'Who gave all the parties?'
Collective memories
Do you remember that charming musical play "Salad Days" of a few years ago? It was very much a University play, a College play, written and first produced (I believe) in Cambridge, and deeply nostalgic.
Aged just 33, Robin Sharwood commenced as Trinity College's fourth warden at the beginning of June 1965.
Young, energetic and full of ideas, he had a particular and clear vision for what collegiate education could look like in the mid-twentieth century. Within a year, he had established a Trinity publication to better communicate with the college's growing community.
Steps were taken to beautify both the grounds, art was purchased to hang on the college walls.
By the end of his nine years, he had set the wheels in motion for women to be admitted into co-residence.
It was a period of progressive and enlightened change. Trinity for Sharwood, was at its core about people and community - students, staff, and importantly, alumni.
He was acutely aware of Trinity's rich history and the unique connections the college's alumni community had with their alma mater, over Trinity's first 100 years.
The following are some of his reflections given at the Dinner for the Commemoration of Benefactors a little over a year after he started in the role, when the college was still male-only, in November 1966.
When the curtain rises, the young hero and heroine are "discovered" outside a pair of very academic wrought-iron gates as they prepare to leave the University for the great world.
"Who'll give all the parties when we're gone?," she asks. "There will be no more parties," he replies.
"There will be no more parties".
Is not this how it is for all of us? The College, the University, is for us, always, what it was in the days when we were here.
We could not, at the time, enter into its past.
We have had no real involvement in its succeeding years. For us it has been timelessly 1913, 1926, 1936, 1946 - whatever our great year may have been.
For some of us the Warden is "Bones" Leeper still, the oak is but a sapling, the Chapel Mr Horsfall's dream (did the Warden really make him drunk on champagne?), and the "hostiles" came across for tennis parties and tea fights.
Or is it 1926, we are living in the temporary Wooden Wing, the Dining Hall is newly enlarged, a grandfather clock has appeared in the Common Room, a man named Farran is Treasurer of the Social Club, and "Jock" Behan, still a young man (was he ever a young man?) sits in his splendid new carved chair in Hall.
Ten years later, 1936, and our Warden is "Jock" in his middle years, immensely dignified at Sunday Mattins. There is a new wing along Royal Parade (what did we call it again?). We have a Dean. Russell Clark is President of the Student Club.
Or perhaps we are of a generation for whom the Warden is Mr Cowan, "the Bull", striding determinedly from the J.C.R. after his first address to the College ("You kick me and I'll kick you"), or presiding in his prime over the great College expansion of the fifties and early sixties.
Whatever our year, we have a private and particular vision of Trinity, do we not?
And when we rise to drink the toast to the College, is it not to these memories above all that each of us drinks - to the College we knew, to the friends we made, to the fun we had, to the buildings we lived in, to our Warden?
We drink, each of us, to our own Trinity, for which time stands still. Who gave all the parties when we went down? There were no more parties.
And yet the odd thing is that the College did go on, and does go on. There were more parties, and always will be.
Trinity is not a collection of stills, of fading snapshots; it is a moving picture, and it has been running without intermission now for nearly 100 years.
The only way we can know it - know it fully - it seems to me, is to know it collectively, to hold it in our corporate memory.
And that is the whole point of occasions such as this tonight.
We come together, Trinity men from every era, because only when we are together do we see Trinity as a whole. Only when we are together thus can the toast to the College transcend the particular memories of the generations.
In order to make this the more possible, we have this year changed the basis of invitation to the Commemoration of Benefactors.
From now on all men who sign the College roll may expect to be invited back at regular intervals over the years to dine in Hall on this College feast day, and on every such occasion (as tonight) the invitations will span the generations.
I hope very much that this plan will become known and appreciated, and that the invitations will be welcomed. There are no ulterior motives: we will not be asking for money. We simply want men to come back and enjoy themselves - meet old friends, wander around the buildings, tell of the past, learn of the present and of the future.
For only through such nostalgic in-gatherings as these can we hope to come to an understanding of ourselves as Trinity men, of our corporate, collegiate identity, of what our role has been as a College, might yet be, of our destiny.
We are today witnessing a remarkable revival of the collegiate idea in Australia.
Twenty years ago we were written off as anachronisms. Now we are in the forefront of University planning. Sixteen Colleges were opened in Australia before the end of the First World War, half of them before 1900. Only six were opened between 1918 and 1945.
But today there are nearly 70 colleges and Halls of Residence in our Universities, and more are being planned and built.
Melbourne alone has 11, and in this University the proportion of full-time students in residence is climbing again towards the heights of half a century ago: it now stands at the remarkable figure of 18%.
In the light of this evidence alone, I believe the future of this College must be bright.
Dr Ben Thomas, Rusden Curator, Cultural Collections
curator@trinity.unimelb.edu.au
Built with Shorthand