does not have a promising future as an independent institution’.
Its student numbers would always to be too small for viability, and its
functions should be integrated with those of the University of Western
Australia.

Clearly, the Williams Committee did not intend the complete elimination of
Murdoch. What its members had in mind was some kind of federal solution,
marrying the decision-making processes of the two universities so that
unnecessary duplication could be avoided and small units amalgamated. This
medicine, however, was far too strong for a small campus many of whose
members were already shaken in confidence, and reactions were traumatic.
Patrick Guiton, isolated in the Pilbara where he was about to meet a group of
external students, heard a truncated report on the radio and wondered how he
should face the students. Assistant Secretary, Richard MacWilliam,
telephoning his office from outside the campus, was confronted by a
secretary dissolving into tears because she believed the University would be
shut. Once again the tradesmen began to harry the administration for their
cheques.

Promptly to the rescue came the State Premier, Sir Charles Court. It was
ironic that the politician who received such a stormy heckling on his
previous visit to campus should now figure as Murdoch’s saviour, but the
opportunity was tailormade for him. On 23 March 1979, the day following
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the publication of the Williams Report, he presided over the formal opening
of the Veterinary School. ‘The State government would not have a bar of
any amalgamation or merger of Murdoch University with the University of
Western Australia’, he told his hearers. ‘We have fought hard to get
Murdoch University. We will fight just as hard to maintain it… We realise
that Murdoch will have its problems but institutions become great because of
the way they are able to surmount adversity. I am convinced that Murdoch
University will do this.’

He was supported editorially by The West Australian: ‘ . . . the major reason

for preservation with Murdoch is to ensure that West Australians have the
choice of a less formal institution than Crawley.’ The vice-president of the
Australian Union of Students weighed in with a forecast that Murdoch
‘would be overrun by sheep if it merged with the University of Western
Australia’ and Willson told a meeting of five hundred students that he saw
Murdoch continuing indefinitely as a university. The merger was a non-
starter.

Cynics have suggested that in Western Australia’s 150th anniversary year it

would have been damaging for the Court government to admit that the State
could not sustain two universities. Like many Western Australians Court
must have remembered that when the University of Western Australia of the
late l940s had no more students than modern Murdoch it had produced
students of the calibre of Bob Hawke, John Stone, Randolph Stow, and
Ralph Slatyer and there was no reason to suppose that Murdoch could not
become the alma mater of equally-distinguished graduates. Besides, the
Williams Committee took its evidence from the disheartened Murdoch of
mid-1977; by 1979 the signs of recovery were readily discernible for those
with eyes to see. In a happy stroke of timing Jim Parker received early in
April, 1979, a fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science for his
research in mineral extraction, ion solvation and reaction mechanisms. He
commented pointedly that ‘it was good that some people in Canberra
recognised one of the many worthwhile activities at Murdoch University’.

The State government followed up its strong stand by appointing a three-

man committee under the chairmanship of Michael Birt, then Vice-
Chancellor of the University of Wollongong, with instructions to
recommend means of securing the future of Murdoch as a separate
institution. In the Queen’s birthday honours Bayliss, as founding chairman of
the Murdoch Planning Board, was advanced to a knighthood and Philip
Adams, the vice-chairman, was also honoured - surely a significant
coincidence. Gradually confidence returned to Murdoch. The bogey of
abolition had been confronted and overcome.

By the time Arthur Beacham took, what he called, his retirement at the end
of 1979 - in fact he was devoting himself to the preparation of a national
70
academic superannuation scheme to which Murdoch is now a party - he
could be sure that Murdoch was steering into quieter waters. He was
replaced as Deputy-Vice Chancellor on a halftime basis by Alex Kerr, the
Foundation Professor of Economics. At the same time Mr Justice Wickham
resigned as Chancellor, having served two terms. He was succeeded by
another humane and thoughtful jurist, Sir Ronald Wilson of the High Court
of Australia. Another of the founding fathers to depart in this year was Bob
Dunlop who returned to North America. He was succeeded by Mal Nairn,
who with John Howell, Ray Wales, Bill Clark, and Ralph Swan comprised a
professorial team who were firmly consolidating the reputation of the School
of Veterinary Studies.

