Photo mysteries

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1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, capping, Christchurch, food science, Helensburgh, languages, Maori, medicine, microbiology, physical education, recreation, St Margaret's

This is a plea for help! Today’s post is rather different from previous ones. I’m posting some photographs I’d like to know more about. Some have appeared on the blog previously, while others are new. They’re all interesting images that I’m thinking of including in the University of Otago history book, and it would be great to have more details before they appear in print. Do you recognise any of the people or places or activities, or can you help with missing dates? If so, I’d love to hear from you, either by a comment on this post, or by email or letter (the ‘about’ page has a link to my university staff page with contact details).

I’ve gathered lots of images from archival, personal and departmental collections over the last few years, but I’m still short in some areas. In particular, I’m keen to locate photos relating to activities involving the commerce division/school of business and the humanities division (though I have a good supply of photos for the languages departments). Zoology, maths and psychology are other departments I’d like to find more images for. Where more general images of student life are concerned, I’d love to find a few photos relating to life in student flats and to lodgings and landladies. I have plenty of capping parade photos, but some other photos of student activities would be great. Overall, the 1980s are a bit of a gap in my lists of potential illustrations, so I’m on the lookout especially for anything from that decade, and to a lesser extent the 1960s, 1970s and 1990s. Another major gap is for images relating to the Christchurch, Wellington and Invercargill campuses. If you have any interesting photos you would be willing to lend to the project, please do get in touch!

Now, on with the mystery photos …

1. Gentlemen dining

Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, Irvine family papers, MS-4207/006, S16-669a.

These gentlemen, about to indulge in a little fine dining at the Christchurch Club, have connections to the early years of the Christchurch Clinical School (now the University of Otago, Christchurch). Those I have identified so far were either senior Christchurch medical men or Otago administrators and members of the Christchurch Clinical School Council. That council was organised in 1971 and met for the first time in 1972. Max Panckhurst, an Otago chemistry professor who was on the council, died in 1976, so the photo must date from before that, and since it also features Robin Williams, who completed his term as Otago Vice-Chancellor in 1973, it probably comes from the early 1970s. Do you know the exact occasion or year?

The men I have identified are, starting from Max Panckhurst, who is closest to the camera with fair curly hair, and working clockwise: LM Berry, Carl Perkins, George Rolleston, Robin Williams, Leslie Averill, Alan Burdekin (Christchurch Club manager,standing), Bill Adams, LA Bennett, Robin Irvine, unknown, unknown, Pat Cotter (partly obscured), D Horne, Don Beaven, unknown, Fred Shannon, Athol Mann, JL Laurenson. Do you recognise anybody else? Or have I got any of these wrong? Some other potential candidates, who were also on the Clinical School Council, are EA Crothall, DP Girvan, TC Grigg and CF Whitty.

2. Burgers

Were you a Burger? After I published a story about Helensburgh House, a student hall of residence in the former Wakari nurses’ home, I met up with Glenys Roome, who had been its warden. She kindly shared some photos, including these three. Helensburgh House ran from 1984 to 1991 – I’d love to identify which year these were taken, and perhaps some names!

 

3. The missing singer

Photo courtesy of Michael Shackleton.

All but one of the members of the 1952 sextet in this photo are identified – can you help with the full name of the young man third from left? His first name was John. The lineup was, from left: Linley Ellis, Richard Bush, John ?, Keith Monagan, Michael Shackleton, Brian McMahon. The story of the sextet featured in an earlier post.

4. On the rocks

Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, Otago University Tramping Club records, 96-063/036, S15-592b.

This is one of my favourite photos – it’s already featured on the blog a couple of times and is sure to end up in the book! In the original tramping club album it is identified as being at Mihiwaka, but somebody kindly pointed out when I posted about the tramping club that this is most likely taken from Mount Cargill. Do you recognise this spot? And can you identify any of the 1946 trampers?

5. Phys-eders

The School of Physical Education, Sport and Exercise Sciences has kindly shared some of their photo collection. The photograph on the beams was taken in the 1970s – were you there, and do you know the exact year? How about the others – any ideas where and when they were taken, or who the people are? I published a post about the early years of the phys ed school in an earlier post, and there are photos on that I’d love to have more information about too, so please take a look!

