Graduation Ceremony – Bachelor Degrees, University of Adelaide (1995)

The University of Adelaide held its summer conferral of bachelors at the close of the academic year, in the dead heat that settled over the city once the examinations were done. Bonython Hall stood at the centre of the North Terrace frontage, between the older sandstone of the Mitchell Building and the long reading rooms of the Barr Smith Library, and by mid-morning the dry northerly had driven the temperature up into the range that made the heavy gowns a small cruelty. The graduands came up the terrace in their hundreds, gowned over their good clothes and sweating under hood and trencher, past the war memorial on the corner and the museum and the art gallery, and in through the great doors into the relative cool of the hall.

Inside, the families filled the raked gallery and the seats along the sloping floor that the hall's founder had insisted upon — the long downward grade toward the dais that had kept the room, by his pious design, forever useless for dancing. The graduands were marshalled below by faculty, the marshals in their gowns moving along the rows and ordering the procession of the afternoon. Above them the high window threw its coloured light down the slope, and the organ, played from the loft by the university organist Margaret Tregenza, held the room under a quiet voluntary while it filled.

When the hall was full the organ changed, and the academic procession came in. The bedellus led it, carrying the university's mace upright before him; behind him came the Chancellor, the Honourable David Pellew, a retired justice of the State Supreme Court, in the black and gold of his office, and the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Alan Brooksbank, and then the deans of the faculties and the professoriate in the colours of their disciplines — the scarlet and the blue, the gold and the rose of a dozen universities' higher degrees, worn by men and women who had taken them across half the world and carried them back to this one.

The whole hall rose. Tregenza brought the procession down the slope on a broad processional, and as the dais filled the choristers of the Elder Conservatorium sang the old students' anthem, the Gaudeamus, its cheerful medieval fatalism rising into the sandstone above a congregation most of whom did not know the words. The Chancellor took the chair beneath the window; the mace was laid before him; the doors were closed against the white glare of the terrace, and the long business of the afternoon began.

The degrees were conferred faculty by faculty, in the order the university had kept for generations. The dean of each faculty rose in turn and presented that year's candidates to the Chancellor, and the candidates came up out of their rows and crossed the floor in a long, unbroken file — up the slope to the dais, across before the Chancellor, and down again into the body of the hall, each one going up a student and coming back a graduate. As they passed, the Chancellor admitted them to their degrees in the customary form, the same words spoken over the whole multitude, from the first of the arts graduands to the last of the engineers.

It took a long time. The faculties were large that year — the benches of arts and commerce and the newer disciplines ran heavy, swollen by a decade in which a degree had come to seem the only sure footing — and the file across the floor seemed at moments endless, hundreds of names read out in the Registrar's steady voice while the heat pressed down through the high windows and the families fanned themselves with their programmes. Among the file were the honours graduands and the medallists of the year, those who had taken first-class results and carried off the prizes of their faculties; but the hall made no parade of them in the crossing itself, and the prizeman and the bare pass degree were admitted with the same handshake and the same form of words. What the ceremony honoured was the whole cohort, and the levelling was deliberate.

When the conferral of the bachelors was done, the university turned to its own act of honour. The public orator rose and presented, for the degree of Doctor of the University, an old woman seated among the dignitaries: Dr Eleanor Maitland, a physician who had given the whole of a long working life to the hospitals of the state's north and its dry country — to the health of the railway towns and the river settlements and the mission stations beyond them. The orator's citation set out her work plainly: the decades in places the city's doctors would not go, the clinics built out of nothing, the generation of country practitioners she had trained. The Chancellor admitted her to the degree, and the hall, which had sat through a thousand crossings without much stirring, came to its feet for her.

It fell to her, by the university's custom, to give the occasional address, and she spoke briefly and to the point. They were leaving the university, she told the graduands, into a state that had lately frightened itself — that had watched its bank fail and its confidence drain away, and had taken to telling its brightest young that their futures lay in other cities. She did not offer them the easy version of their prospects. But she made the case for the unglamorous and the local: that a state was not rebuilt by those who left it, that the work most worth doing was rarely the work most rewarded, and that a life spent in the service of one's own small and difficult place was not a lesser life for being lived out of the light. It was the argument of her own long career, and she made it without sentiment, to a hall of the newly qualified in a year that had given them little reason for confidence.

After the address the hall was given over for a few minutes to music. A soprano of the Elder Conservatorium, Imogen Hartley, sang from the front of the dais a setting of the psalm by Mozart, the Laudate Dominum, the single clear line of it rising over Tregenza's accompaniment and carrying to the gallery. For the length of it the shuffling and the fanning stopped, and the graduands in their hundreds and the families above them sat still in the heat and listened, and the ceremony briefly became something more than the administrative passage of a year's students into the professions. Then the last note went up into the timber roof, the hall breathed, and the business moved to its close.

The Chancellor closed the proceedings in the brief customary form, and the procession that had entered re-formed and went out — the mace, the Chancellor and the Vice-Chancellor, the honorary graduand walking now among them, the deans and the professoriate — to a broad recessional from the organ, Tregenza sending them out on Elgar, the great rising march of it bringing the whole hall to its feet a final time. Behind the procession the graduands followed, faculty by faculty, up the slope and out through the doors into the full white heat of the terrace.

Outside, the order of the afternoon dissolved at once into a crowd. The new graduates spilled across the lawns and the steps below the Mitchell Building's tower, hunting for their families in the glare, gowns over their arms and trenchers coming off in the heat; the photographs were taken under the sandstone and the date-palms, and the testamurs were held up and turned over and read again. For an hour the frontage of the university belonged to them — a few hundred of the state's newly qualified and the people who had come to see them, loud and relieved on the hot stone terrace, while inside the emptying hall the marshals gathered the abandoned programmes from the sloping floor.