– 311 –

[twelve]
Weirdie beardie layabouts

THE STUDENT UNION building, sometimes known as the university union, was officially opened by the minister of education on 10 June 1961, nearly 30 years after the Students' Association had established a Permanent Building Committee and resolved to put the profits of Extravaganza and Cappicade into a building fund, and three years after the old gymnasium was demolished. ‘This antique building would not be the landmark it is if it were not in its usual parlous state,’ the president had remarked a few years earlier.¹ An unofficial wrecking party held before the contractors arrived was a source of some embarrassment: reglazing the windows in the part of the old building that was to be used as the site office cost the Students' Association £20. Otherwise, Victoria has been proud of its students' ‘magnificent record’ of self-reliance, in acquiring for themselves firstly the gymnasium, then the student union.²

1932 had been a singularly inopportune year to launch a fundraising campaign, and the college Council refused the students permission to apply to hold an art union. Momentum began to build after the war when the Council decided that the building should be a war memorial and open in the college's jubilee year, and the government agreed to pay a subsidy of £2 for £1 up to £40,000. Raising the money was one matter. There were also fierce controversies over the choice of an architect and the site. The Council had given its assent to the gymnasium site before the war, but George Dixon now devised an alternative plan that would save both the old building and, more importantly, the tennis courts. It was this site that was proposed when the Students' Association launched a golden jubilee appeal in 1949. In the end, however, both the gym and Dixon's beloved tennis courts had to go.

The students had £15,000 in their building fund when the appeal was launched: the government raised the subsidy limit to £70,000, and £35,000 was in hand by

– 312 –

the middle of 1950.³ They also had an architect in mind: the Austrian émigré Ernst Plischke, whom they recommended to the Council in 1946 as ‘the foremost architect in the country’ and for his ‘philosophic and intellectual approach to the problems of architecture and to the problems of community life’.⁴ The Council for a variety of reasons (not least of which, perhaps, was his nationality) hesitated. The New Zealand Institute of Architects offered its opinion in favour of the current college architects, the firm of Gray Young. J.C. Beaglehole lent his support to the students and ‘the cause of a worthier College architecture’ in a passionate plea to the Council not to appoint Gray Young (‘very mediocre architects indeed’) but to choose one of the younger, modern men: he did not necessarily mean Plischke, but noted Plischke and Firth's Meat Board building on Lambton Quay, then in construction and ‘which looks to me as if it will set a completely new standard for Wellington’ (this was Massey House, and it did).⁵ Nevertheless, and despite the apparent obstacles to Plischke's engagement having been overcome, the Council's building committee chose the advice generously offered by the recently retired government architect, and gave the contract in 1953 to the Structon Group (with the assent of the Students' Association).⁶

As the project evolved a separate gymnasium was decided upon: having the gym on the floor above the theatre did not seem a good idea. The principal returned from America in 1954 and, having investigated student facilities there, advised that more generous plans were required. Costs escalated. The Students' Association voted in 1957 to raise its fee from £2 5s to £3 5s and put £1 of it into the building fund, upon which the government increased its contribution to £115,000. A second public appeal was launched in 1960 for furnishings. For a few months in 1958 the Students' Association also changed its name to the Students' Union.

The union building, while not a masterpiece of modernism, at least broke away from the red-brick pattern of the college's academic buildings to date. It was designed to take a third storey, initial plans for which were ready by 1965 (by Ian Athfield for Structon) – giving the whole the appearance, as a Salient writer noticed, of an airport control tower.⁷ This was not added until 1969–70, by which time the building was becoming desperately overcrowded. Where the gymnasium had stood, the state-of-the-art Memorial Theatre, with ‘a versatile apron stage, built-in cyclorama, electronically-controlled curtain, ample dressing room and storage space, orchestra pit and New Zealand's first front-of-house lighting control’, was inaugurated by the Drama Club in 1961 with Much Ado About Nothing.⁸ Its southern foyer (‘expected to be frequently hired out for cocktail parties and the like’) was also added in 1970.⁹

In all, the students directly contributed just over a quarter of the cost of the union building. Having done so, they wanted to keep it as their own. Fears that the university was planning to appoint a warden prompted a successful campaign for control to be vested in a Student Union Management Committee with a majority of student representatives. The university and the association continued to share the operating costs of the building, while the university employed the staff, with a managing secretary rather than a warden.

– 313 –

*

Jim Williams was elected a life member of the Students' Association for his essential support for the student union building, and for the subsequent development of student welfare services – as well, one supposes, as for his patronage of university rugby. He hoped that it would develop as a facility for the whole university: as a university union, not just a student union. But it never truly would. The Students' Association president in 1956 looked forward to it becoming ‘the cultural centre for the city and a meeting place for the majority of the city's youth’.¹⁰ No less optimistically, his 1959 counterpart wished for it to ‘form the basis of a corporate spirit which has for so many years been lacking’.¹¹ Of course it could not. A constant in the record of student affairs in the second half-century as well as the first is the lament about other students' apathy, as is the elusiveness of ‘student life’. The larger the student body became, the more this was so. Still, the achievement of their building undoubtedly meant more to Victoria's students in 1961 than did the university's statutory coming-of-age.

The big picture of Victoria's students now is that there were more of them. They multiplied from some 2000 in 1950 to approaching 10,000 in 1990, though not steadily, the first boom beginning in the late 1950s and continuing to the mid–1960s as the baby boomers arrived. As importantly, there were more full-time students. The bogey of part-time study seemed finally to have been vanquished, thanks in a large measure to the new bursary scheme introduced in the wake of the Hughes Parry report. Full-time students outnumbered part-timers at Victoria for the first time in 1962, from being a quarter of the roll in 1950 and just over a third in 1960. By 1968 two-thirds were full time. The percentage was about the

– 314 –

same at the end of the 1980s. Patterns and expectations of ‘going to university’ had begun to change again in the 1970s, with the growth of graduate and post-experience programmes. Just as extramural study, although a far cry from the once despised ‘exempted’ system, came back into fashion, so did part-time study – for now at least.

‘Middle-aged students the new trend,’ the Evening Post women's page observed in 1968, although in fact the noticeable ageing of the student population was a phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s.¹² In 1973, 22% of internal students at Victoria were aged 25 and over; by the 1980s a third were. (Indeed, Victoria was a leader, not just among New Zealand universities, in accepting students over the age of 20 without necessarily a formal entrance qualification.) So was the rise of women. They were a fifth of Victoria's students in 1950, a quarter by the late 1950s, a third by the 1970s (as they had been in 1899), half by the end of the 1980s. The broadening ethnic mix of Victoria's students was noticed in the 1950s, but was more pronounced in the 1960s and '70s. Overseas students, the annual report noted in 1952, had ‘lately very much increased’ and ‘added a cosmopolitan element to the College’.¹³ They were European or British immigrants, American Fulbrighters, and Asian students under the recently established Colombo Plan. Private overseas students, from Asia especially, began coming in increasing numbers in the 1970s. Overseas students constituted 8% of Victoria's roll in 1972; they

– 315 –

were 11% by 1976 when the new quotas were imposed. Two-thirds of them were from Malaysia. Victoria had then the largest number of overseas students among New Zealand's universities in both numerical and percentage terms. In the late 1980s this had fallen slightly to 9% of the roll.

There were fewer Maori: 1.8% of Victoria's roll in 1962; 3% in 1986. Miria Simpson, personal assistant to the librarian, Harold Miller, and guide and mentor to the college's small band of Maori students from 1957 until 1970, kept her own statistics and counted over that period 147. As it has become larger, Victoria's student body has become more diverse in its age and ethnic mix, and in the range of disciplines they have studied. This is not so true, however, in socio-economic terms. A survey of enrolling students in 1984 concluded that, in common with New Zealand's other universities, Victoria drew its students from ‘a narrow range at the higher levels of socio-economic status’.¹⁴ In this sense it had not fulfilled its founder's vision of a ‘people's university’.