In November, 1979, the Birt Committee tabled its report. It was a document
designed for reassurance. Most of its recommendations gathered up ideas,
which had been floated around Murdoch during the last year or two.
Murdoch was advised to limit its undergraduate load in 1982-84 to the same
level as 1981 but to increase its postgraduate intake to 18 or 19 per cent of
the student total. Working parties should investigate the feasibility of
forming institutes for teaching and research in energy science, mineral
science, and marine studies. External studies should be developed further.
More courses should be provided in Asian languages and cultural studies.
Education was a promising growth area. Pre-service teacher education
courses should be increased, perhaps including an eighteen-month primary
teaching programme for graduates. And Murdoch was exhorted to launch no
major activities unless it was certain that they could be adequately funded
and attract enough students. This advice sounded wryly to those who
remembered that in early years the most contentious of Murdoch’s
programmes were often those, which attracted all too many students.

The most controversial issue arising from the Birt report came when the
State government set up an inquiry into the possibility of removing pre-
school teacher education and control of the Muresk Agricultural College
from W.A.I.T. and transferring them to Murdoch. The Muresk idea was
intriguing because from Murdoch’s earliest years there had been those who
argued that the University of Western Australia should give up its Institute
of Agriculture from its cramped quarters at Crawley and allow its transfer to
Murdoch where space was ample and the School of Veterinary Studies
would provide congenial neighbours. To couple such a move with the
acquisition of Muresk would have been rational. As usual institutional
inertia proved too strong and to this day the study of rural sciences continues
to be scattered between Western Australia’s three major tertiary institutions.

Nor did the next five years see many important examples of co-operation or
rationalisation as between Murdoch and its peers. At least the University of
Western Australia liberalised its practices considerably so as to facilitate
transfer of student credits between the two universities. But despite some
70
growth in cordiality between Murdoch, U.W.A. and W.A.I.T. and despite the
existence of a coordinating body in the Western Australian Post Secondary
Education Commission (W.A.P.S.E.C.), which was intended to encourage,
rationalisation Murdoch was given few favours by its bigger neighbours.
Nothing followed, for instance, from the idea that Murdoch should take over
all responsibility in Western Australia for Asian studies or at least for Asian
languages. This meant that Murdoch’s programmes in Chinese Studies and
Southeast Asian Studies encountered difficulties with numbers (and in the
former case with personnel) so that ultimately, after an internal inquiry, the
Asian studies programmes were merged. In this as in many other areas
Murdoch had to plan on the expectation of going it alone.

Quite suddenly any talk of merging Murdoch with its neighbours seemed a
dead issue. Controversies still rippled the University but they ceased to blow
up into headline news. For instance, in mid-1979 the old issue of
Communication Studies surfaced once more as the administration, reacting
to the lack of progress in defining the programme’s direction, proposed
afresh that students should not be enrolled in it at Part II level in the
following year. Strong protest ensued but on this occasion there was no
public controversy before the issue was resolved by deciding to make one
more attempt to fill the chair.

Again, some discontent was felt when the Vice-Chancellor, acting in

response to a directive from Canberra, halved the entitlement of academic
staff to study leave (rechristened in deference to political sensitivities as
‘outside studies programmes’). One lecturer petitioned the State Governor,
Sir Wallace Kyle, in his capacity as Visitor to Murdoch University, to set
aside the administration’s decision. Kyle, finding no suggestion that the
Vice-Chancellor had acted in any way improperly or beyond his powers,
disallowed the appeal in March 1980. The dispute was settled without
massive repercussions.

Increasingly Murdoch looked a place where the students enjoyed campus

life. As early as September 1978, the Guild of Students ran a highly
successful spring fair. The same year saw the first running of the Great Race,
now an annual event, at which teams of fantastically-dressed competitors
bent the rules mercilessly in attempting to become the fastest team
propelling a one-wheeled vehicle to complete an obstacle course around
Bush Court. While numbers still told against Murdoch’s chances of
exhibiting great prowess in more conventional forms of sport the University
could field a cricket team, which by 1982-83 could become champions of
the Suburban League in two successive years.