6. Te Huka Mātauraka

Photo courtesy of the Māori Centre

This photo was taken outside the Māori Centre, Te Huka Mātauraka, in 2002 and featured in a post about the centre. Can you identify anybody?

7. Microbiologists

Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, Department of Physiology records, r.6681, S16-521c.

This photograph is a good example of the value of this blog. In the original, the man is identified as Franz Bielschowsky, of the cancer research laboratory. When I included it in a story featuring Bielschowsky, people informed me that the man here is actually Leopold Kirschner, a microbiologist working in the Medical Research Council Microbiology Unit. It was probably taken in 1949. Typically for that period, the female assistant is not named – do you know who she is? What, exactly, are they doing? I suspect health and safety procedures have changed since then!

Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, University of Otago Photographic Unit records, MS-4185/042, S15-500d.

Here’s another microbiology-related photo, taken during the first hands-on science camp in 1990 – it featured in an earlier post about hands-on science. Can you identify any of these high school students? I’m curious to know if any of them ended up as University of Otago students!

8. The St Margaret’s ball

Image courtesy of Peter Chin.

This photograph, taken at an early 1960s St Margaret’s ball, featured in a story about Chinese students at Otago. At centre front are Jocelyn Wong and Peter Chin – can you identify anybody else? Exactly which year was it?

9. Picnickers

 

Image courtesy of Alexander Turnbull Library, Ref: 1/2-166716-F. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22884184

The Latin picnic was a popular event in the early twentieth century. This photo was taken at Whare Flat in 1932 – it featured in an earlier post about writers at the university. People identified so far include Dan Davin, on the far right, with Angus Ross in front of him and Christopher Johnson to Davin’s right. Other students include Frank Hall (back left), Winnie McQuilkan (centre front) and Ida Lawson (in dark jacket behind her). The Classics staff, Prof Thomas Dagger Adams and Mary Turnbull, are at front left. Can you identify anybody else?

10. In the food science lab

I featured these mystery photos quite some time ago on the blog, and people have identified Rachel Noble, a 1980s student, as the woman in the centre of the bottom image. The food scientists tell me these students were in the yellow lab, possibly working on an experimental foods course or the product development course run by Richard Beyer. Can you help with the date, or identify any of the other students?

Images courtesy of the Hocken Collections, from the archives of the Association of Home Science Alumnae of NZ, MS-1516/082, S13-556b (above) and S13-556c (below).

 

I have quite a few other photograph puzzles, but will save those for future posts!

Update

Thanks very much to those of you who have identified some of the mystery people already – yay! And thanks for the kind offers of further photographs. For those with photographs, here are a few instructions. If they’re already digital, that’s great. If you are scanning them, it would help if you make them high resolution (say 300dpi), preferably in TIFF format, but JPEGs are okay. If they are hard copy, I’m happy to scan them for you if you’re willing to lend them to me – I promise to return them promptly. I can pick up items if you’re in Dunedin, otherwise you can post them to me (it’s probably easiest if you send them to Ali Clarke, c/o Hocken Collections, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin 9054). Remember if you’re sending images that you need to be willing for them to appear, potentially, in the new university history book (due out 2019) or on this blog! I’ll send you a form to sign granting permission for their use in university publications. Any published photos will be attributed to you; do let me know if there’s a photographer I should clear copyright with as well. Thanks 🙂

 

The ‘latest’ health science – nursing

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1920s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, Christchurch, home science, medicine, mental health, nursing, public health, Wellington, women's studies

Some of New Zealand’s leading nurses of the 1920s, when the university attempted to set up a nursing diploma. They were photographed at the first conference of hospital matrons, held at Wellington Hospital in 1927. Image courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library, S.P. Andrew Ltd collection, reference 1/1-018313-F.

The University of Otago is perhaps most famous for its health science courses, but many people are unaware of its contributions to the largest of the health professions: nursing. There have been many twists and turns in the path to nursing education at Otago, which this blog post attempts to map.