*

Where, asked a newspaper feature on the ‘new’ university in 1962, did one look for the student life ‘of which one hears and imagines so much … It does not appear to be flowing down the corridors or oozing out of the library shelves … The intellectual ferment and carefree good humour that one likes to associate with the name “university” are most nearly approached in the student clubs. These are the basis of social life in the university, and every student should belong whole-heartedly to a few clubs and half-heartedly to others.’¹⁵ In the rise and fall of student clubs at Victoria – fall being the long-term trend – social, cultural and political movements figure more prominently than sporting ones. There were 38 clubs and societies affiliated to the Students' Association in 1956, and almost two-thirds of them were sports clubs. In 1973 there were 73 official clubs, about a third of them sports. In the 1950s new Yachting, Weightlifting and Badminton clubs

– 316 –

were formed, a Chess Club briefly, and a Motor Club; there were the International Club in 1953, a Maori Club in 1958, and a Bachelors' and Spinsters' Club at whose inaugural debutante ball in 1953 Miss French was crowned Miss University; the Literary Society and the Jazz Club thrived in this decade and a Film Society began a fitful existence. In the 1960s there were Judo and Deerstalkers, Surf Board Riders, an Underwater Club and an apparently stillborn ice hockey club, as well as the Contemporary Art Group, Record Club, Radio Club, Folk Music and Folk Dance groups, and a Wine Society. New appearances in the 1970s included Billiards, Squash, Hang-gliding, and the Bridge, Chess and Other Games Club; a Food Co-operative, Astrological Club, Meditation, Ecology Action, Blues/Rock Society, University Feminists, Gay Liberation and the Tenants Protection Association. The left – Victoria's notorious ‘University Reds’ – had just kept changing their name.

The 1950s might be the last golden age of Victoria sport, relatively speaking, that is. The college's lamentable showing at Tournament was a running (if sensitive) joke in Salient through the 1950s and '60s, when sport still featured prominently in its pages. Easter Tournament was especially embarrassing, although winning six points to the other universities' 21, 43 and 44 1/2 in 1957 may have been a record. Victoria did manage to bring home the Winter Tournament shield in 1954, ‘at long last’,¹⁶ its first Tournament victory since 1938; it did so again in 1958 (also winning the Joynt Scroll for debating for the first time in 15 years), and in 1965. There were some individual fields of sporting achievement, notably golf, fencing and .303 rifles; debating regained form after a lull through the 1940s and '50s, and was enjoying a resurgence of success in the late 1960s; and Victoria has held a distinguished record in the drinking horn (an official Tournament event). But the

– 317 –

wooden spoon, as Salient wryly observed in 1957, ‘no longer even raises a laugh’.¹⁷ Excuses offered for this conspicuous failing have included the large number of part-time students at Victoria, and its lack of sports grounds (‘four tennis courts … and one undersize rugby field’).¹⁸ Perhaps, though, Victoria simply lacked the sporting spirit of others. Perhaps, some have thought, this is something of which Victoria should be proud.

The 1950s was, however, the high season of Victoria rugby. It was for the harriers and the Ski Club too, but for rugby above all. Six All Blacks played for the Victoria Rugby Football Club (popularly known as ‘Varsity’) in 1951–53, out of a total of 16 in its history, of whom its biggest pride was the great Ron Jarden. The club won the provincial Jubilee Cup four times in this decade. It enjoyed the dedicated support of the principal, to whose home the First XV repaired for their post-match sessions on Saturday night, and of the chancellor as well. Williams and Boyd-Wilson (in his retirement) continued a well-established tradition and alternated the roles of president and patron of the club from the mid–1950s until 1970 (George Culliford took the role in the 1970s and early '80s). Arguably, Victoria's rugby culture oiled the wheels of town–gown relations in these, the Williams years. The Boyd Wilson field and gymnasium were opened in 1958, with a match between Weir and The Rest, the culmination of a six-year fundraising effort, the subscription list having been launched by a ‘handsome donation’ from Boyd-Wilson.¹⁹ But soon the decline set in. Its ninth Jubilee Cup win in 1966 was the club's only major competitive success for 20 years. Ignominy came when it fell from the first division in 1984.

This is not only rugby's story, nor only Victoria's. The decline of sport as an integral part of student and even college culture, which was especially marked from the 1970s, was a larger phenomenon. No one much noticed when a Salient editor dispensed with the sports column in 1972, and few academic staff were now actively involved in university sports clubs.²⁰ In the decade 1930–40, 134 New Zealand University blues were awarded to Victoria students; between 1983 and 1993 there were just 19.²¹

Literature also flourished in the 1950s, all the more curiously – if this is to be regarded as Victoria's sporty decade – for its connection with Weir House, an institution more typically associated with beer and rugby, haka parties and capping stunts than with the finer arts. Broadsheet (1947–48), issued by a newly established Literary Society, was largely hatched at Weir, and was the first of a sequence of little magazines that were this university's ‘distinctive and seminal’ contribution to New Zealand literature,²² before Sport and VUP in the 1980s and 1990s reasserted Victoria's claim in this field. Poets in particular were at the fore; and the Victoria set became part of the larger movement historically identified as the ‘Wellington group’ – a cluster of young, emerging writers with connections to both Victoria and the teachers' college, centred on Louis Johnson, whose self-conscious modernism and rejection of Curnow-esque, 1930s nationalism rent a geographical and generational split in the New Zealand literary world. Those who were associated with and published in Broadsheet included W.H. Oliver, Alistair Campbell and Erik

– 318 –

Schwimmer, who had recently arrived in Wellington from Indonesia, and enrolled in classics at Victoria, contributing to the local literary culture an exotic interest in French existentialism and theory. Their third issue, ‘The First Placard of the Armadillan Absolutists’, was a joke on modernism, apparently after the celebrated Ern Malley hoax that had scandalised Australian letters a few years before.

Broadsheet was succeeded, and improved on, by Hilltop (1949), whose title (suggested by Ian Gordon) was after John Donne, not the college's situation, but quite appropriately outdoorsy: the Tramping Club was still a centre of intellectual activity in these years. Hilltop aimed to be more than a student magazine. Its first issue (of three) included James K. Baxter, who had recently moved up from the south (and was not a student yet, although he would be in a few years), Louis Johnson, Kendrick Smithyman and David Ballantyne. After Hilltop came Arachne, and ‘sophistication, cosmopolitanism and the airing of literary theories’; it was edited by Schwimmer with ‘a deliberate intellectualism usually described as “arty”,’ commented Salient.²³ When Arachne also went the way of little magazines there were three literary issues of Salient (in 1952, 1953 and 1955), more workmanlike in presentation but still evidence of a lively literary scene. Joan Stevens reviewed the first. ‘It is good,’ she thought, ‘that V.U.C. life includes, besides daily swot and sweat, the Museums, Art Galleries, French Maid Coffee Houses, pub crawlings, parties, poetic interests, and Kinsey reading which are reflected in the Literary Issue.’²⁴ Victoria's literary magazines complemented, and more or less explicitly challenged, the new but already established Landfall. They also displaced Spike, the literary quality of which had markedly improved in the late 1940s. After 1949, the jubilee number, there were only three more, occasional issues of the original college review (the last in 1961). In the meantime a new Literary Society had come on the scene and in 1956 launched another magazine, Experiment, which, if less audacious and iconoclastic than its predecessors (this role had been taken over by Louis Johnson's Numbers), ran for 13 years and 13 issues.

