Eating at the union

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1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, food, University Union

The current Student Union building in the 1960s, before another storey was added. Photograph courtesy of Arthur Campbell.

Anyone for curried lamb (80c) or sausages and chips (55c)? Or perhaps you’d prefer to splash out and spend $1.50 on a steak? If money is short this week you could go for a filled roll at 18c, or a pie in a bag at 22c. If your tastes are a little more exotic you might prefer chicken chow mein at 80c or Hungarian goulash at 90c. Those were the most adventurous options on a fascinating document I discovered recently – the University Union price list for 1976.

The Union, jointly managed by the university and the students’ association, prides itself on supplying a range of cheap food options for students. When the current Union Building first opened in 1960 it had just one food supply, the cafeteria, offering “an attractive, reasonably-priced three-course lunch” and also morning and afternoon tea. As the student roll and the building expanded new options were added, including three meals a day in the main cafeteria, a coffee bar in the basement and the Terrace Dining Room, located on the top floor. The latter was promoted by the 1975 student handbook as “one (or several) grade(s) above the Cafeteria in the quality of meals provided at lunchtime. Prices are correspondingly higher.” The 1987 handbook noted the popularity of carvery lunches at the Terrace Dining Room (“a different ‘joint’ carved daily”) and also the “omelettes made to order.”

Looking down on the Union Building around 1973. The top floor, added in 1969, allowed the addition of the ‘superior’ Terrace Dining Room. Image courtesy of Arthur Campbell.

The Union food was always cheap and readily available; quality was another matter. The 1980 student handbook commented grumpily that “meals in the cafeteria have come in for a lot of criticism in the past, but the food could be a lot worse, as many hostel students will testify, and for $1.40, what sort of banquet do you expect?” The 1987 handbook made a better effort at putting a positive spin on the food: “Nourishing, hot and heaps!!!! The only way to describe the very reasonably priced ‘Meal of the Day’ available from the Cafe at lunchtime and during the ‘Tea Hour’. You just haven’t lived until you’ve tasted Union bangers with chips and lashings of GRAVY!!! Wizard!”

The cover of a 1988 brochure advertising the Union’s function services. The image of sophisticated eating is somewhat ruined by the presence of the cheap bubbly Chardon! Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, OUSA archives, MS-4240/294.

As well as its everyday food service, the Union provided catering for functions. With various rooms and a commercial kitchen on hand, it could offer a range of services, seating 600 people in the Union Hall for a formal dinner, and serving over 1000 at one dinner function. Outside catering was an important source of revenue which helped subsidise student services. In 1978, for example, the turnover from regular student meals was $177,000, but an additional $191,000 came in from special catering.

A 1988 brochure promoted the University Union as a function centre, especially for weddings, Christmas functions and 21st birthdays. Food suggestions reflected New Zealand culinary tastes in the late 1980s: “How about Veal Suecloise as a main – that’s escalopes of veal served with a capsicum, mushroom and brandy cream sauce? Or perhaps you’d prefer Scotch Fillet Cordon Bleu with Chicken Liver Mousse? Or then again, perhaps something simpler, like Roast Leg of Beef with Yorkshire Pudding, garden fresh vegetables and potatoes? Or for something a little less formal, how about Sliced Ham, tossed salad, French Dressing and Hot Garlic Bread?”

The Union cafeteria and its menu have been renovated many times in the decades since. A major facelift in 1995 turned the old cafeteria into a “food court”, featuring the Wok Factory, Lunch Pail, Burger Inc. and the Coffee Mill. I recall in 1999 and 2000 part was branded “Y2K” (“so last year,” quipped Critic in 2001). Other options for eating have also emerged on the central Dunedin campus: there are now various food suppliers in the Link (between the Union and the Library) and a cafe in the St David building. And just down the road, in the University Plaza Building (next to the stadium), is the attractive Plaza Cafe, while health science students can enjoy the cafe at the Hunter Centre.

Do you have any memories (good or bad!) to share of Union food?

The Link, located between the Union Building (left) and Library (right), photographed in 2007. It hosts various food suppliers. Image courtesy of University of Otago Marketing and Communications.