Nurse training in this country started out with ad hoc programmes in various hospitals; it was an apprentice-style system, with nurses learning on the job and providing the bulk of the hospital workforce as they did so. In 1901 New Zealand introduced the registration of nurses. From that date general nurses could become registered after completing the required years of training and passing a state examination. Separate registration was later added for obstetric, psychiatric and psychopaedic nurses, along with another roll for nurses who had completed shorter training programmes, with greater restrictions on their practice (known initially as nursing aids, then community nurses, then enrolled nurses, then nurse assistants, then enrolled nurses again). The hospital-based education of nurses slowly improved, with more time dedicated to teaching from dedicated nurse tutors, but there was no higher education available for those tutors. Advancing education programmes became a priority for those who wished to increase the professional standing of nurses and improve the care they offered.

When Otago’s home science school started out in the 1910s, nurses took notice. In 1912 leading nurse Hester Maclean, who edited the nursing journal Kai Tiaki, published there the response of home science professor Winifred Boys-Smith to Maclean’s enquiries about the potential of the school’s new courses for women who intended to enter the nursing profession. Boys-Smith suggested that the diploma course would be ‘incalculably useful to a girl who wanted to become a really efficient hospital nurse, for it would enable her to obtain a sound and much more advanced knowledge of physiology, sanitary science and household economics, than she could afford the time to gain, while she was training at a hospital’. The courses might also benefit nurses already trained who wished to improve their qualifications: Boys-Smith hoped to attract ‘quite a number of the more intelligent nurses, who wish to make themselves especially efficient for the higher posts which offer’. It is unclear whether or not any nurses or potential nurses enrolled at the home science school at this point, but the courses there did become the core of a new venture a decade later.

In 1922, in response to various concerns about the state of nursing education, and advocacy from the Trained Nurses’ Association, the University of Otago council began planning a five-year nursing diploma. In consultation with the home science and medical schools, it approved a curriculum consisting of two years of university courses, two years of ‘ward work and general hospital training’, and a final year of specialised nursing education. An attractive feature of this programme was that it used existing courses at the home science school and hospital and would not require the council to employ any additional academic staff until the fifth year. Meanwhile, the government’s department of health was keen to see an advanced course for already-trained nurses, and suggested the fifth year of the proposed Otago diploma could become that course; it offered to send two senior nurses overseas to be educated as lecturers for the programme. Janet Moore headed to London and Mary Lambie to Toronto in 1925, with the fifth year/advanced programme scheduled to commence in 1926; meanwhile several women started the first years of the programme through the home science school.

Unfortunately, the scheme then fell apart due to a series of misunderstandings between the university and the health department. Neither had explicitly stated who was to pay the salaries of the specialist nursing lecturers. The university council assumed the health department’s involvement and support meant they would stump up the cash required, while the health department assumed the university would pay its own staff. Those council members who had only supported the project on the basis it would cost the university nothing stubbornly refused to commit any funding, even after the nurses’ association offered to pay a contribution. The health department proved equally stubborn over the matter. Admittedly the university was strapped for cash, but it is sad that a programme that could have changed the course of New Zealand nursing education collapsed over the cost of two salaries. Moore and Lambie approached Victoria College (later Victoria University of Wellington), where they got a more sympathetic response to a proposal for a short diploma course for already-registered nurses. The government proved more willing to offer funding for this course, which commenced in 1928 at Wellington Hospital, jointly supervised by Victoria, the health department and the hospital boards association. For 50 years the School of Advanced Nursing Studies, as it became known, was to provide New Zealand’s only advanced education for nurses. The first two students in Otago’s collapsed programme, who had already completed the first 4 years, went on to complete the new Wellington course. One of them, Winifred Fraser, applied to Otago for a diploma of nursing, becoming the one and only person awarded that qualification. Most of the other women partway through their course switched to home science.