– 319 –

The 1950s was not an exciting period politically. The executive and Salient were in a conservative mood. The Socialist Club sought to maintain Victoria students' radical tradition, not of the red-ranting communism that Truth spied, but study, criticism and action (the ‘university red’ is ‘a thinking student with courage and a conscience’).²⁵ The burning issue in the late 1940s and early '50s was international student solidarity: whether to affiliate to the communist-leaning International Union of Students and the World Federation of Democratic Youth (popularly known as ‘Woofdee’). The Socialist Club invited the president of the locked-out Seamen's Union, Jock Barnes, to their 1951 May Day meeting; held cottage evenings ‘chez Bollingers’, the home of Conrad Bollinger, leading campus socialist in the 1950s and early 1960s (later a member of the English Department for seven years, until his sudden death in 1975); at their annual weekend school they listened to Paul Robeson records, and discussed trade unions and the student and the socialist movement. Not that it was all earnestly political: in 1952, to the displeasure of the registrar, Socialist Club members stole the teachers' college piano and carried it to the gymnasium for a dance. The character of the club changed about this time, with the passing of the generation of ex-servicemen ‘with its strange mixture of idealism and toughness’.²⁶ In 1956 internal discord resulted in the breakaway establishment of the Social Democratic Society of ‘independent left-wing liberals’,²⁷ which in 1958 renamed itself the Labour Club and in 1962 Socialists again (rather than New Left, after the Review that everyone then read). Meanwhile, the original Socialist Club had been disaffiliated in 1957 after failing to file an annual report. ‘It has become a truism to say that Vic. is no longer a “hot-bed of communism”,’ Salient remarked that year.²⁸

The O'Briens reigned over the association executive in the early 1950s. The future chancellor, Kevin, who had been elected president in the Chartist coup of 1948, resigned early in 1950 when his executive decided to invite Hewlett Johnson, the ‘red dean’ of Canterbury, to visit the college – a replay of the Gottwald telegram incident by which O'Brien had come to power, for the dean (who was attending a peace congress in Melbourne) didn't come to Wellington and the invitation was not sent. But O'Brien was returned to office in the elections a few months later, and his brother Maurice, who was the secretary, became president in 1952. Salient observed the passing of the O'Briens in July 1953 – but a motion before the AGM described the next president, accountancy student (and a later treasurer of the university) Malcolm McCaw, as ‘the First Protector For The O'Brien Regime’ (though this was a little unfair).²⁹

Salient 's 1951 editor (an ex-Chartist) expressly repudiated the paper's own red tradition, maintained unwaveringly since 1938, for a policy of unbiased criticism, and over the next few years it became increasingly narrowly focused on college news – ‘a mere college version of a parish gossip-sheet’, Smad-like, until Con Bollinger became editor in 1957.³⁰ There was little politics and a lot of sport in Salient for most of the 1950s, especially under sports editor and founder of the Bachelors' and Spinsters' Club, Bernie Galvin (later a university councillor and secretary of Treasury), who beat Tim Beaglehole for the presidency in 1954. In

– 320 –

the later 1950s there was a good deal of social and moral commentary; the religious clubs were strong at this time. The association's 1956–57 president, John Marchant, discerned a shift in interest from politics to religion as a sign of Victoria students' more serious temper. Increasingly there was also a good deal of music. And the editors bemoaned apathy and the passing of the Body Corporate. If Salient was dull, they responded to critics, this was because students were dull. In 1951 ‘one of the dullest AGMs’ in living memory voted to raise the association fee from £1 12s 6d to £2 5s; 1953's AGM was ‘somnambulant’; in 1954, 63 students, 3% of the roll, attended; in 1955 the secretary of the association (Marchant) resigned in order to shock his fellow executive members into taking their job seriously, but was co-opted back on and became president the next year in an election in which seven positions were uncontested. In 1958 the secretary resigned over the relative merits and cost of a Gestetner and a Fordigraph machine.³¹

Perhaps the temporary lack of a home of their own – the gym having been demolished and the student union not yet built – contributed to the ‘shocking student apathy and indifference’ Salient saw this year.³² But it was well into the 1960s before political activism, of the kind the Socialist Club had inaugurated at the end of the 1940s (when it marched over Indonesia and conscription), became a trend. The beginning of this decade was not without some excitement, however. There was a motion of no confidence in the executive in 1960 (defeated, as these usually are) over its hesitation in affiliating the Anarchist Association, which carried the torch of radicalism in the first half of the 1960s; and a fluster of constitutional confusion when a president disappeared (he had got a teaching job and left town). In 1962, though, it was the university Council that stood publicly by Victoria's

– 321 –

long and proud (though not consistent) tradition of defending academic freedom. When the Department of Labour requested access to university records in search of the ‘fairly large number of youths’ who had failed to register under the National Military Service Act, Victoria alone refused, for which it was congratulated by the local press.³³ This action prompted a special general meeting of the Students' Association and a no-confidence vote in the executive after it debated a motion – put by men's vice-president Peter O'Brien, brother of Kevin and Maurice – disagreeing with the Council stand, even though a contrary resolution had been passed. In June this year the executive was voted out, for the second time in the association's history, after ignoring the directive of a general meeting to lead a demonstration over the trebling of university fees (this was the quid pro quo of the substantially increased bursaries recommended by the Hughes Parry report). Some 150 or 200 students protested anyway, after the capping procession, nearly breaking down the doors of Parliament, the press reported: ‘Burly house messengers bolted the tall revolving door while almost two dozen police and a black maria rushed to the scene.’³⁴ It was conducted more in the spirit of procesh than protest, but it was a taste of things to come.

*

The infrastructure of student life in the university was greatly expanded in the 1960s. There were bigger bursaries, a new library, and the union building, of course, with its brand new committee rooms, club rooms and common rooms, a quiet room (all that remained of early proposals for a chapel), the theatre and a new cafeteria. University food, which had been provided by a succession of caterers under contract to the Students' Association since the 1930s, had been a perpetual source of complaint. It was old saveloys and burnt tripe (‘we prefer not to mention the cabbage’) in 1950; a new menu later that year offered a light evening meal –

– 322 –

for fewer students now ate two full meals a day at the college – of ‘a soup and a savoury dish of potatoes, macaroni cheese, salad, perhaps devilled kidneys, or something similar’ for 1s 6d.³⁵ The contract to run the new dining room, aka the ‘caf’, went to Fritz Levenbach, a German refugee, trained in his trade in Amsterdam and latterly chef at the Royal Oak Hotel, who ‘introduced Hungarian Goulash, and Chicken ragout to the student diet’ over the next 10 years, and yoghurt and other strange things.³⁶ Feeding students was not an easy business. In the last term of 1961, 420 cups, 247 saucers, 369 dinner plates, 242 small plates, 198 soup plates, 110 small forks, 89 dessert forks, 50 soup spoons, 76 large knives, 61 small knives, 80 salt and pepper sets, 78 ashtrays and 198 glasses were stolen from the dining room.³⁷ Within a year stern remarks were being made in Salient about the deteriorating state of the building generally (178 pieces of furniture had to be repaired or replaced between May 1962 and November 1963), and of the cafeteria in particular: leaving piles of salt on the tables was especially popular, it seems. More to the point, Levenbach was required to just break even or make a loss on university catering (between 1964 and 1968 a net loss of £60,000, in fact), making up the difference on private functions, from which the fee and a percentage of profit went into the student union building extension fund: but hiring out facilities that students considered their own for conferences and weddings was not very realistic.

The Students' Association ran its own coffee bar, also at a loss, under the stairs. Enhanced dining facilities were provided when the building was extended in 1970: a ‘restaurant’ on the middle floor and a coffee bar on the third. In the mid– 1970s patrons could choose between the ground-floor caf (serving sandwiches and takeaways now: full meals were a declining taste); the takeaway bar and grill, specialising in ‘gourmet-type delicacies’ such as steak, chicken and omelet ‘for the self-indulgent’; and Alfonso's Alternative for vegetarian and health foods upstairs.³⁸ The cafeteria, a survey found in 1975, was ‘not held in high regard’ (this, it should be pointed out, was after the Levenbach era).³⁹

The new union hall (with mezzanine) on the top floor became the venue for meetings, forums and ‘hops’. There was still no swimming pool, although this object had not been abandoned. Long-term planning for expanded student facilities – eyes were on Wai-te-ata Road – envisaged ‘a totally new Student Union complex based on a swimming pool’, with a billiard room as well.⁴⁰ The arts centre plan was subsequently added in to this. But the only part that eventuated from this planning cycle was the 1979 Athfield-designed extension to the gym, transformed thereby into the Recreation Centre. Identification cards were issued by the Students' Association in 1965, but this was taken over by the library the next year. ‘Contact’, a one-stop information bureau to guide students to the expanding range of university services for them, was opened in 1969.