 

 

 

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From natural philosophy to physics

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1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, benefactors, mathematics, physics

The physics staff and senior students in 1926. Seated are (from left) lecturer Agnes Blackie, Professor Robert Jack and lecturer Robert Nimmo, who was about to head to England for postgraduate research and would eventually succeed Jack as professor. Everybody has signed their name on the back of the photo, but I haven’t been able to match all the names and faces. Others include Helen Thomson, Phyllis Sutton, Allan Harrington, James Horn, William Somerville and Harold Taylor, who would all graduate BSc in 1927, plus Doris Wheatley and Evelyn Franklin. Later departmental photos show Agnes Blackie surrounded by men, but physics was clearly less of a male bastion in 1926! Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, Department of Physics archives, MS-3846 Box 2, S06-516.

I’ve written about the beginnings of various departments created in the 20th century, but this week I look at the early decades of a subject which has been around for much longer: physics. John Shand was one of Otago’s first professors, appointed to the chair of mathematics and natural philosophy in 1870. “Natural philosophy” was an old term for “the study of natural bodies and the phenomena connected with them.” By the 1860s it was being overtaken by the term “physics”, though less so in Scotland; this may explain why Otago stuck with the traditional “natural philosophy” for its professor until the 1920s. Shand concentrated on teaching maths to begin with, but in 1881 and then from 1884 onwards he provided specialist classes in physics. As the university grew, the council appointed additional professors. In 1886 mathematics and natural philosophy were divided into two chairs; Shand chose to continue with physics and drop maths.

One of the remarkable features of physics at Otago is that until 1948 it had just two professors. Shand retired after 43 years of service and his successor, Robert Jack, after a mere 34 years. So, for nearly eight decades these two men had enormous influence on the research and teaching of physics in this country. I’ve written about both previously on this blog (here for Shand, and here for Jack). They were well remembered by many students, including health science students who sometimes struggled through their compulsory physics course! “Bobbie” Jack also became famous among the wider public as a pioneer of radio broadcasting. The professors weren’t the only long-serving staff, though: Agnes Blackie was assistant and then lecturer from 1919 to 1958, and Stan Hughes was a technician from the early 1920s to 1978.

Professors are important figures in university departments today, but once upon a time they held greater sway. Agnes Blackie, who started out as a student in 1915, recalled that they got to know their professors well, for “the professor was the whole department. In some of the larger departments – English, Physics, Chemistry – there might be an assistant who marked essays or practical books or helped with practical classes. For the rest, the professor did everything, gave every lecture, supervised every practical class.” She remembered Jack was “a bundle of nervous energy” whose workload meant “he curtailed his hours for sleep. He gave at least seventeen lectures a week, never giving a lecture without preparing it the night before; demonstrated eight hours weekly in the first year laboratory; spent a great deal of time helping students in the advanced laboratories; and then there was all the rest he had to do.”

Calendars for the 1890s outline the courses taught in Shand’s day. They provided broad coverage of various aspects of physics: heat, sound, light, static electricity, magnetism and current electricity. Textbooks included Deschanel’s Natural Philosophy, Garnett’s Heat, Tait’s Light, Thomson’s Electricity and Stewart and Gee’s Elementary Practical Physics; the advanced class used Maxwell’s Theory of Heat and Treatise on Electricity; Glazebrook’s Physical Optics and Gray’s Absolute Measurements in Electicity and Magnetism. As well as these physics courses, Shand taught the paper in elementary mechanics and hydrostatics: this was classed as part of mathematics by the University of New Zealand, but considered a traditional part of natural philosophy. When David Richards, who had an engineering background, became Professor of Mathematics in 1907, Shand handed over to him the teaching of mechanics, which was then renamed applied mathematics.

Shand and Jack were both renowned as thorough and clear lecturers, often faced with students who had been inadequately prepared at high school. Demonstrations kept their classes interesting. Blackie recalled that Jack’s lectures “were amply illustrated with applicances that the lecturer obviously enjoyed demonstrating. Wheels ran up hill, gyroscopes performed strange feats, waves ran along ropes, strings and tuning forks vibrated in resonance, light turned itself into brilliant colours, sparks cracked from electric generators, and I for one sat there fascinated.”

