Graduation Ceremony – Master Degrees, University of Adelaide (1998)

The University of Adelaide held the last of its graduation ceremonies for the year in the early evening, when the worst of the December heat had gone off the day and the light along North Terrace had turned to gold. This was the postgraduate conferral, the masters and the higher research degrees, and it was a smaller and quieter business than the great undergraduate ceremonies that had filled Bonython Hall earlier in the season. The graduands waiting on the lawns below the Mitchell Building were not school-leavers but grown men and women, a good many of them with grey already in their hair, who had come back to the university and taken its higher degrees while carrying the rest of their lives at the same time.

Inside, the hall did not fill as it had for the bachelors. The graduands sat on the long slope of the floor in far smaller numbers than the undergraduate ceremonies had drawn, and the gallery above them held a different kind of crowd — fewer parents, and more husbands and wives, and here and there a graduand's own children, brought to watch a mother or a father take a degree that had cost the household years of evenings and weekends. The room had about it the air of something earned the hard way and a little late.

The organ in the loft, under the hand of the university organist Margaret Tregenza, brought the procession in as the doors were closed against the dusk. The mace went first, and behind it the Chancellor, the Honourable David Pellew, who had presided over the year's conferrals from the first of them, and the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Alan Brooksbank, and then the deans and the professoriate in the colours of their faculties. The hall rose for them and settled, and the long ceremony of the higher degrees began.

The degrees were conferred faculty by faculty, but where the undergraduates had crossed the floor in one unbroken file, the postgraduates came up more slowly and in smaller companies, and each was hooded as well as capped — the master's hood laid across the shoulders by the dean of the faculty, the plain mark of the higher degree. They came from criminology and engineering, from public health and the sciences and the professions, a various and scattered company bound together by little except that each had gone back to a subject and pressed further into it than a first degree had asked.

Many of them had been years over it. The coursework masters had done their degrees in the evenings and the spare hours of working lives, in the lecture rooms the university had learned to fill after dark; the research candidates had spent longer still, alone with a thesis, and brought up the slope the particular tiredness of people who had finished a long and solitary piece of work. Among them, too, were the first large companies of overseas postgraduates the university had taken in — men and women who had come a long way to study, whose families could not be in the gallery to see them, and who carried that year an added weight, for the money markets of their own countries had fallen in the months before, and more than one of them sat in the hall not knowing what they were going home to.

With the degrees conferred, the university came to its own act of honour. The public orator presented, for the honorary degree of Doctor of the University, an old woman of the sciences: Professor Frances Iredale, a crystallographer who had given the better part of fifty years to the patient structural work the university's own physicists had founded a century before — the slow reading of matter by the way it bent light and rays, atom upon atom, structure upon structure. The citation made no claim to glamour. It set out instead a working life of exactness: the long decades at the bench, the students trained, the few fundamental things she had been the first to see plainly. The Chancellor admitted her to the degree, and the hall stood for her.

It fell to her to give the occasional address, and she spoke, fittingly, on patience. She had watched the world grow impatient, she told the graduands — quicker every year to want knowledge, quicker to want it useful, and readier all the time to mistake a credential for an understanding. Against that she set the slow virtues of the work they had just finished: that nothing worth knowing was known quickly, that mastery was a matter of years and not of fees, and that the long, unrewarded, unglamorous labour of coming to understand one thing thoroughly was among the few human goods that could be neither hurried nor bought. It was an old scientist's argument, put without apology to a room that had just spent, in time and money both, to prove her right.

After the address there was music. A cellist of the Elder Conservatorium, Rosa Ferraro, played alone at the front of the dais the prelude from the first of Bach's suites for the instrument, a single line climbing and folding back on itself in the lit hall while the graduands and the few who had come for them sat still in the cooling room. It was a smaller and graver music than the choral pieces of the undergraduate ceremonies, and it suited the evening and the company.

The Chancellor closed the proceedings, and Tregenza sent the procession out on the great toccata of Widor, the organ filling the hall to its high timber roof and bringing the whole company to its feet a final time. The graduands followed the deans up the slope and out through the doors, hooded now, into the blue dusk of the terrace, where the lamps had come on and the heat of the day was gone at last. There were photographs under the sandstone in the last of the light, and the slow, glad reunions of people who had earned the evening the long way; and then the hall behind them went dark, its year of ceremonies done, and the new masters of the university went out into the warm Adelaide night.