The idea of a student-owned bookshop had been in the air as early at least as 1944 when suggestions were first being gathered for what to have in the new building. In 1954 the association had experimented with selling textbooks (more cheaply than Whitcombe & Tombs downtown) in combination with their stationery

– 323 –

scheme and second-hand bookstall, but realised that it would have to be done comprehensively to be viable. Interest was revived in 1963 when plans were being made for the student union extensions, and presidential candidate Peter Blizard made a bookshop part of his election campaign. It was taken up more seriously in 1964 after an approach from Whitcombe's subsidiary UBS, which had had the first university bookshop in Dunedin, then in competition with Whitcombe's, and was now setting out to capture the tertiary book market in the main centres. Only in Wellington did this plan fail. The Professorial Board and Council were now looking into the matter too: they were persuaded of the desirability of a university bookshop, but the catch was finding 2000 square metres of available university space. Whitcombe's chief competition in the Wellington market, Sweet and Maxwell, opened a ‘University Bookshop’ at the northern end of The Terrace in 1966, stocking a wider range of textbooks than their downtown shop which catered only to law and commerce students. In 1967 they made a conditional purchase of a house in Kelburn Parade, but an application to the City Council for zoning approval to sell books there, although supported by the university and Students' Association, was declined. Another house on the fringe of the campus was found, in Mount Street, and here Sweet and Maxwell's University Book Centre opened. Whitcombe's continued to offer strong competition: ‘Other universities have bookshops; Victoria has Whitcombe's,’ their Salient advertisement read. Facing liquidity problems, the Sweet and Maxwell shop was bought by the Students' Association in 1975 and became the Victoria Book Centre Ltd, the country's first wholly student-owned bookshop. Despite making no profit for two years, and its distance from the Student Union – some 20 metres, but they were steep ones – it survived, and remains student-owned.

– 324 –

The Students' Association also looked after its members' more personal needs. A hairdressing salon, The Woolshed, opened in 1970. Contraceptive vending machines were installed in 1972 (a few members of the university Council had hesitated). A creche was run, briefly, in the Memorial Theatre foyer in 1973 as a free alternative to the university's existing but overcrowded one. The movement for a university creche had begun with the formation of a Creche Association in February 1967, which minded babies at various locations – the Kelburn Plunket Rooms, private homes and the Boyd Wilson rugby clubrooms – before a university house was provided in Fairlie Terrace in 1969 (the first university creche in New Zealand). It was oversubscribed within a few years, and provided what may be Salient's best ever headline: ‘Baby Bites Vice-chancellor’.⁴¹ The house next door was taken over in 1975; a staff creche, however, was not established until 1980.

*

The university itself had taken its first steps to care for the bodily as well as the intellectual health of its students in 1951, when a physical welfare officer (Bill Landreth) was appointed, following a request from the Students' Association. Conditions were quite rudimentary. On one occasion the Extrav stage crew, short of timber for a set, cut up a gymnastics beam they found in the gym. ‘As the facilities available could not even be called the bare essentials needed for a full physical education programme, and as there were no other welfare officers, the service developed in some unusual directions’, including advising students with health, emotional and other personal problems, until the provision of a new gymnasium, an assistant and a comprehensive student welfare service in the 1960s.⁴² It was 20 years, then, since the abortive experiment of 1944 that a health service

– 325 –

– ‘our own pet lost cause,’ remarked Salient – was achieved.⁴³

Victoria's Council, the Health Department and college principals were discussing health schemes in the late 1940s, and in 1951 the Council approved a plan for one, then considered it some more. The question of whether it should be voluntary or compulsory was debated again, and decided again in favour of a voluntary service. Students now were also pressing for a counselling service. A Salient editorial suggested that senior students be appointed counsellors to freshers during orientation week in the meantime. A committee of the Professorial Board, convened to consider a proposal from the Federation of University Women that a dean of women be appointed, reported instead that a systematic approach to the welfare of all students was needed: it recommended a warden for the student union building, a part-time doctor, a welfare officer and a counsellor. The Council deferred its decision until the union building was open and another quinquennium came around.

Thus the managing secretary of the student union building, an Englishman, Ian Boyd, who was appointed in August 1961, was also charged with assisting the development of welfare services. He had a graduate degree in physics and gave lectures on electrical circuit theory as well. A top-ranking middle-distance runner in the 1950s – he was in the race at Oxford when Roger Bannister ran the first ‘four-minute mile’, and ran in the 1954 Empire Games and at Melbourne Olympics – he had been inspired to apply for the job, he later said, by the friendliness of his New Zealand running friends (Murray Halberg and others). An Accommodation Service was started in 1962; and an Appointments Board was set up, comprising university staff and employers, to provide what was at first called the University Placements Service, later the Careers' Service. Health and counselling services were established in 1964. Psychology lecturer Tony Taylor's voluntary student counselling became a full-time position, and the Health Service began with four part-time staff, with a full-time position of medical director established in 1966.⁴⁴ Boyd gained the additional title then of director of Student Welfare Services, and moved into this role full time in 1970, until in 1984 he moved sideways into managing the university's building and site programme.⁴⁵

The Student Welfare Services expanded steadily through the 1960s and 1970s, with strong support from both Williams and Kevin O'Brien, until some retrenchment in the fiscally straitened later 1970s. In recreation, as well as counselling, Victoria was ahead of the rest: the comprehensive programme developed once the new gymnasium opened was revamped in the 1970s to keep up with changing student lifestyles (including the impact of internal assessment).⁴⁶ Whether the students should pay for such services was debated – the different universities followed a variety of practices – but not until 1981 did Victoria introduce a student services levy, following a government directive to all the universities to reduce their spending on student welfare by two-thirds (at the same time as economic conditions meant that there were more students, and they were using the services more). Victoria was spending more per student than any other university. It had, moreover, incurred the particular displeasure of the University Grants Committee

– 326 –

for the amount it spent on staff, having established the higher-level welfare positions on the academic salary scale – a situation it now took steps to remedy. Net budgeted expenditure on the Student Welfare Services fell proportionately by half – from 2.34% to 1.61% of the total university budget – between 1980 and 1985–86. The Health Service had been established as a free, voluntary, preventive one based on an annual interview, much as it had been planned back in 1944. The students used it a little differently: they came, over time, less for an annual interview and more for general medical advice. A consultant psychiatrist was added to the staff in 1969. The Counselling Service noticed definite trends as well. The ‘barometric reading’ increased measurably in the early 1970s after the introduction of the flexible credit degree and in-term assessment: many more students were now coming with problems relating to their academic work.⁴⁷ There was another marked rise in student stress levels in the early 1980s. The service was still dealing primarily with study-related problems, but increasingly too with worries about future personal and job security. And naturally, the service's role expanded as the student population did. Boyd became the university's liaison officer with the Department of Labour's immigration division in 1970, helping to smooth the business of re-entry permits for private overseas students. An orientation programme for overseas students was developed in the early 1970s, and one for mature students in 1979.

*

Accommodation was a more intractable problem. The state of Weir, and the culture of Weir, was not the most of it, although the residents periodically complained about the quality and quantity of the food and the deteriorating physical state of the building, and there was the scandal of 1963. The indefatigable New Zealand Truth, informed by the matron, exposed Weir on its front page, under the headline ‘Women and whoopee at Weir House’, as a den of iniquity, a hotbed of squalor, vandalism, drunkenness and naked women in the showers, which resulted in extensive renovations and the departure of both the matron and the warden.⁴⁸ More serious, however, was that Weir had beds, then, for only 98 male students. A new wing which opened in 1968, built with Colombo Plan funds to cater primarily for Colombo Plan students,⁴⁹ added 89 more but did little to ameliorate Victoria's endemic student housing shortage.

Weir remained the university's only hostel of its own. The original Victoria House, opened by the Women Students' Hostel Society in 1908, was renovated for the first time in 1955 and 10 more beds were added, bringing the total capacity of this establishment to 64. It no longer catered for teachers' college as well as university students, although the Student Christian Movement's smaller Helen Lowry hostel in Messines Road, Karori (opened in 1949), did. Other city hostels, like Feilden Taylor, Rudman Hall and Stuart Williamson House, took in smaller numbers of mostly male students, and these would progressively close down in the 1970s and 1980s. Eight per cent of Victoria's students lived in hostels in 1969.