A generous bequest to the university by watchmaker Arthur Beverly, who died in 1907, provided a boost to the teaching of physics and mathematics with scholarships and funding for additional staff. In 1909 Thomas Hamilton became the Beverly Demonstrator in Physics, “the first adequately paid assistant any professor ever had,” according to university historian WP Morrell. In 1915 funds from the bequest also allowed the appointment of a “mechanic” – I guess we would now call him a technician – for the physics department. Another generous endowment, this time from the Mackenzie family of Walter Peak Station, enabled the appointment of Charles Focken, a Melbourne and Oxford graduate, as Beverly-Mackenzie lecturer in physics from 1926.

Physics has been located in the Science III building since 1977; prior to that it was in the “physics building” – the southernmost extension of the main clocktower building. The extension was built in the early 1920s, taking over the space once occupied by a large silver birch tree (transplanted to the Andersons Bay home of the architect, Edmund Anscombe) and a tennis court. Before getting its new wing, physics was squeezed into the original part of the clocktower building, together with many other departments. Laboratory work took place underground, in the basement.

I’ll close this post with a little inspiration from Agnes Blackie, who wrote some wonderful reminscences of her many years at Otago. She was a true fan of her subject: “I can’t imagine a better subject for a lecturer. Brimful of interest, it illumines and explains the world of everyday experience yet leads out in the furthest realms of space and inwards to the intriuging mysteries of the very small.” Long live the physics department!

Breaking the barriers

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1980s, 1990s, disabilities

The Disability Information & Support team in 2011. Back row from left: Emma Holt, Eileen O’Regan, Helen Ingrams. Front: Jenny Week, Donna-Rose McKay, Kim Daufratshofer. Photo by Graham Warman, courtesy of University of Otago Marketing & Communications.

There were many changes to the university in the 1980s and 1990s. They included developments which had a revolutionary impact for one sector of the community – people with physical impairments. Making the university more accessible to students and staff with disabilities did not happen early and did not happen fast, but steady growth in awareness and action led, eventually, to a new world of possibilities.

The stories of students with disabilities in the late 20th century reveal the enormous determination required to complete a qualification before some of the advances in technology we now take for granted. It must have been even more difficult for earlier generations.

Barry Kirkland was Otago’s first profoundly deaf graduate, completing a BSc and BCom (Hons) in 1993. He had no special support during lectures in the 1980s, having to rely on written handouts from lecturers and looking at visual presentations. Special grants enabled him to buy a portable computer – then a very expensive item – while studying for his second degree. Other students typed lecture notes for him on this. He appreciated the help he received from them and from university staff, but what deaf students really needed, he suggested, was interpreters. He also noted the significant prejudice against deaf people in the community, with deafness often equated with a lack of intelligence. The media was full of misinformation, and seldom gave positive coverage of the achievements or needs of the deaf. Kirkland’s own achievements would, he hoped, encourage others with disabilities to take on the challenges of university study.

John Kaye was already studying at Otago when he became a ventilator-dependent tetraplegic after a rugby injury in 1984. He was forced to abandon his plans to become a surveyor, but returned to university in 1988 to study computer science – he had learned to operate a wheelchair and computer using his mouth. Writing in 1991, Kaye noted the benefits his studies brought: “I have found that attending university has improved my attitude towards life. Achieving has made a big difference to my self esteem.” His positive attitude helped him overcome many obstacles. He found that planning well in advance meant his lectures and tutorials could be allocated to accessible venues, and lecturers would arrange for special assistance, including lecture notes or the audio taping of classes. After gaining a BA in computer science in 1998 he developed an interest in classics, going on to complete a Diploma for Graduates and Postgraduate Diploma in Arts. By 2008, when the ODT featured a story on Kaye, he was planning a masters degree.

An earlier wheelchair-using student did not find the university staff quite so cooperative. Donna-Rose Harris began her studies in the late 1970s. She later recalled: “My long-suffering friends pulled me up two or three flights of stairs twice a week to the top of the Quad Geology Building to my stats lecture because they refused to move the lecture to somewhere more accessible.” Like Kirkland and Kaye, Harris was determined and intelligent and went on to achieve several qualifications: she graduated BA in 1981, BCom in 1985, and then went on to a Posgraduate Diploma in Arts.

