News Archive

Jenny Gregory makes no apology for the people or events that may have been left out of the Centenary history she has edited.

“With more than 100,000 graduates and 100 years of history, you just can’t cover everything, much as you’d like to,” she said.

Seeking Wisdom , nearly 500 pages of the history of UWA, is written largely from the perspective of academics. “So there is very little on the tea ladies and chauffeurs of the 1960s – and yes, we did have them!” said Winthrop Professor Gregory, Head of the School of Humanities .

“The biggest challenges in bringing together the story of the State’s first university were deciding its shape and structure and sourcing the right people with the right expertise to research and write each chapter. I’m very grateful to the historians and other academics who worked on the project with such commitment,” she said.

“Fred Alexander did a great job covering the first 50 years up to 1963 in his Campus at Crawley ,” Professor Gregory said. “UWA had just 4,085 students and 450 academic staff then, compared to 23,792 students and 1,400 academic staff in 2011.

“So it is not possible to publish a ‘blow by blow’ history as Fred did. This book is written by a team of academics, from the perspective of this generation and the questions generated by the society we live in today. They are very different from Fred’s questions.

“Whatever point of view you adopt, it will always be different from somebody else’s, depending on whether you are a student, an academic, a professional staff member, a graduate or a historian.”

The history is written in two parts: Looking inwards and looking outwards. “It became clear during the research that a key aspect of UWA’s history is our relationship with the outside world – looking outwards to the local, state, national and international communities,” she said.

As a part-time student in the 1970s, Professor Gregory did not have much involvement with the student community and says that, through this history, she has learnt a lot more about student politics and has a better understanding of the range of student experiences.

“As a result of our research, I also learnt that, sadly, the situation for women at UWA seems to be stagnating, despite the work that was done in the 1990s and beyond. Hard-won gains for women seem to have stalled with very few women in executive positions at UWA.”

Seeking Wisdom, published by UWA Publishing , will be launched during the Alumni Weekend in February. It will be on sale at the Co-op and other bookshops for $49.95.