Wellington ‘is easily the worst place in New Zealand as far as housing is concerned,’ Victoria informed the Hughes Parry committee in 1959, and the

– 327 –

minister of housing himself agreed.⁵⁰ The shortage of student accommodation was acute by the end of the 1960s, and ‘reaching crisis proportions’ by the early 1970s.⁵¹ The causes were not hard to see: expansion of the government sector and of the university itself into inner-city residential streets; the growth of student numbers; and the construction of the Wellington motorway through traditional student housing areas, like Shell Gully and Tinakori Road. Victoria had told the Hughes Parry committee that it hoped to have 534 more places in halls of residence in 1964, and was looking for funding to the government, the Colombo Plan, loans, and the subsidy that had never been paid on the Weir bequest (a vain hope). Williams had staff members on refresher leave in the 1950s bringing back information about university hostels overseas. The Federation of University Women was campaigning for more accommodation for women students.

But traditional halls of residence were not the future. Increasingly, students preferred flats. This was first signalled in 1965 in a comprehensive survey of 3595 students carried out by the Council's newly convened Standing Committee on Halls of Residence: among those who preferred to live away from home, flats were twice as popular as halls of residence or other hostels; 30% of students not in flats or rented houses would have liked to be.⁵² It took considerably longer for some of those working to solve the student accommodation problem to realise (or acknowledge) this.

– 328 –

A concerted campaign by the churches was launched in the mid–1960s. The Presbyterians and Methodists had decided on a joint hostel development in Everton Terrace, down the hill from Weir House, and the Anglicans' Diocese of Wellington University Committee (chaired by university librarian Harold Miller) was looking for a site for theirs, to be called Trinity College. Negotiations were entered into with the City Council for the soon-to-be decommissioned Walworth Tip (now Western Park, where the Physics Department's radioactive waste was buried a few years later) and another site on Wilton Road. Plans for a hostel for 240 students, and a chapel, were well advanced before the committee decided that the terms under which the land was offered – a renewable 66-year lease – would not do. In September 1965 they settled on a site within the recently defined university zone, in Clermont Terrace. The Catholics came to the party last, when a Joint Standing Committee for Halls of Residence was being formed (in 1966), bringing together the Council's committee and the other interested parties. They set their eye on the Mount Street Cemetery as the site for Newman Hall.

A Halls of Residence Foundation was established by the four church groups, and a public appeal was launched in the second half of 1967. A little over $400,000 towards a target of $700,000 had been given by 2200 donors by the middle of 1968: large corporate donations came from the Wellington City Council ($50,000), the Girls' Friendly Society ($40,000) and New Zealand Breweries ($10,000). The Women Students' Hostel Society, meanwhile, went ahead with its expansion plan for Victoria House. Another property was purchased in 1968, at 288 The Terrace, and vacant land adjoining the original Victoria House A at number 282; Victoria House B (which housed only 16 students) was sold; and when the government approved a subsidy in August 1969, work could begin on a new wing, and renovations to the kitchen, which opened in 1971–72. The society had also looked at buying the Ambassador Flats on The Terrace, but the building proved too expensive to renovate. The Student Christian Movement closed its Messines Road hostel in 1967 and opened a temporary one in Newtown before a larger, purpose-built Helen Lowry Hall in Karori was ready (a little later than planned) also in 1972. It was the first to begin to move away from the traditional dormitory-style block.

The delay in the completion of the churches' projects – Everton in the mid– 1970s, Trinity and Newman not until the 1980s – was due partly to their grander scale and the wait for sufficient government funding, and partly to the question of what students wanted. Salient greeted the launch of the Halls of Residence appeal by pointing out that what students wanted was flats, and flats were cheaper to establish than hostels were to build and run. The university was becoming aware of this too. The Accommodation Service reported in 1969 that while most first-year students still preferred full board, the preference among second- and third-years, women especially, was for flats. At the end of 1969, on the recommendation of its Standing Committee, the university Council adopted a new policy on student accommodation, approving in principle of flats as well as traditional halls of residence. Not that the Halls of Residence Foundation was listening. They must

– 329 –

be persuaded, Taylor wrote in evident frustration two years later, that ‘halls are out’.⁵³ A fifth of Victoria's students were flatting in 1965; a quarter were in 1973; a third would be in 1980.

The Accommodation Service was busy. Five hundred and fifty-two students sought its assistance in 1967 – ‘the worst accommodation shortage ever,’ Salient reported, prematurely; 495 did in 1969, despite the new wing of Weir; 718 in 1970; 894 in 1971. A third of applications for the halls of residence were declined that year. It was becoming harder to find flats close to the university too: 39% of properties handled by the service in 1967 were within a mile of the campus; 29% in 1971. Rents were reportedly the highest in the country. And standards were deteriorating. Salient exposed ‘slum living’ conditions.⁵⁴ The Tenants Protection Association was formed at Victoria in 1972 (later becoming the Wellington Tenants' Union), and in 1973 organised the long-running and ultimately successful Rama rent strike against one of the city's largest and least scrupulous landlords.

The Students' Association endeavoured to take matters into its own hands too, but with only minor success. During 1974 it sublet the Beverley Hills Private Hotel on The Terrace, at a net cost to the association of $3000. (Its plan to purchase a 21-bed hostel in Newtown in 1965 had been thwarted by the university Council, which was unwilling to see the students burden themselves with so much debt.) During 1972 and 1973 emergency and somewhat less than salubrious accommodation was also provided at the former Bowen Street Hospital, which was earmarked for demolition (along with the neighbouring Alexander Turnbull Library) for the motorway development. Tim Beaglehole (a Weir House warden in the 1960s: he had been appointed to sort out the mess in 1964) brought the vacant hospital and nurses' home to the university's attention in 1971. When the university rejected them both as substandard, the Students' Association approached the government itself. In its brief life as student digs ‘Bowen Hall’, run jointly by the association and the university, was a less formal establishment than the other university hostels, more or less self-managing and combining ‘the colourful range of characters found in a student hostel with the freedom of a flat’.⁵⁵

The Presbyterian–Methodist committee, having refused at first to change its plans in favour of the now officially sanctioned flatting concept, came around in 1973 – Bob Clark was typically persuasive – and Everton Hall opened in 1975– 76, providing 131 places in 22 self-contained apartments. The Anglicans and Catholics took longer to convince. By 1968 the Trinity committee was considering three proposals for its Clermont Terrace site, from low- to high-rise. The architect favoured the high-rise option: as slim as possible so as to leave the neighbouring properties with views around it (they were well aware of the residents' antagonism to the university's claim on this area). The Trinity and Newman appeals were combined in 1973, and detailed plans were now in hand for twin, 13-storey circular towers (with men and women separated on alternate floors). In 1975 plans were announced for two low-rise buildings instead – Newman Hall and Trinity College – which would merge with the landscape, and provide apartment-style accommodation, common rooms, a chapel and resident chaplain, and ‘an atmosphere

– 330 –

conducive to the development of the whole human personality – spiritually, intellectually and physically’.⁵⁶ Financial obstacles (inflation and the plight of the University Grants Committee subsidy scheme) and another change of plan later, five existing houses on the site, left vacant by Sociology's move to the Von Zedlitz building, were rehabilitated over the summer of 1979–80 to make a student flatting complex, known as Trinity Newman.⁵⁷ It would later be extended in the southern student housing zone around Fairlie Terrace, Landcross Street and Adams Terrace, and encompassed some 50 houses by the mid–1990s.