Harris – who later became Donna-Rose McKay – went on to a pioneering role in disability services for the university. She was appointed part-time to the new job of disabilities coordinator in 1992. The university’s first efforts to take the needs of people with impairments seriously had begun some ten years earlier. In 1982 a “useful booklet for disabled students” was produced for the Student Services Committee, assisted by Works and Services. Among other things, it listed wheelchair-accessible toilets and buildings with ramps. As the staff newsletter commented, “there is a formidable list of areas where wheelchairs cannot be propelled,” but “the future for the disabled student looks bright.” Some existing facilities were being upgraded to remove barriers, and more thought was going into the design of new buildings.

Publicising the help available was also a priority – many students were not aware of assistance the university could provide for them. Various staff members volunteered to liaise on issues of concern. The Disabled Action and Support Group, established in 1987, provided a new mechanism of support. A couple of years later it established an Academic Facilitation Fund, which provided money to pay for individual assistance, such as extra tutoring (though not for equipment). There was a growing demand for such support: “Each year increasing numbers of students with disabilities are enrolling at Otago, and they can be found among the full range of university departments,” reported a 1990 staff newsletter. That year the university appointed Coralie Kirkland to produce a report on existing students with disabilities at Otago. She found that about a third of students with impairments had mobility problems, and another third had vision loss, hearing loss or specific learning disabilities. The most frequent difficulties reported by students were inability to read overhead transparencies and inability to hear lecturers.

Kirkland recommended the appointment of a permanent liaison officer for disabilities and the establishment of a student learning centre. Meanwhile, new government policy was requiring the university to take the needs of the disabled into account. The university’s first Equal Employment Opportunities management plan, prepared by EEO Co-ordinator Kris Smith and approved in 1991, included recommendations relating to staff and students with impairments. In response to these reports, the university appointed Rachel Ford as a temporary part-time Disabilities Facilitation Officer in 1991, with Donna-Rose Harris becoming the first permanent staff member dedicated to people with disabilities in 1992.

From these tentative beginnings the disabilities support service grew to become the impressive operation it is today. By 1996 Harris’s role was full-time and in 1998 a project officer and administrator were added to the team. As funding and staffing grew, the service was able to take a more strategic role in making the campus more inclusive, rather than simply responding to the urgent needs of students who came through the door. Staff advocated for students with impairments, but also supported them to be as independent as possible. Co-ordinating learning support has always been a key role of the service, with many casual staff – mostly fellow students – employed as note-takers or interpreters or tutors.

Many people have had their path through university made smoother through what is now known as Disability Information and Support. By 2010 there were around 850 Otago students with a disability affecting their study and 25,500 hours of learning assistance provided. The support team was still led by Donna-Rose McKay who, in addition to her effectiveness, served as a living reminder of the potential capabilities of a woman with highly visible disabilities. Her death after a short illness in 2013 was a great loss to Otago, but her legacy remains an inspiration (you can read tributes to her in this Bulletin article). Do you have any stories to share of the history of the disabilities service, or life as a student with impairments in the days before support services?

 

The gift of music

Tags

1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1970s, benefactors, music

John Blair, the Dunedin seed merchant whose generous legacy allowed the music department to get started. Image from the Cyclopedia of New Zealand: Otago & Southland Provincial Districts (Christchurch: Cyclopedia Company, 1905), courtesy of the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 New Zealand Licence

Turnips and opera may seem an unlikely pairing, but at Otago the former eventually led to the latter! Turnips were one of the specialties of Dunedin seed merchants Nimmo and Blair, regular winners of prizes at agricultural and pastoral shows around Otago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. John Blair, one of the owners, was a Scotsman drawn to the colonies by the lure of gold. After some years in Victoria he arrived in Otago in 1862, attracted by the new rush to the Dunstan. When he failed to make a fortune on the goldfields, Blair settled in Dunedin, finding work with a seed merchant. Blair proved a better businessman than he was a miner. With partner Robert Nimmo he purchased his late employer’s firm in 1876, and Nimmo and Blair quickly flourished as growers and suppliers of seeds, also branching out to sell fertilisers and agricultural implements. When he died in 1913 Blair was a man of considerable means, leaving money to his family and to various charitable causes, especially those connected with religion and education in the south.

Blair had a great fondness for music and in 1925 the University Council learned from his trustees that he had bequeathed funds to pay for a music lecturer at Otago (the delay after his death was presumably to allow various life interests and annuities in his estate to be completed). With funds for a lecturer’s salary guaranteed, the university was happy to expand its academic offerings to include the study of music; it was already supporting more informal adult education classes in music appreciation through the Workers’ Educational Association.

