'A fine spreading tree'
The College Oak
'It is a tradition at Trinity College that when the sprouts begin to appear on the college oak tree the college settles down to solid work.'
IIn the spring of 1880, 41-year-old Franklin Kendall paused for one final glance at the small, brown acorn sitting at the bottom of a his freshly dug hole before a sweep of his hand sent a pile of soil sliding back into the shallow depression, covering it. Kendall was the Melbourne agent for the British shipping firm The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, a mouth-full even in the nineteenth century. Then, as now, it was better known as P. & O.
For a little over eight years, since before Trinity College had welcomed in its inaugural student, Kendall had also been the honorary secretary to the fledgling college's Council. In that capacity, as Trinity's first Warden Alexander Leeper would later note, he 'set a standard of efficiency … that it was difficult for any of his successors to live up to.'
An alumnus of Christ's Hospital School in West Sussex, like many from that school Kendall had made his way into the P. & O. Company and, from his early teens, travelled extensively aboard their ships to India, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia. But it was in Australia that he felt most at home. The acceptance of a role with the company back in London necessitated his resignation from the College Council and he lamented that after his fourteen years in Melbourne 'he had considered himself fairly anchored, and he would feel in going home more like a boy returning to school than anything else.'
'When he was leaving Melbourne', Trinity’s first Warden Alexander Leeper would later write, 'it was decided that he should be asked to plant a memorial oak in the college grounds, to be known for all time as the "Kendall Oak".
'The Kendall oak is now a fine spreading tree, but it is not the tree planted by Mr Kendall. Far from it. It is only first cousin six times removed to the original.'
'There must have been something radically wrong either with the soil or the trees planted,' Leeper continued, 'for six in succession withered and died.'
'Salvation come to the oak tree in a curious way. The grounds were for a time infested with stray dogs, which became an intolerable nuisance, and we had to lay poison. Before long I noticed the tree gaining surprising vigour and vitality. I asked the gardener could he explain it, and he replied grimly, "I buried eight of them dogs there."
'Long after', Leeper mused, 'the undergraduate mind indulged in pleasantries about the "bark" of the tree.'
'The Kendall oak is now a fine spreading tree, but it is not the tree planted by Mr Kendall. Far from it. It is only first cousin six times removed to the original.'
And the seed sprouts and grows
Whether through the fertilisation of decaying canines at its roots or by some other mystery of nature, a seedling finally took hold, probably in the late 1880s, and flourished. Protected in its infancy by a white picket fence that framed it at all compass angles, the young oak soon became a defining aspect of that corner of the northern end of campus, sheltered on its eastern and northern flanks by Bishops’ and Clarke Buildings; themselves, only a few years old.
In Greek mythology the oak came to represent the god Zeus, a symbol of strength, resilience and knowledge. Writing in the fourth century BCE, Plato – in his Phaedrus – had his protagonist, the philosopher Socrates, explaining that the 'first prophetic utterances' came from an oak tree at Dodona in north-western Greece, a site of sacred worship of Zeus. The implication being that the oak itself was a vessel for divine knowledge and wisdom.
The Roman poet Ovid, in his narrative Metamorphoses a few centuries later, had Zeus granting the final wish of the elderly couple Philemon and Baucis to be united in death. Turning them in to entwined trees - Philemon an oak and Baucis a linden tree - the new-found symbiosis of the pair came to represent the steadfast reliability of the former species combined with love, symbolised by the latter. For Leeper, as Warden and a scholar trained in the Classics, these attributes much surely have resonated as he witnessed the young sapling mature.
The adolescent College Oak in front of the Clarke Buildings during the 1920s
The Clarke Building, no longer obscured by the Oak during the winter months of the 1920s.
An early example of a tradition that continues today, as students string up bottles below the Oak's branches.
'The Trinity Oak is garbed in green’
By the early years of the following century, this robust example of Quercus robur had already established itself as part of the formative identity of Trinity, the scene used on early postcards home to parents or depicted by local artists during their visits to college. As one student, writing in 1912, observed, ‘Our Cloisters and our Oak-tree have played their part in the formation of an atmosphere.’
'They have helped to give our College man a different outlook and a different manner, to make of him a being different from a member of another college and from one who has lived no college life at all.'
An early photograph from the end of the 1920s shows a figure high in the branches of the Oak during the winter months, seemingly pruning the tree in readiness for its spring growth. One writer in the Fleur de Lys in 1957, reflected on a photograph from this era that purportedly showed Warden John Behan 'high in the College oak, closely inspecting a swarm of bees to see if they could be captured and retained' for the benefit of the college community. Could this in fact be the second Warden balanced perilously along the tree's bows?