In the mid–1970s the older halls of residence had faced financial crisis and the threat of closure. In the three years to 1976 Weir, Victoria House and Helen Lowry suffered a combined loss of $91,000. They had been constrained from putting up their boarding rates by the level of the student accommodation allowance. Helen Lowry had long-term debts, exacerbated by rapidly rising interest rates; most of its residents were teachers' college students, and it was taken over now by the Department of Education. Victoria House remained popular, with an occupancy rate of 98% since the early 1970s, but also had substantial mortgage liabilities and its old wooden wing was in urgent need of repair. It was bailed out by the government in 1979 with a $195,000 grant for capital works and maintenance. Weir House was financially more secure: debt free, and able to earn significant extra income from conferences and casual business during university vacations. But it was not popular. Applications fell by over half, from 161 to 77 between 1974 and 1978. It was becoming common for students to leave to go flatting mid-year, and fewer senior students were reapplying, when once they had to be ejected to make room for freshmen. The cut in the university's intake of private overseas students in 1977 also had an effect. The house was in physical decline. After the biennial conference of the New Zealand Association of Heads of University Residential Colleges and Halls was held at Victoria in 1977 its chairman wrote to the chancellor conveying the delegates' unanimous dismay at ‘its un-cared for and ill-kept condition … a blot on the standards of all the Halls in New Zealand’.⁵⁸

The corporate culture of Weir was also passing. Initiation ceremonies went some time in the early 1960s, the annual ball and picnic in the early 1970s; there was no longer a Weir column in Salient. If Weir until the 1960s was the bastion of Victoria's beer drinkers and rugby players, its defining character from the 1970s was its cosmopolitanism. Some older traditions persisted, however, such as the annual raid on Victoria House – traditionally perpetrated with a substantial element of wit and co-operation from the inside. In 1976 the Weirmen threw flour bombs and eggs, lit a fire in an upstairs room, flooded two floors with the fire hoses, and let off a smoke bomb which sent four residents to hospital suffering from shock and smoke inhalation. In 1978 local dignitaries and sentimentalists taking the last ride on Wellington's original cable cars, a traditional target of Weir pranksters, were pelted with eggs and water bombs. Boys will be boys. Weir was unpopular especially because it was now the university's only single-sex hostel. Vandalism and drunkenness were an expression of the first-year male university student's frustration and lack of social responsibility, observed the secretary of the residents'

– 331 –

association: ‘On Friday night after the pubs close, there's toilet paper all over the walls. The last time we had a wine and cheese evening, the floor was covered in an inch of beer.’⁵⁹

Thus, the integration of Weir House was brought about partly to improve the establishment's ‘moral tone’, and partly to boost its occupancy rate and rescue it from closure. It had the desired effect on both counts. There was no mixed-flatting fuss at Victoria, as there was at Otago in 1967, when the university authorities' official disapproval of the practice prompted a tense confrontation with its students (and a celebrated small ode by James K. Baxter). Letting women into Weir, officially, had been talked about since at least the beginning of the 1970s. But the shortage of accommodation for male students was a problem (landlords appeared to prefer women, and first-year men preferred full board). Men were admitted to Victoria House when its new wing opened in 1972, as a trial in the first instance: it was judged a success, despite the expulsion of eight students during the year, four of them men, for holding noisy late-night parties. A draft proposal for admitting women to Weir was prepared. A variation was required to the terms of William Weir's will, which had specified a hostel for male students, before 40 women could take up residence in 1979 and the fortunes of Weir House turned around.

*

The pattern of student politics at Victoria in the 1960s and after is a familiar one: a rise in political activism in the second half of the 1960s, reaching a peak in the early '70s, followed by a shift in attention towards more domestic concerns. There are other threads in this narrative too, of course. Fashion, for example. At some point, during the 1950s, the wearing of college blazers went out. These, in ‘an unobtrusive pond-scum green’, were for ‘mental invalids’ only, advised Salient in a report on college fashion statements in 1952. There were, it observed, the junior executives, ‘with horribly striped stiff collars … stringy little ties … and late-Victorian suits’; Campus Man, ‘easily recognised by his baggy corduroy trousers (red, green or purple), and his violent pullover. Sometimes reindeer course across his massive chest’; and, in smaller numbers, the Spivs, in their ‘bottle-green gabardine suits with matching shoulder pads, crepe-soled shoes, and fluorescent ties’.⁶⁰ Freshers were advised to wear blazers ‘at least one size too large’ in ‘the correct brownish shade and droopy shape’, and ‘a gabardine coat of unobtrusive shade … is indispensible’.⁶¹ Indeed, there was a spate of thefts of gabardine overcoats from the men's common room in 1954. A reporter who attended a student fashion parade organised by the DIC department store in 1956 despaired. ‘Much-bagged “bags” and disreputable jackets have been the deliberately-acquired “student look” for University men over the years’, while for women it was ‘an unattractive sweater and skirt outfit, varied only by an occasional change of neckerchief’: advice was given on how to dress smartly and economically.⁶²

Duffel coats replaced gabardine in the 1960s. The counter-culture reached Salient in 1968, after several years of the paper trying, quite successfully, to look like a downtown daily.⁶³ Psychedelic doodles adorned its pages, and cartoons: the

– 332 –

Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Fat Freddy's Cat became regulars until the late 1970s. Hair grew now, and sideburns. A journalist reporting on enrolment day in 1970 commented: ‘there was long, long hair, shorter long hair, longer short hair, long sideburns, luxuriant sideburns, moustaches and beards. And “The Post” departed the campus convinced that the “short-back-and-sides” era has truly passed.’⁶⁴ By the end of the 1970s, however, it would have been hard to identify a particular sartorial style as the ‘definite insignia of varsity rank’, as duffel coats had been in the 1960s.⁶⁵

There were no barricades in the streets of Kelburn in 1968, but ripples if not the tide of international student unrest reached Wellington. There was a definite quickening of the political temper in the middle of the decade. Salient's first School Supplement in October 1962 advised prospective students that while a rise of leftist activity could be detected, ‘the right-wing (mainly law and commerce students) is the most powerful force on campus. Most law students standing for Exec. make the grade.’⁶⁶ The paper itself was in one of its more conservative phases. The editor (for a few months), Geoffrey Palmer, devoted his first editorial of 1963 to advising women students about the hazards of university life: ‘The most important thing a woman can do is to maintain her femininity … her taste in clothes and makeup, while avoiding becoming loud’ – ‘a harsh and brash super-sophisticate, with dyed hair and drip dry morals’. The next issue warned freshers to watch out for the ‘pseud’, who takes English I and Greek HAL, ‘dashes off sloppy poetry for the little magazines, appears conscientiously at the art films at the Paramount in duffel coat and beard, and frequents the right coffee-bars, using his out-of-date pseudo-American hip slang … His loudest proclamations are naturally against all that the solid chaps at Vic stand for.’⁶⁷ A ‘girl of the week’ was featured.

Political issues began to appear (and the girl disappeared) later in the year: Vietnam, racism, abortion and nuclear testing. A student delegation visited the French embassy and the prime minister, Keith Holyoake, who dismissed them as ‘talking a lot of Socialist and neo-Communist ideas’.⁶⁸ Three years later he was subjected to a noisy demonstration by some 20 students when he received an honorary degree at the official opening of the Rankine Brown building, an incident which drew hostile editorials downtown, as well as some disapproval from Salient and student leaders – about the way it was conducted, however, not about student protest per se. A special general meeting in March 1964 had carried a motion rescinding a standing executive resolution that the association not make statements on moral, political or religious issues that did not directly affect students. The president, Peter Blizard, reporting to the vice-chancellor on the students' contribution to the CORSO

– 333 –

Freedom From Hunger campaign in 1963, observed ‘a new movement in student affairs both as far as Victoria University is concerned and on a national basis: it has been decided that perhaps in the past we have paid sufficient attention to matters which directly concern students, to the possible exclusion of those matters which are of concern to us all.’⁶⁹

Forum began in 1964: a weekly soapbox session on the lawn outside the cafeteria. In 1965, 1000 students, Salient reported, boycotted lectures with the official (though controversial) support of the executive, and marched to Parliament to protest over fees; Salient saw a ‘remarkable growth of Student action on Victoria campus’.⁷⁰ Of course not only students, nor all students of course, were ‘radicalised’ in the 1960s. New Zealand's first Vietnam teach-in was held at Victoria in July 1965, organised by the Students' Association, introducing a new medium of political action which remained in vogue for several years. Some hundreds of students signed a petition asking the government to allow Mandy Rice-Davies into New Zealand; 80, just 2% of the roll, attended a special general meeting on the sending of New Zealand troops to Vietnam. But the age of demonstrations had dawned. The Students' Association, said its president in 1969, ‘should function as an agent of social renewal. This requires the expression and promotion of progressive social and political attitudes.’⁷¹ The president-elect in 1972 told a reporter that he had ‘been actively associated with an average of a demonstration a month so far this year’.⁷²