After this unfortunate episode, the University of Otago kept out of nursing education for many decades. Meanwhile, dissatisfaction with New Zealand nursing education remained, with high attrition rates, a failure to keep up with new developments and a continuing focus on student nurses as a labour force rather than learners. In 1970 the government approached the World Health Organisation, which appointed Helen Carpenter (director of the University of Toronto’s nursing school) to review the current system. Her report (An improved system of nursing education for New Zealand) led to major reforms. The education of registered nurses shifted from the health sector to the tertiary education sector. Commencing at Wellington and Christchurch in 1973, technical institutes around the country established nursing schools, and registered nurse programmes at hospitals were gradually phased out (though hospitals continued to train community/enrolled nurses). The technical institutes also later developed advanced diploma courses in various clinical fields, taking over the role of the School of Advanced Nursing Studies.

One of Carpenter’s recommendations was that a proportion of nurses should be educated to a still higher level, through universities. She suggested that Otago’s preventive and social medicine department, along with the education departments at Victoria, Massey and Canterbury, could start by appointing a nurse to their academic staff, with a view to building up nursing research and later courses. Otago’s medical faculty proved largely supportive of the idea, but over the next decade various proposed schemes came to nothing. Meanwhile, Victoria and Massey began offering a few BA papers in nursing studies. Proposals from Otago included a diploma in nursing administration, and later a basic-level bachelor’s degree, but neither made it past the University Grants Committee. In 1979, faced with various proposals for new nursing courses, the UGC appointed a special committee on nursing education, which recommended turning down Otago and Massey’s proposals for basic degrees, and another from Auckland for a post-basic bachelor’s degree. Victoria, it suggested, could develop its existing programme into a full nursing degree, complete with clinical education, while Massey should continue its existing courses. Victoria approached Otago’s Wellington clinical school to see if they might cooperate in an undergraduate nursing degree. That scheme got quite advanced but eventually fell through due to the government’s unwillingness to supply funding. Victoria’s nursing programme went into abeyance for a while in the early 1980s, but it later built up a postgraduate school. There were many differing opinions about university-level nursing education but it was, generally, finance that prevented many a dreamed-of programme from getting going. In Dunedin, any sense of urgency for an undergraduate programme that would lead to nursing registration ended once the Otago Polytechnic opened its nursing school in 1984.

Of course, nurses did enrol in a variety of other University of Otago courses. A good example is nursing academic Beverley Burrell, who trained as a nurse at Dunedin Hospital in the 1970s. After developing an interest in education through the playcentre movement, she enrolled in education courses at the university, going on to complete a BA and MA in women’s studies. There was a close synergy between her nursing experience and her university study.

Robyn Beach leading a class in the ‘nursing – high acuity’ paper in the Centre for Postgraduate Nursing Studies premises in Oxford Terrace, Christchurch, 2012. Image courtesy of the Centre for Postgraduate Nursing Studies.

In the end, it was on the Christchurch campus that Otago finally got a successful programme specifically for nurses off the ground. The medical school there offered a wide range of postgraduate courses, undertaken by a variety of health professionals, including nurses; for instance, many nurses completed public health and mental health postgrad qualifications. With the government injecting money into ongoing clinical training for healthcare workers, and increasing demand for nursing-specific courses, in 1997 the Centre for Postgraduate Nursing Studies opened. Initially hosted by Christchurch’s Department of Public Health and General Practice, it grew quickly and soon became an independent centre. Christchurch nurses had long wanted a local alternative to the postgraduate nursing programmes offered by Massey and Victoria universities, but flexible teaching methods, including block courses and distance education, meant the new Christchurch courses soon had students from all over the South Island, and a few from further afield. Starting out with papers on nursing practice and mental health nursing practice, the centre soon developed a range of papers, some generic and others in specialist fields of practice. Students could complete a postgraduate diploma or master’s degree in health sciences, endorsed in nursing, or various shorter certificate courses in specialist fields; the centre also offered PhDs. From 2006 a new master of health sciences option allowed an alternative to the papers plus thesis requirement: students could now complete papers and a ‘clinically applied research practicum’ for an endorsement in ‘nursing – clinical’. This was an important development because it met the clinically-oriented master’s degree requirement for those who applied to the New Zealand Nursing Council for registration as a nurse practitioner, a new level of practice which included prescribing rights.

