Snapshot 2024

The Choir of Trinity College was awarded ‘Performance of the Year – Notated Composition’ at the 2024 Art Music Awards for their performance of Stabat Mater at St Paul’s Cathedral. 

Soprano soloist chorister Mia Robinson was accompanied by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Benjamin Northey, with Trinity’s music director, Christopher Watson, directing the chorus.

Trinity’s choir also joined forces with that of St Paul’s College, University of Sydney, in July to perform in Sydney and Bowral.

We were pleased to install 12 new Fellows in August: the late Dr John (Jack) Best AO (awarded posthumously), Prof Stephen Cordner AM PSM, Prof Andrew Cuthbertson AO, Andrew Farran, Associate Prof Jane Freemantle OAM, Rose Hiscock, the Revd Jennifer Inglis, Prof Fleur Johns, Prof Tim Lindsey, Ali Moore, the Hon Geoffrey Nettle AC KC, and Siobhan Stagg. The College is limited to having 30 Fellows (plus an unrestricted number of Senior Fellows). This was the largest installation of Fellows on record.

Isaac Hucker, a proud Badimaya man from Ballarat, was elected the new Senior Student of the Residential College. Other members of the TCAC for 2025 are: Social Secretary Rosie Bradford; Treasurer Hamish Devonshire; Indoor Rep Kody Roth; Women’s Sport Rep Tarsh Madden; Men’s Sport Rep Deegan Craig-Peters; Arts Rep Sam Prins; and Community Rep Lam Pham.

Daisy Wu was announced as our 2024 FS Alum of the Year. Daisy is a cost manager at Linesight Global Construction Consultants and was the winner of the 2024 Women in Leadership Award – Australian Multicultural Women Association and the 2023 Top 100 Women in Construction Award. She is also the founder of Multilingual Connectors, which offers mentoring, events and other resources, including the No Language Barriers podcast, to non-native English speakers to help them thrive in English- speaking environments.

Tom Snow was named our 2024 Residential College Alum of the Year. Tom, who was Trinity’s Senior Student in 1998, has strongly advocated for equality in Australia, founding and co-chairing the Equality Campaign, which played a crucial role in the successful YES postal plebiscite on marriage equality in 2017. Tom, who founded infrastructure investment fund Whitehelm Capital, also chairs the Snow Medical Research Foundation, and has served as a director of Canberra, Perth and Bankstown Airports and Rhodes Scholarships in Australia, having personally been a Rhodes Scholar.

We held two exhibitions in 2024 in Trinity College’s Burke Gallery. In March, we opened All that you’ve loved, which brought together a collection of works by graphic artist and printmaker David Frazer, and in September we opened Tais, culture & resilience: woven stories of Timor-Leste. This exhibition, running until 10 December, attracted the largest opening night attendance of any of our exhibitions and coincides with the 25th  anniversary of Timor-Leste’s vote for independence and start of the Australian-led UN peacekeeping mission INTERFET. It showcases traditional weaving plus photography taken on the ground in Timor-Leste over the past 50 years.

Our Foundation Studies program continued to thrive in 2024, with student places filling well ahead of cut-off dates for all intakes throughout the year. We secured two additional levels of 200 Victoria Street, our second campus, taking our total occupancy to four levels by mid-2025 and allowing us to enrol 1600 students per year.

Pathways School graduates celebrated the completion of their Foundation Studies program at our Summer Valedictory Ball (in March) and Winter Valedictory Ball (July). Congratulations to our duxes: Ching Fong Ly (January Comprehensive 2023), Thi Viet Huong (February Standard 2023), Chang Yan (February Standard 2023), Stanislaus Nicholas Dosemon (June Fast Track 2023), Mengying Xue (July Comprehensive 2023), Yuxuan Li (August Standard 2023), Michael Dharmawan (September Fast Track 2023) and Brandon Gabriel Liem (September Fast Track 2023).