Vietnam was the catalysing cause, but South Africa, apartheid and sport was probably the longest-running subject of student activism. There were American military bases and nuclear tests to oppose, tenants' rights and homosexual law reform to support, and security agents on campus to expose. The last was really Auckland's scandal, when the discovery of an undercover agent enrolled as a student there in 1966 resulted in a commission of inquiry and a ruling that the service could not conduct its business in universities. The fact that there was a student at Victoria in 1966 who had worked for the security service a year before was not a cause of the same celebrity, but the presence, rumoured or real, of spies on campus continued periodically to excite student suspicion and the publication of fuzzy photographs of suspected individuals in Salient. (It had been strongly believed, among students, that there was a security service presence on the staff of the History Department in the 1950s.) A decade later, in 1977, the university Council at the instigation of its pro-chancellor W.J. Scott, recalling the von Zedlitz affair, publicly opposed the controversial SIS Amendment Bill.

Highlights of Victoria's season of revolt, muted though it might have been on an international scale, include the Peace, Power and Politics in Asia conference held at the university in March 1968, coinciding with a SEATO meeting in town; and the combined student, trade union, Vietnam mega-demonstration at the opening of Parliament on 26 June that year, where a little jostling for room in the front rows was presented by the media as an attempt to storm the police lines and attack Parliament, and the Evening Post spied ‘the rabble in our midst’.⁷³ A rally featuring live music (the Capel Hodgkins Blues Dredge) prior to a Vietnam march

– 334 –

in 1969 marked a further evolution of the protest form (although it had to be held in the Easterfield lecture theatre instead of the Rankine Brown courtyard because of the weather). A Political Action Co-ordinating Committee was formed in 1970. ‘Will the worldwide fashion of student unrest reach Victoria in 1970?’, asked the Post's campus reporter, a little belatedly, in February this year, but this first term was to be ‘one of the most eventful for many years’.⁷⁴ A half-day boycott of lectures was called by the Students' Association after the Kent State killings (an executive member was heckled by commercial law students when he spoke on the issue before classes). Pierre Trudeau encountered protestors when he visited the campus a week later. The AGM voted for legalisation of marijuana, and a Special General Meeting declared the chief justice, Sir Richard Wild – a former president of the Students' Association – an ‘honorary white’ for his public support for the All Blacks' tour of South Africa (after a motion to ban him from the union building was lost). Students were also prominent in anti-tour protests which culminated in the invasion of the airport tarmac as the All Blacks flew out in June, and the resignation of the Salient editor after the executive apologised for ‘defamatory’ comments made about a policeman: this was the stuff of student politics.

Later in the year, during the national students' arts festival in August, seven Auckland students and protestor extraordinaire Tim Shadbolt were arrested and charged with trespassing for sleeping over in the union building. This incident provoked much discussion over the apparently vexed question of who had the

– 335 –

authority to call the police onto campus (conventionally the vice-chancellor did; on this occasion the festival organiser and the managing secretary of the union had). A more serious incident involving the police was the disruption of the Pacific Basin Economic Council meeting held in the student union building in May 1972 – ‘probably the worst [violent protest] in the history of the University,’ the Students' Association President reckoned: delegates were forced to clamber over seated students to get to the union hall, and the police were flour-bombed.⁷⁵ This fracas resulted in a protracted formal investigation and the re-drafting of the university's disciplinary regulations, and a keen debate within the association about the nature of protest: ‘the biggest general meeting of the university students’ association in its 75-year history' censured the executive for criticising the demonstrators.⁷⁶ This, really, was as bad as it got.

The new vice-chancellor took a hands-off approach to the question of discipline. ‘The place could be torn apart brick by brick,’ Taylor told the press in June 1971, when Otago students were occupying their administration building in protest over strict disciplinary regulations: so long as there was no danger to life and the students took responsibility for their actions, he would not call the police. Protest was a sign of a healthy university, which would not be doing its job if its students were ‘a dull, complacent, conforming lot’.⁷⁷ In 1972 he pacified an irate parent of Lower Hutt who had read in Salient that the students had voted to donate $40,000 to the Vietnam Medical Aid and Relief Fund. ‘Student affairs,’ he explained, ‘operate in a somewhat different manner from the affairs of other organisations and decisions

– 336 –

are, at times, taken more for their publicity value than their actual content’; and as the sum represented was almost the entire annual budget of the association, it was unlikely to be given away.⁷⁸

More domestic matters provoked students into action too: the quality of the air in the Rankine Brown building, for example; caf prices; cable car fares. A long-running campaign to persuade the City Council to put a pedestrian crossing at the dangerous Kelburn Parade/Salamanca Road intersection – carried on by the regular appearance of an unofficial whitewashed crossing at capping times, as well as more formal means – was brought to conclusion by a spontaneous ‘stand-in’ by 400 students (led by Michael Hirschfeld) after Forum in July 1966. Two crossings were installed, one on Salamanca Road and one on Kelburn Parade, within the month.⁷⁹ (That the association president of the time, John McGrath, was the son of a member of the City Council caused some embarrassment downtown.) On a quite different theme – but one perhaps dearer to the hearts of more students than Indochina – there was the Campaign for Civilised Drinking. A group of Political Science students and staff campaigned for the end of six-o'clock closing in the 1967 referendum with the inspired slogan ‘Vote Now, Drink Later’.

*

– 337 –

There was a more sober side to student affairs in the late 1960s, exemplified by the student-initiated Joint Committee on Student Participation set up in 1968, a deliberately responsible approach to the demand for student power. Making and implementing recommendations as they went along was part of the strategy – of ‘play[ing] it quietly, endeavouring to create an atmosphere of confidence’.⁸⁰ Achieving student representation on the Professorial Board was considered a particular coup, argued before the board by the association's law-student president, Douglas White, and education officer Caroline (Candy) McGrath. A bunch of law students and self-proclaimed moderates had decided to get involved in running things in the mid–1960s. (Law students had traditionally taken a prominent part in Students' Association affairs, which may reflect nothing more than the nature of their profession, but this was in the nature of a planned assault.)⁸¹ John McGrath defeated David Shand for the presidency in July 1966 on a platform of keeping international politics out of student affairs; White, the public relations officer, won in 1967. Both were future chancellors of the university. Their successors for the next three years were law students too.

While political activism grew in the 1960s, so did the association as a political organism – although its description as ‘a curious mixture of New Zealand cowshed politics and the authoritarian system of the Soviet Union’ was probably no less apt in the 1970s than it had been a decade before.⁸² The political evolution of the association was an effect not only of the emergence of a student movement internationally but also of the growth of the student body – and a full-time one. The executive committee had been given portfolios (like cabinet ministers) in 1960. In a general review of the association's administrative structure in 1964–65, the sports and cultural affairs officers became the chairs of their own councils (elected, that is, by their own executives rather than the general student body), which were themselves given more financial independence. From 1976 the sports

– 338 –

council would also have its own dedicated slice of the Students' Association fee: left to fend for themselves in the annual carve-up of the general account, the sports, whose enthusiasts tended to take little interest in general student affairs now, had been missing out. (A decade before, by comparison, the sports clubs had received three times as much funding as the rest, and back in 1956 seven times as much.) Salient became a more businesslike affair. In 1964 concern about the continuity of editors (seven in three years) and its financial position (it had long been published at a loss) prompted an investigation by committee. It was now given its own account, was distributed free, and the editor paid a ‘scholarship’ of £200. A technical editor was appointed in 1968, and it became a weekly: the first weekly student paper, it was believed, in Australasia.