Beverley Burrell teaching a course for the ‘nursing – leadership and management’ paper in 2011. The class was held in the Philatelic Society rooms, one of many temporary premises used after the usual venues were closed due to earthquake damage. Image courtesy of the Centre for Postgraduate Nursing Studies.

As the nursing centre grew, so did its research. Staff attracted considerable research funding, including from the Health Research Council, and also benefited from Tertiary Education Commission funding targeted at developing research capability in nursing and other health professions which had not done well under the PBRF system. In 2008 Lisa Whitehead received the university’s early career award for distinction in research, recognising her achievements in research on the management of long-term conditions (a field of particular interest for the nursing centre). As its research capability grew, the centre attracted more PhD students from both New Zealand and overseas; by 2012 it had 10 PhD candidates enrolled among its 350 students and had the largest postgraduate programme on the Christchurch campus.

The Addington Raceway was another stand-in venue for nursing courses following the Christchurch earthquakes. Here it is set up ready for clinical teaching for the ‘health assessment and advanced nursing practice’ paper in 2011. Image courtesy of the Centre for Postgraduate Nursing Studies.

The nursing centre has never been short of initiative and has introduced a variety of new courses to meet needs in the health sector. In 2016 it enrolled the first students in perhaps its most exciting venture to date: a new master of nursing science degree, which allows people with a bachelor’s degree in any discipline to complete the professional education required for registration as a nurse in a concentrated two-year programme. While this type of programme has been available in North America for decades and in Australia for several years, it is the first qualification of its type in New Zealand and required new regulations from the Nursing Council. Finally, some 90 years after the first ill-starred attempt, the University of Otago is offering a course which leads to the registration of nurses!

A tale of 10 libraries

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1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Christchurch, Invercargill, library, Wellington

Hard at work in the library of the University of Otago, Wellington, in 2007. Image courtesy of University of Otago Marketing & Communications.

Last week my post mentioned the popular practice of studying for exams in the sunshine. This week I take a look at another popular student hangout at this time of year – the library. Neil Howard, who was an arts student in the 1950s when the library was in the clocktower building, remembers the “cosy comfort of the little cubicles where we could chat”. The “most terrifying place was the upper Oliver at the northern end where the real swots worked. Here silence reigned supreme, dropped books, coughs, sneezes, splutters were greeted with angry eyes appearing above the top of books while a spoken word suggested the imminent appearance of a bouncer.” The library may have changed, but the mixture of people chatting and “real swots” has not!

Of course a library is not just a study space, for a good collection of books and journals is critical to a university’s teaching and research. In 1872 – a year after classes commenced – the university library boasted just over 500 volumes, and fitted into a bookcase in the council chamber of the original university building (in Princes Street). The first four professors had purchased books, which were supplemented by public donations. The cash-strapped university spent very little on books, or their management, in its first few decades. The library grew to around 8000 volumes in its first twenty years thanks to books gifted by the public, the collection of a short-lived independent reference library committee, and the donation of the provincial government’s library after the provinces were abolished in 1876. The books were kept in locked shelves, with the university registrar, who also served as librarian, holding the keys.

The library received a big boost in 1908 when Dr TM Hocken donated his valuable collection of early New Zealand books, pictures and manuscripts to the people of New Zealand, on condition that they be managed by the University of Otago. A new wing was added to the museum (which was also run by the university) to house the new collection, and the university employed its first full-time librarian, William Trimble, to catalogue and care for it.

Meanwhile, the main university library remained under the care of the registrar in its long-term home, the second floor of the main university building (where the registry is now). Trimble’s successor, Beatrice Howes, was appointed in 1913 to be half-time at the Hocken, and half-time in the main library, finally relieving the busy registrar of library duties. The next big change came in 1935, when John Harris was appointed librarian. He was the university’s first trained librarian, and in his 13 years at Otago brought a new professionalism to the place, improving the collections, the staffing and the access students enjoyed to books and journals.