In alternate years Murdoch held an ‘open day’ at which the general public
was encouraged to visit the campus and watch staff and students present
samples of Murdoch’s academic and extracurricular activities. The ‘open
70
days’ in 1982 and 1984, held on a Sunday, were especially well patronised
(each attracting more than 20,000 people), showing that Murdoch had at last
learned something about good publicity. Activities ranged from computer
games to the flying of Chinese kites. The veterinary farm and its animals
were always a great draw but the other Schools, centred on Bush Court, also
contrived to attract large numbers. Murdoch also put on displays at the
Royal Show, twice in an exhibition of collaborative research with the
University of Western Australia, which was a heartening testimony to
improving relations between the campuses.
I
n the Annual Report for 1980 Wilison described the year as ‘essentially one
of internal consolidation and of determined effort to ensure that the
University was better known to school-leavers, other prospective students,
and also to members of the general public’. This effort paid off at the
beginning of 1981 when after four fairly static years numbers surged
forward. Enrolment of new students increased by 18 per cent over 1980, and
of school leavers by nearly 12 per cent. For the first time external enrolments
topped one thousand. The recently introduced practice of mid-year
enrolments proved useful in boosting numbers. Perhaps the imminent
completion of the South-street extension to the Kwinana Freeway also
helped by bringing Murdoch within fifteen minutes drive of the city centre.
The lean years were over and Murdoch was again on the move.

The academic establishment began to grow modestly. A professor of

Communication Studies was at last found in Michael O’Toole who arrived
in 1981. A senior appointment was made in Chinese Studies and a
programme initiated in Contemporary Asian Studies. In 1981 Alex Kerr
became full-time Deputy-Vice-Chancellor following the departure of the
Business Manager Ray Campbell. The Deputy Secretary (Academic) Bob
Tapsell also left about this time. Meanwhile, in mid-1980, Peter Sumner was
appointed Director of Computer Services. Murdoch in its early years had
taken timely steps towards computerisation but with the prospect of renewed
growth upgrading was needed. By the early I 980s the demand for research
computing was increasing at 40 per cent annually and computer-related
teaching by about 15 per cent. In 1982, not without a little controversy
among the experts, a $600,000 programme of modernisation was
commenced.

Research prospered. Admittedly the Mineral Chemistry Research Unit

suffered setbacks. Having won steady support from the State government the
Unit applied for consideration when in 1981 the Fraser government decided
to fund a number of centres for excellence in Australian universities.
Unfortunately, although the Unit made the short list of about twenty from
among three hundred applications, Murdoch was not selected. The awarding
committee decided to place the centres only in large universities. This
disappointment was followed in 1982 by the sudden and unexpected death of
70
Jim Parker. With characteristic efficiency he had built up a team, which
could carry on the work, but he was sorely missed.

Among many other research projects Andrew Thompson’s work on hydatid

disease was singled out in 1982 when the World Health Organisation
nominated Murdoch’s School of Veterinary Studies as a collaborating centre
for research on this problem. In the same year Alcoa and the Metropolitan
Water Authority awarded the environmental scientist Goen Ho $250,000 for
a three-year project on the control and use of the red mud left over as a by-
product from alumina production. In 1983 the Griffin colliery company
made a grant of $80,000 for energy policy research and an anonymous donor
funded a postgraduate scholarship for research in the relationships between
animals and humans. Murdoch academics’ research activity detracted
nothing from their steady commitment to teaching.

Students, too, achieved distinguished awards. Zoe Sofoulis was named

Caltex Woman Graduate of the Year in 1979, a distinction matched by Gail
Reekie in 1983 and Robyn Slarke in 1984; all three chose to undertake
advanced study overseas. In 1980 Sean Foley became the first Australian to
win an Italian government scholarship to attend the International School on
Solar Energy Resources at Urbino, a biology student, Rosemary Gales, was
awarded a Queen Elizabeth Silver Jubilee Trust scholarship to study wildlife
management in New Zealand, and physics student Graeme Cole won a
Harvard University postgraduate scholarship. Several other graduates also
won awards for postgraduate work in the United States, among them a
Murdoch PhD and tutor Rob Pascoe who took the Harkness Fellowship for
1981. Perhaps one of Murdoch’s most characteristic moments came at the
1980 graduation ceremony when a granddaughter and grandmother, Heather
Marr and Beverley Wardle, received their degrees together. Less happily,
Murdoch found itself awarding a posthumous PhD to Peter Marks, who in
December 1979 after completing a thesis in environmental science collapsed
and died while out running. The award was presented to his widow.