From its earliest years, sentinel-like the Oak had kept watch over the academic year. As the autumn days shortened, its leaves changing their cloak to a russet before settling on the ground below, students would peer up from their desks through the windows of their studies facing inwards towards the Oak along Bishops' and Clarke Buildings, mindful of the passage of the months.
As the spring heralded a new cloth of green along its branches, one student quipped in the 1950s that 'even the most optimistic of us knock the dust off prescribed texts, as the spectre of exams once more looms before us.'
It is a refrain that has found its way into prose across more than a century's pages of the Fleur de Lys magazine, as one generation of collegians after another learns that the budding Oak announces the final stretch towards the end of the academic year.
As the 1928 Fleur de Lys observed, 'it is sufficient to know that the oak has sprouted, an omen which though it may not be lightly disregarded, informs us that the worst is at least nine weeks away.'
During the post-war years of the 1920s, lounging on the expanse of grass around the Oak's trunk also proved a suitable vantage point from which the Trinity 'gentlemen' could cheekily catch the eye of their female counterparts from the neighbouring College Womens' Hostel, Janet Clark Hall. Before the opening of Behan Building in 1935, the Hostel residents wound their way across a path that lead from the Hall to the east side of the college grounds towards the Warden’s Lodge, and out towards the University.
Under yonder oak tree, single on the greensward,
Couched with their arms beneath their heavy heads,
Watching there and waiting to see the Hostiles passing
Lie all Trinity – Science, Arts and Meds.
Has not one the pluck to hail a passing maiden,
Lead her to the turnstile and whisper in her ear,
Shouts and yells and whistling and other horrid noises
Echo round the Bulpadock for all the world hear.
Though it seems likely the 'courting' extended in both directions, on both sides of the fence, between the Womens' Hotel and the College. In a verse in the 1919 student work, ‘The Poetry of Motion’, the author pens the following passage:
Come, tell me, Hostel maidens free,
The name of him you wish to see;
Dwells he in Clarke’s or Bishop’s wing,
That here you dance and glow and sing
Here at the College Oak?
Under the Oak Tree
When winter's power is nearly done,
And daily stronger grows the sun,
The hour of tedious toil's begun,
For a third term's here;
And misspend hours forever gone -
One wasted year.
Around the budding oak-tree's bole.
Upon the green the workers roll.
In one short term they seek the whole
From books to cram,
And struggle for the long year’s goal -
The dread exam.
On chair or cushioned turf they lie;
Upon the book is bent each eye,
Save where a dreamer scans the sky,
Or, all a-doze,
Lies still and lets the hours go by
In sweet repose.
Sometimes the wicked passions rise;
From books are lifted thankful eyes;
O'er Latin verse no longer sighs
The student fellow,
But to the call his voice replies
With threatening bellow.
Oh, little oak-tree, as you grow,
We in our turn must rise and go,
While other students work below
Who'll known us not;
But every springtime they will know
Your sunny plot.
When your far-reaching branches hide
The windows set on every side,
Through which to us at eventide
The sinking sun
Calls, "Lay your books and work aside,
The day is done!"
Whate'er our lot in life may be,
At ease or work, by land or sea,
Still shall we not forgetful be
Of hours we spent
Beneath the slim-stemmed infant tree
Now broad and bent
Fleur de Lys, 1907
Students of Janet Clarke Hall providing a 'shoe shine' service under the College Oak with colleagues from Trinity College, 1948
Spreading forth its branches to the sun
The Oak remained a central focal point of the northern end of campus throughout the final decades of the twentieth century, the scene of various outdoor alumni reunions on the Bulpadock that would inevitably spill out under the Oak's shade-providing branches on warm summer evenings. In March 2007 the college alumni committee, the Union of the Fleur de Lys, established what has since become an annual alumni gathering that takes its name from tree, Drinks under the Oak.
The College Oak – the Kendall Oak, if we are to remember its origins – remains a much-loved feature of the college campus, as valued and identity-shaping for Trinity students and alumni as it was more than a century ago. In this sesquicentenary year, it is the Oak that has been incorporated as the symbol of the college's new anniversary logo – a poignant reminder that from an acorn held in the palm of one’s hand grows a tree that has come to symbolise those defining traits of strength, steadfastness and knowledge.
Qualities that continue to represent the Trinity community at this milestone anniversary in our own journey.
Trinity International Student Committee's 'Night Market' held under the Oak, 2021
Dr Ben Thomas, Rusden Curator, Cultural Collections curator@trinity.unimelb.edu.au
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