The council advertised for a lecturer, but did not have to look far to find a perfectly qualified candidate. Victor Galway, who was organist at First Church, conductor of the Dunedin Choral Society and its orchestra, a private music teacher, and the WEA lecturer, started work as the University of Otago’s first music lecturer in 1926. Galway, then in his early thirties, had excellent academic credentials in addition to practical experience, for he was the University of Melbourne’s first doctoral graduate in music (he was born in England but migrated to Australia with his family in his teens).

The University of Otago’s first music lecturer, Victor Galway, photographed in 1931. Image courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library, New Zealand Free Lance collection, reference PAColl-6303-32.

The music department had small beginnings, with just 12 students in its first year. Early courses on offer included harmony, counterpoint, musical appreciation and history, and – for advanced students – composition and orchestration. The actual performance of music would not become part of the curriculum until much later, though staff and students of the department took part in many musical activities outside their classes.

Otago was late getting off the ground with music – Auckland University College had a music lecturer from 1888 and Canterbury from 1891 – but its programme grew steadily. Victor Galway, who was promoted to professor in 1939, reflected in 1949 on the department’s first 25 years. There were now 185 students, including 45 studying for the specialist Bachelor of Music degree. Galway took pride in the achievements of those he had taught, particularly those who had gone on to influential positions in education: “The Professor of Music in Canterbury University College and both of the lecturers in Music there are students of mine and graduates of this University, as is also the lecturer in Music in Otago [Mary Martin, who had graduated MusB in 1930 and was appointed lecturer in 1939]. The Departments of Music in the Dunedin Technical High School, the Christchurch Technical College, the Papanui Road Technical College as well as in many other post primary schools in New Zealand are staffed by men and women trained at the University of Otago. Others of our graduates hold leading positions in the National Broadcasting Service, as Church Organists, and as performers and teachers throughout New Zealand.”

Recently I had the pleasure of talking with Honor McKellar, who was a student in the department in the early 1940s. She remembers the music staff of two – Galway and Martin – being squeezed into a small office shared with the German department in the clocktower building. Among the half dozen or so other students majoring in music then were John Ritchie (who became Professor of Music at Canterbury and a noted composer) and Walter Metcalf (who studied both science and music and ended up with an academic career in chemistry). Metcalf was a good violinist who led the university orchestra, while McKellar played “about fourteenth violin.” She describes herself as “dispensable” to the orchestra – when somebody in a front row broke a string she passed her violin forward and retired from the concert!

Honor McKellar’s great talent was in singing, and Prof Galway called on her to illustrate the public lectures he often gave. He was a popular lecturer, well-known for swinging his watch chain as he walked from side to side across the stage. He was a good teacher, she recalls, and gave them a thorough technical training; she could “write a fugue backwards”. He was, though, very conservative in his musical tastes, and famously described nineteenth-century opera as “the lowest form of art”. Seventeenth-century composer Purcell was more to his taste, and in 1941 he led the Otago University Musical Society in a concert performance of the Purcell opera Dido and Aeneas. Galway’s successors as Professor of Music, Peter Platt and then John Drummond, were opera enthusiasts who developed this aspect of the department’s work greatly.

The seed merchant’s legacy – still commemorated through the Blair Professorship in Music – clearly had quite an impact on Otago. As well as the lectureship, his bequest funded scholarships for many music and arts students until the 1970s, when the money was redirected into the newly-established Mozart Fellowship for composers. Other music lovers later followed his example and contributed financially to the department’s activities; most notably, a large bequest from Dunedin physician William Evans funded a travelling scholarship and lecturers in music performance. Honor McKellar returned to Otago as its first executant lecturer in 1971; performance was offered as a degree subject from 1966, but tuition was initially contracted out to external teachers.

The Department of Music has offered much to Dunedin, and the wider world, ever since it started in 1926. It’s nice that this is a reciprocal relationship, with those who enjoy music supporting its teaching. And how appropriate it is that money earned from seeds got it started and helped it flourish!

Advertisement for Nimmo & Blair from the Otago Daily Times, 9 November 1895. Image from PapersPast, courtesy of the National Library of New Zealand.