In reaching out to the public Murdoch became the venue for a number of
series of public lectures. Following the precedent set in the opening year the
Walter Murdoch Memorial Lecture was delivered annually on a date close to
Sir Walter’s birthday. Its eminent speakers came from varying backgrounds
and gave performances of varying quality. Most were good; one or two such
as Mr Justice Michael Kirby in 1984 were excellent. The most contentious
was probably the 1980 speaker, Sir Roderick Carnegie, whose presence
attracted a large crowd eager to heckle and question a leading executive of
the mining industry on the subject of Aboriginal land rights; but few even
among his critics could deny that Carnegie handled himself well under
pressure, and a tense situation stayed within bounds.

Controversy was actively encouraged in the Counterpoint debates on topics

70
of lively contemporary interest, first introduced as a contribution to the
State’s 150th anniversary celebrations in 1979 and retained because of their
continuing popularity. These took place two or three times a year, usually
when the presence of an attractive visiting speaker provided an opportunity.
From 1983 an annual lecture was also offered on a theme related to
community science. This was a memorial to Keith Roby, another of the early
appointments to the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences and a
colleague of rare, attractive character, who after a long illness died at too
early an age.

Building resumed. In 1981 the first major indoor recreational facilities on

campus were completed, four squash courts. Consistent with Murdoch
practice they were open to the public at large. Proceeding to bigger things,
Murdoch also saw in 1981 the completion of a two-storey annexe to the
main Bush Court complex housing the Senate room and smaller committee
rooms as well as chambers leased by the Murdoch University branch of the
Rural and Industries Bank. The University of Western Australia presented
the Senate room with a handsome table, thus further symbolising their
goodwill. The next project, in Senate’s view by far the most pressing, was
the provision of campus student housing. Murdoch was the only Australian
university lacking residential accommodation, and its suburban situation
offered little in the way of cheap lodgings. The task was daunting, as federal
funds had never been granted for such a purpose since the early 1970s and
Murdoch was left in little doubt that despite its needs no exception would be
made.

Self help remained. Sketch plans were drawn up in 1980 for three apartment
blocks each capable of housing thirty-two undergraduates. In addition a
group of cottages would provide for married students or visiting staff and
plans were also made for a function hail and related amenities. At this point
the Rural and Industries Bank came to the assistance by offering a generous
loan. The plunge was taken and Murdoch embarked on the building of the
first two-storey apartment block on the basis of its own reserves, the loan,
and the response to a fund-raising programme chaired by Sir Crawford
Nalder. The decision paid off. Not only was Student House ready for
opening by July, 1983, but the C.T.E.C. was sufficiently melted by this
example of enterprise to find a grant of $350,000 which enabled an
immediate start to be made on the second stage of the project, though the
University had to finance another large loan to supplement the
Government’s grant. It was probably Willson’s proudest achievement at
Murdoch. Further extensions to the student housing were on the drawing
board in 1985.

70
Gradually the campus was beautified. As the trees grew the landscape
softened, and birds, which had grown scarce in the suburban sprawl of Perth,
began to nest in what was becoming something of a wildlife sanctuary. The
courtyards were improved. A garden carefully integrated with rocks and
stones was created in the East Academic 1 courtyard and named Bayliss
Court in 1979 in honour of the man whom many regarded as the ‘father’ of
Murdoch University. On the other side of the main campus block a Chinese
garden with a moon gate came into being between 1980 and 1983. It owed
much to gifts from the inhabitants of Hsinchu county in Taiwan. Less
conventionally, the University also received a gift for the establishment of a
specialist botanical garden for the study of poisonous plants. The University
also became the recipient of a number of works of art, culminating in 1984
in the indefinite loan of more than a hundred works by Charles Blackman.

Sir Noel Bayliss, Chairman of the Murdoch University Planning

Board and Senate member 1975-1982, in the garden court named in
his honour.
Against this background of consolidation Murdoch planned modestly but
confidently for the future. A Master’s Degree in Literature and
Communication was planned for 1982 and a Graduate Diploma in
Community Science - again perpetuating the ideas of Keith Roby - for 1983.
The Universities Council in 1982 gave the green light for further growth
70
during the 1985-87 triennium and proposals were advanced for the
introduction of Computer Science, Horticultural Science, Philosophy, and
Theatre Studies. The World Veterinary Congress, held in Perth in 1983,
owed much to the organising skills of people in the School of Veterinary
Studies. During the Congress an application for the accreditation of
Murdoch graduates on a worldwide basis was successfully put forward to
representatives of the Royal Veterinary College of London. Diplomas in
Environmental Science and Applicable Mathematics were introduced in
1984 and in 1985 an important step was taken with the foundation of a
programme in Commerce - which was so sought after that immediate limits
had to be imposed on enrolments - and a Master’s Degree in Public Policy.
A strong campaign was proceeding for the introduction of a Law
programme.

