Bonython Hall, South Australia

A Hall on North Terrace

Bonython Hall stood at the heart of the University of Adelaide's frontage on North Terrace, the broad ceremonial boulevard along which the city of Adelaide had gathered its public institutions — the art gallery, the museum, the state library, the botanic garden — in a single cultured row. The hall was the university's great hall, its room for ceremony, built to give an institution then sixty-two years old a fitting place to confer its degrees and conduct its grandest occasions.

It was raised in the Gothic Revival manner, in dressed sandstone, to the designs of the Adelaide architect Walter Bagot — whose firm, Woods Bagot, had shaped much of the university's North Terrace — and built to stand in keeping with the older university buildings beside it, the Mitchell Building chief among them, so that the university's stretch of North Terrace read as a single sweep of pinnacled, traceried stone rather than a clutter of periods. From the street it presented the high pointed windows, the buttresses and the crenellation of an English collegiate hall, a piece of borrowed Oxford set down in the dry light of South Australia.

Inside, it was a single great volume under a high timber roof, the long floor running down to a raised dais where the university's officers sat in ceremony. Tall windows carried the light down the length of it; an organ stood above the platform; and the arms and colours of the university gave the stonework what heraldry it had. It was built to seat eleven hundred and to make them feel small, in the way ceremonial architecture was meant to — a room that turned an ordinary afternoon into an occasion by the plain fact of its scale.

Bonython's Gift

The hall existed because one man paid for it. Sir John Langdon Bonython — proprietor of The Advertiser, Adelaide's principal daily newspaper, and one of the state's great accumulators and givers of money — gave the forty thousand pounds that built it, and it carried his name in consequence. He was, by the time of his gift, immensely wealthy and notably careful, a self-made man of strict habits who had given to the university before and would be remembered as much for his benefactions as for his press.

Construction was completed in 1936, and the hall opened to take up the ceremonial work the university had until then conducted in lesser rooms. For a benefactor's building it was a serious one, not a vanity: a working hall, meant to be used, and used hard, by every faculty of the university for the better part of a century after.

The gift came in the depths of the Depression, when public money for such a building would have been unthinkable, and the university owed its hall to private wealth at exactly the moment the state had none to spare. It was among the last and grandest of the benefactions that had built the university's North Terrace face, and it largely completed that face — after it, the ceremonial frontage of the institution stood substantially whole.

The Floor That Would Not Dance

The hall's most famous feature was its floor, which sloped — noticeably, deliberately — downward from the entrance toward the dais at the far end. It served the obvious purpose of sightlines and acoustics, the plain sense of a raked floor in a room built for an audience to watch a stage. But it served a second purpose, and that one Adelaide told for generations.

Bonython was a strict Methodist, and he had made it a condition of his gift that his hall never be given over to dancing. A level floor invited a ball; a raked one forbade it. Walter Bagot pitched the floor to satisfy the old man's stricture and his own sightlines at a single stroke, so that the story which grew up around the building happened also to be true: generation after generation of students crossed the tilted floor on their way to their degrees, denied a dance, whether they knew it or not, by a dead newspaperman's piety.

The slope was the making of the hall's character. It turned every graduand's walk to the dais into a small descent, and every procession into a stately fall toward the light at the front — an effect no level floor could have lent, and the first thing the building was ever remembered for.

The Threshold

Whatever its floor, the hall's true purpose was ceremony, and above all graduation. It was here that the University of Adelaide conferred its degrees — here that the year's cohorts of new graduates, gowned and hooded, crossed from students into the bachelors, masters and doctors of their disciplines, and were sent out into the professions of the state.

Generation after generation passed through it in the same way: the procession of the academic staff in their colours, the address, the long roll of names read out, the brief walk across the dais, the conferral, and the walk back down the sloping floor a different thing than they had walked up it. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, scientists and clergy of South Australia almost all began their working lives with that short crossing. The hall lent the moment its gravity — the high stone, the organ, the gathered families — and made of an administrative act something a person remembered for the rest of their life.

The ritual was deliberately old. Degrees were conferred in a Latinate form little changed in centuries; the graduands wore the gowns and the coloured hoods that marked their faculty and their rank; the chancellor or his deputy presided in full academic dress. On its grandest days the hall conferred honorary degrees on the eminent and the visiting great, and gathered the university for its formal commemorations. But its staple and its truest work was the ordinary graduand — the first in a family to take a degree, the country student a long way from home — for whom the borrowed grandeur was not routine at all.

Examinations and Other Uses

Between its ceremonies the hall did humbler work. For much of the year it served as the university's great examination room, its ceremonial floor filled with ranks of small desks and its grandeur pressed into the service of the most anxious hours of student life — the silence, the invigilators pacing, the clock, the scratch of pens. The same hall that conferred the degree had often, years before, been where it was most nearly lost.

In examination season the transformation was complete and a little absurd: the hall that had rung with the organ and the conferring of degrees stood silent but for the turning of pages, hundreds of students bent over their papers under the same high windows, the whole ceremonial apparatus of the place reduced to a very large, very quiet room with a clock. The hall held both faces without apparent contradiction, as old institutions held their contradictions generally.

It was used, too, for the wider life of the university and the city: concerts and recitals, public lectures, memorials and commemorations, and the ceremonial occasions a university was called on to hold. It was a hall in the old sense — a single great room a community kept for the business that mattered, whatever shape that business took.

What the Hall Was

For all its borrowed Gothic, Bonython Hall was a working building, and its dignity came less from its stone than from what was done in it. It was the ceremonial heart of the University of Adelaide — the fixed point at which the long private labour of an education was made public and complete.

Generations of South Australians measured their lives partly by it: the day they sat their examinations beneath its high windows, and the day, in gown and hood, they crossed its sloping floor to be made graduates and sent out. It asked to be noticed only on those few days, and on those days it gave the moment everything its high stone and long tradition could lend. That was what the hall was for, and for the better part of a century it did it, cohort after cohort, lending its gravity to the day each of them crossed from one life into the next.