Convocation has been planting trees on our Crawley Campus for a decade. It's a joint initiative between the Convocation of Graduates and the Guild of Undergraduates, sparked by UWA’s Centenary in 2013. Since then, each Warden and each Guild President has had the honour of planting a tree with golden shovels no less. A special feature of each year’s Convocation Day, it commemorates the first meeting of UWA’s Convocation on 4 March 1913.
Why do we celebrate Convocation Day? UWA’s founding Act of 1911 was passed as a result of lobbying by graduates living in Western Australia who called for a university. Under the Act, all UWA graduates are legally lifelong members of the University. Until it was established, although the government could appoint a Senate, and they a professoriate, students could not be enrolled until sixty of those graduates met together to formally create a Convocation.
UWA, like the five other universities then in existence in Australia, was the inheritor of a model of governance stemming from the ancient British universities. In this model, a university recognises the value of their graduates and provides them with rights: to nominate and vote in elections for the Senate and Council of Convocation, attend General Meetings of the University, review any proposed changes to the University’s statutes, be consulted by the University administration on its future strategy, and discuss and express an opinion on any matter relating to the interests of the University.
Following that first meeting of Convocation in 1913, the interim Government-appointed Senate was dissolved. Convocation then elected 12 of its members, and the Governor appointed six members, to form an 18-person Senate. It was only then that the first students could be enrolled on 26 March 1913 and attend their first lectures just a few days later. Students then got together for the first meeting of the Guild of Undergraduates on 11 April 1913.
Without that first meeting of Convocation, UWA could not have begun operations; teaching its students as the only free university in the nation. A fact worth celebrating!
We’re looking forward to seeing our Convocation Day trees mature into sturdy oaks and magnificent eucalypts, joining our superb landscape for learning that is Crawley Campus. Most spectacular will be Convocation Walk, on the east side of James Oval, when the long row of white jacarandas we’ve planted burst into flower each December.
Often, we pair the Convocation Day tree planting with a special event and, as always, a sundowner. In 2020 we held a re-enactment of the Somerville Auditorium’s first performance in 1945, by talented graduates of UWA’s Conservatorium of Music, pianist Adrian Soares and baritone David Woods. In 2021 guests were privileged to be given a special tour of the new Bilya Marlee building, the award-winning home of UWA’s School of Indigenous Studies. And, in 2022, we teamed up with Friends of the Grounds to celebrate the unveiling of Kate Cullity’s striking metal sculpture ‘Cellular Curios’ in Prescott Court.
This year, we celebrated the 75th anniversary of the first play performed in the Sunken Garden in 1948 — Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. We began with a fascinating address by Dr Lara O’Sullivan from UWA’s Classics and Ancient History that contextualised the play for the audience. Then two gifted young actors, Felix Malcolm and Madelaine Page, directed by Grant Malcolm from the Graduate Dramatic Society, gave us an engrossing re-enactment of a pivotal section of the play.
In UWA memories, the 1948 run of Oedipus Rex is forever linked to the presence of Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, who happened to be in Perth as part of a British Council tour of Australia. The surviving members of the 1948 student cast, Basil Balme (later Professor of Geology at UWA), and Bill Heseltine (later Sir William and Secretary to Queen Elizabeth II) were not able to attend our re-enactment, but our 200 plus guests were surprised and delighted to be able to welcome the Reverend Douglas Brown, who fittingly had played the High Priest in 1948.
Read the full issue of the Winter 2023 edition of Uniview [PDF 2.7Mb]. The Uniview accessible [PDF 2.9Mb] version is also available.