At the more innovative edge of Murdoch’s activities was the establishment

in 1985 of a BA degree in Women’s Studies, based on inter-university co-
operation and exchange of external courses between Murdoch, Deakin and
Queensland Universities. From 1982 the School of Human Communication
hosted an Aboriginal writer-in-residence. Research was conducted in
Aboriginal literature and plans were developed for the cross-disciplinary
teaching of Aboriginal Studies based on the existing courses in history and
literature. Chinese Studies set up an exchange scheme with the Guangzhu
Institute of Foreign Languages. A programme in Theology was planned for
1986 in conjunction with the Perth College of Divinity, thus providing a
need, which had been under discussion in Western Australia for at least
twenty years but for which it had never previously been possible to devise a
satisfactory plan. The list could be extended lengthily, but a sample is
enough. Initiative was taking many forms. Although the University had,
early on, established its commitment to equal opportunity, the Senate (in
1984) strengthened that commitment by deciding to appoint an equal
employment opportunity officer in 1985.

Murdoch staff were in demand for positions of public responsibility. Liz

Harman from Social Inquiry, the economist Herb Thompson and the
environmental scientist Peter Newman were all seconded to advise the State
government on policy matters. Barry McGaw, one of the two professors of
education, presided in 1983-84 over a major inquiry into assessment in upper
secondary school and tertiary admissions procedures in W.A. as well as
serving on a second commission on more general educational policy chaired
by Murdoch’s Pro-Chancellor, Kim Beazley senior. Professor Bolton was
seconded for three years to the University of London to launch an Australian
Studies Centre. In 1984 Cora Baldock, of Social Inquiry, became the first
woman academic appointed to the Australian Research Grants Committee,
and Paige Porter, of the School of Education, was appointed to chair the
Council of the W.A. College of Advanced Education.

70
By 1983 Murdoch had broken through the barrier of student numbers. Over
three thousand students were enrolled, the equivalent of over two thousands
full-timers, and in subsequent years the numbers remained healthy. In 1985
the total enrolment was 4200 - with a 19 per cent increase in school-leaver
enrolments over the previous year. Glenn Willson who had presided over
Murdoch as the tide turned in the University’s favour decided that the
moment was right for retirement and arranged to leave at the end of 1984.
The management of the University now passed entirely into Western
Australian hands. Alex Kerr who had been a popular Deputy-Vice-
Chancellor retired at the end of 1983, being replaced by Mal Nairn from
Veterinary Studies. At the beginning of 1985 the Vice-Chancellorship was
taken up by Peter Boyce, formerly Professor of Politics at the Universities of
Queensland and Western Australia. In an inaugural address at a ceremony to
mark the University’s tenth anniversary, Professor Boyce said: ‘I believe
that Murdoch in only ten years has demonstrated that it is capable of
acquiring an enviable reputation. A worthy university is suited to its
environment, and Murdoch, more quickly than most new universities I
suspect, has identified positively with its environment.’

A new phase was beginning. After all the vicissitudes of the previous ten
years Murdoch University was emerging, like its emblem the banksia, all the
more flourishing for having gone through the fire. If many of its activities
complemented those of traditional universities, and if plans for future growth
looked largely to vocational or socially relevant options, this did not mean
that the original Murdoch ethos had been lost entirely. It was still at work as
a leavening influence to ensure that, no matter how distinguished their
research performance, Murdoch academics bore their first responsibility
towards their students; no matter how unorthodox or provocative a new idea
might be it deserved the respect of serious discussion and criticism and must
not be discarded from sheer inertia or prejudice.

Walter Murdoch when they named the university after him demanded that it
should be a good one. It is.

70
 Geoffrey Bolton, one of Australia’s foremost
historians, is uniquely qualified to document the
early years of Murdoch University. He was a
member of the Murdoch University Planning
Board (1970-73), an inaugural member of the
University’s governing body, the Senate (1973-
76) and, in 1973, was appointed Murdoch’s
Foundation Professor of History.

Professor Bolton is general editor of the Oxford

History of Australia and, for the past three years
(to mid-1985), has been on secondment as
inaugural head of the Australian Studies Centre at
the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the
University of London.

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