Trinity hosted 22 visiting scholars throughout the year, including Emeritus Dr Dagmar Eichberger, an expert in Renaissance art history, and her husband Dr Jürgen Eichberger, a senior lecturer in economics; Dr Joshua Ralston, Reader in Christian-Muslim Relations at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, and director and co-founder of the Christian-Muslim Studies Network funded by the Henry Luce Foundation; and Stefan Hanß, a Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Manchester, as part of the Australian Research Council-funded project ‘Albrecht Dürer's Material World’, and his wife, Beatriz Marin-Aguilera, a Derby Fellow in Historical Legacies of Empire at the University of Liverpool.

Mandy Tibbey, Chancellor of the Diocese of Riverina, then delivered the biennial Sharwood Lecture in Church Law entitled ‘Church law and anti-discrimination law: do these need to collide?’, on 15 May in Melbourne and 22 May in Sydney. The Hon Justice Joe Williams, KNZM (pictured, read more about Justice Williams's visit here), delivered the Caldwell Lecture, ‘Mā te ture anō te ture e āki’ (‘The law must look itself in the mirror’) on 9 April.

We invited a number of guest preachers to our Chapel throughout the year, including a number as part of our ‘faith and sciences’ sermon series. They included the Revd Dr Chris Mulherin, Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of Christianity in an Age of Science and Technology (ISCAST) network, and Prof David Grayden, Clifford Chair in Neutral Engineering at the University of Melbourne.  

Our ‘old’ JCR (replaced by the new Junior Common Room in Dorothy) was renamed the Cripps Room to honour the generous support of the Cripps family over many decades. The room will be used for both Residential College student events and other College-wide events and dinners.

Trinity College signed a memorandum of agreement (MOA) with Taylor’s College Malaysia to deliver Trinity’s renowned Foundation Studies program transnationally at Taylor’s in Kuala Lumpur. This will provide Malaysian students with the option of studying Trinity College Foundation Studies either in Melbourne or in Malaysia, with the Taylor’s program delivered under the supervision of Trinity College Melbourne and with attention to strict quality control. 

Resident Trinity students once again enjoyed great sporting success. The men and women took out the top spot in swimming; the men won  the premiership in hockey; the men’s firsts won the rowing for the third year in a row (the men’s and women’s seconds crews also won); the women’s firsts triumphed in netball, while the men did likewise in basketball; the men won the rugby and the women won the AFL (having now taken out the premiership 10 times in the past 11 years). To top it all off, the men won the Cowan Cup and Trinity College won the Tickner Cup, the combined men's and women's trophy for intercollegiate sport. 

Residential College students performed the story of teenage misfit Veronica Sawyer (played by Charlotte McAdam, pictured with Ollie Jones, who played Jason Dean) in Heathers over three nights in May. The musical was directed by student Sam Prins, with Charlie Morris as musical director, Francis Heath and Grace Koczkar as co-producers and Josh Roberts as choreographer. Students then performed the play Away on 2 and 3 October, with Will Lawrence as director and Sam Prins as producer.

At our annual Archbishop’s Dinner, we farewelled the retiring Archbishop of Melbourne, the Most Revd Dr Philip Freier, who has long been a strong supporter of the Trinity College Theological School and who served 17 years as President of the Trinity College Council. The Council, along with members of the Senior Management Team and Board, also celebrated the Archbishop’s service at a special dinner following the Archbishop’s final Council meeting on 24 October.

Former prime minister Julia Gillard launched former Victorian premier John Brumby’s new book A Better Australia: Politics, Public Policy and How to Achieve Lasting Reform, co-written with Scott Hamilton and Stuart Kells, at the College on 8 October, while Ken Hinchcliff, Mark Lindsay and Dorothy Lee all published books in 2024: Equine Sports Medicine and Surgery (3rd edition), Markus Barth: His Life and Legacy and Poems of Lament and Grace respectively.