The presidency carried an honorarium (of $400) from 1969. This came as part of a more radical reform of the association's political structure, into ‘a most exciting concept of advanced democracy’, although not quite what its original proponent had had in mind. White had put forward a proposal in 1968 for a representative senate of about 100 students, with the power to form all association policy subject to general meetings; a much smaller executive; and a full-time paid president. His senate proposal emerged from a committee and a special general meeting a year later as the Student Representative Council (SRC), a fortnightly council at which all students had voting rights (if they bothered to turn up and exercise them), with the power to formulate policy on all matters except financial. Actually, the first SGM called to vote on the proposal failed to reach a quorum: it was passed a few

– 339 –

weeks later by 42 votes to 32. After several months' trial a general meeting rejected a proposal from the president and president-elect to reconstitute SRC on the original model as an elected body, and Victoria's ‘experiment in Athenian-style direct democracy’ was to stay.⁸³ The executive was reduced from 15 members to eight, the other seven portfolios becoming SRC offices. The first SRC voted against the establishment of a licensed restaurant or chartered club in the union building, for a good democratic reason: that a substantial proportion of students were under the legal drinking age.

Alcohol and the student union has its own story. For many decades liquor could be consumed at student functions only with the permission of the vice-chancellor and with a member of the academic staff present. The Law Faculty Club, for example, imbibed gin, whisky, beer and wine; the Catholic Students' Guild sherry and wine; the History Society New Zealand wine. An arrangement reached with the police in 1966 allowed drinks to be ‘purchased’ with tickets paid for outside the venue, a rather quaint interpretation of the licensing laws that continued until 1988 when the Students' Association finally acquired a liquor licence.⁸⁴

Parties appeared for the first time in the association elections in 1970: the Radical Activist Ticket (RAT) and the Surrealistic Operations Action Party (SOAP). The RAT's presidential candidate, ‘veteran student politician’ and Trotskyist, PYM member and student representative on the university Council, Bill Logan, was defeated by 1127 votes to 632 by law student and impartial ‘Left of centre’ candidate Graeme (‘Kumara’) Collins. Salient declared a victory for the right wing.⁸⁵ Student politics remained, however, a minority sport, if an often exciting one (and an important training ground for future careers in law, politics, journalism and trade unions especially). In fact, a voting turnout of 40% in 1969, and even the norm in this period of 30%, was extraordinarily high by the standards of later decades. Yet

– 340 –

its organisers were bemoaning within four or five years the decline of Forum (which moved from Tuesdays to Wednesdays and the Hunter lawn in 1969, then to the Quad, and finally to the union hall). Once it attracted up to 1000 students, but the novelty, it seemed, had worn off. And continually Salient journalists and executive members bemoaned the small attendance at SRC and, as ever, at general meetings unless political donations, confidence votes or the future of capping were on the agenda.

Victoria's student leaders in the ‘radical’ sixties had also paid determined attention to public relations, in an effort to dispel the public image of the student as a ‘weirdie-beardie layabout’.⁸⁶ It was with this purpose that the Students' Association initiated the university open day in 1967, and a serious effort was made to rehabilitate capping, to vanquish that other dominant image of the student in the public eye, the drunken prankster. ‘The Open Day visitor will find the university much less deviant from the rest of society than he probably imagines it to be,’ reported the Post's campus correspondent (who was also a member of the Students' Association executive). ‘The unwashed, the alienated and the bearded are certainly there but they are still fairly small minorities.’⁸⁷ A film project, on the other hand – a 20-minute introduction to life at Victoria, commissioned by the Students' Association in 1964 – ‘blundered on’ for four years and was never completed.⁸⁸

A related development was the renaming of the student union building the ‘university union’ in 1970, to emphasise (or rather to encourage) its role as ‘a joint community centre’, where students and staff could ‘mix socially in a relaxed atmosphere’, and as a ‘meeting point of city and University’ – as Jim Williams had dreamed.⁸⁹ (For a brief period in the 1960s it had seemed that it might be like this: staff lunched in the cafeteria, and an interdisciplinary lunchtime lecture series was arranged, until soon overcrowding and the rise of student radicalism kept the staff away.) It was changed back to the student union building in 1991, preceding the opening of the award-winning, Athfield-designed tower extension the following year. The name university union had never caught on. Nor had it achieved its broader purpose of busy togetherness, for a variety of reasons including the changing geographical centre of the university: the drift from north to south. (Nor, for that matter, did some student leaders now want it to, preferring to guard it as the Students' Association's base.) But there was concern on all sides in the early 1970s, among students, administration and staff, about the alienating, ‘meaningless impersonality’ of the modern university, which had doubled in student numbers in 10 years.⁹⁰ In this spirit staff were invited to SRC, and SASRAC, or the Staff and Student Relations Advisory Committee, was born: twice weekly in the smoking room all members of the university were invited ‘for a small charge [to] consume a modest amount of alcohol and engage in convivial discussion’.⁹¹ Les Cleveland sang and gave a talk about folk songs at the inaugural SASRAC on 18 July 1973. Alienation, of course, was a characteristic of the times: it was the era of ‘dropping out’. (Anxious university planners watching the unpredictable movements of the student roll in the early 1970s should perhaps not have been so surprised after all.)

– 341 –

*

Salient in the 1970s continued to give voice to the disaffected and the idealistic young intellectual, more or less stridently from year to year – covering a spectrum of issues from Africa, Indochina and East Timor, to Bastion Point, the Clutha Dam, and the Royal Commission on Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion. Like environmentalism, feminism was a rising movement in the 1970s, and the growing number of women students changed the character of student activity in a number of ways. A Women's Liberation Front was formed in 1970, followed by the University Feminists, then the Women's Action Group. The Students' Association had its first elected woman president in 1970, Margaret Bryson. The second, Lisa Sacksen in 1975, became the first woman for 60 years to be elected a life member of the association in 1980, and only the fourth of a total of 36 to that date. (Harry Sansum, a student of the 1920s and '30s and self-appointed records keeper, who had made the life membership of the Students' Association his life's work, was a little perturbed.)⁹² Feminism also effected the demise, in 1970, of the Miss Victoria contest, which had been held more or less annually since the early 1960s (the winner going on to contest the Miss University title at Winter Tournament), although not without some ambivalence from the outset.⁹³ A move by Margaret Bryson to desegregate the union building toilets, on the other hand, failed in the face of plumbing regulations – but after having provoked some uproar (it was Victoria's equivalent of Otago's mixed-flatting affair).

The history of Victoria's student left in the 1970s is too complex for this narrative. Salient remained anti-establishment and left wing, true to its tradition,

– 342 –

and was criticised by the Trotskyists for not being left wing enough. The Trotskyist Young Socialists regularly and unsuccessfully put up candidates in the elections. There was an anti-Trotskyist Student Anti-Imperialist Front; an October Club was established to apply a socialist critique to university and student issues. (One casualty, ironically, of the broadening of protest politics, inside the university and outside it, was the Curious Cove Congress, last held in 1970: the reasons for the demise of Congress were many, but one was that its function as a talkfest for university progressives had been superseded by the action elsewhere.) At the end of the decade a Progressive Students' Alliance was formed to wage the struggle against student apathy, their ‘abysmally low level of political awareness’, and the fragmentation of the left and rise of the right.⁹⁴ But it failed to stop the election as president for 1979 of the candidate who had campaigned for more social, sports and welfare activity, and less ‘irrelevant’ politics in the association's affairs.

There was a clear, although by no means complete, shift in the focus of student political energies in this decade away from international political issues to domestic, educational concerns. A national action campaign was launched over the Labour government's foot-dragging with the Standard Tertiary Bursary, and its level when it was introduced in 1976 – although several hundred Victoria students also marched that year against apartheid (the All Blacks were touring South Africa again), and a few hundred when US vice-president Nelson Rockefeller visited in 1975. Internal assessment, increasing workloads, restructured degrees and the quality of teaching were also of deep concern to Victoria's students from the early 1970s. A May

– 343 –

week forum in 1973 on the topic ‘Why I am pissed off with this place’ indicates the mood. Previously, Salient had rarely reported on academic matters, lectures or lecturers (notable exceptions being an extended debate over the Asian Studies troubles and the campaign to end the BA for