Eventually the students and books outgrew their library space, and there was no further room in the main building. A brand new library building opened in 1965 on the corner of Albany and Cumberland streets, strategically located half-way between the medical school and the main university buildings. It was an attractive space, two stories high, with a courtyard in the centre; the building also housed several university departments, which later moved into other new buildings, allowing the library to expand.

The 1965 central library was notoriously built around the property of elderly storekeeper William Matthews, who refused to move. His property on the corner of Albany and Castle streets was demolished after he died in 1967, aged 91. Photograph courtesy of Arthur Campbell.

Sadly, once the building was full it had no potential for extensions. Jock McEldowney, who was university librarian from 1961 to 1987, recognised this before the library moved in, and set about some long-term planning to help the library cope with the anticipated future growth in students. His strategy was for “controlled decentralization” – six physically separate libraries around the Dunedin campus, each with senior librarians and the capability to provide full services to students. This was a pragmatic solution, and it remains the university library’s basic administrative structure to this day. It was based around various libraries which had developed in an ad hoc fashion on campus over the years, and added one important new one.

Many departments had developed their own libraries, and some of these were quite substantial. The geographical expansion of the university, together with its frugal funding allocation to the central library, encouraged the practice. When the medical school moved from the central campus to its new Great King Street building (now known as the Scott Building) in 1917, the medical library was born and all the medical books in the central library were moved there. Medical school administrators took over the running of the collection; this later became a point of tension as the medical school and the library sometimes wrangled over the control of the medical library. The expanding medical library moved into a purpose-built space in the new Sayers Building in 1972.

The dental and law libraries gained new status under McEldowney’s library structure. Both were essentially departmental libraries which had grown along with their faculties, and got much improved spaces when their faculties moved into new buildings: the dentists into the Walsh Building in 1961 and the lawyers into the Hocken Building (now the Richardson Building) in 1979. The Hocken Building also provided a new home for the Hocken Library, formerly housed in the museum and part of the 1965 library building. Heritage collections do not, like other libraries, throw out their “old” books, and this made the Hocken especially prone to a need for more space. Its manuscript and photograph collections lived for some years in the former vehicle testing station in Leith Street, before all the collections were reunited in their current location, the former cheese factory in Anzac Avenue, in 1998.

The final library in the “controlled decentralization” programme, the science library, was a new institution, created out of the libraries of several different departments. This was a controversial move, with some departments very reluctant to lose their individual libraries; there was a major battle over Chemical Abstracts. But the advocates of a centralised science collection, with easier access for all students and a professional librarian in charge, eventually won out. The library was able to take advantage of the development of major new science buildings in that period, moving into its current premises in 1977.

The development of the clinical schools of medicine at Christchurch and Wellington in the 1970s presented a new challenge to the library. The university wanted staff and students in these campuses to have equal access to research services. Fortunately both cities had exisiting hospital board libraries, and Otago was able to pool resources with them to create joint library services for the university and healthcare staff.

Back in Dunedin, the decentralization scheme reduced pressure on the central library for some years, but eventually the continuing acceleration of the student roll made a larger building essential. In 2001 the magnificent new Information Services Building was opened, with greatly improved study space for students.

Inside the central library, 2004. Image courtesy of University of Otago Marketing & Communications.

The newest additions to Otago’s collection of libraries came with its merger with the Dunedin College of Education in 2007. The Robertson Library opened in 1981, bringing together the College of Education and Otago Polytechnic library collections. It is named after Bill Robertson, who taught at the polytech and also chaired the College of Education Council and the Otago Education Board. The university library now runs the Robertson Library, supplying services under contract to Otago Polytechnic as well as to its own students. With the College of Education merger the university also acquired the smaller specialist education library on the Southland campus.

From that single bookcase to ten libraries in four cities, the University of Otago library has certainly come a long way! Of course, there have also been major changes in the technologies used by the library, but that’s a whole other story which I’ll save for a later post. Do you have any Otago library memories to share?

Studying in the newly refurbished Robertson Library, 2011. Image courtesy of University of Otago Marketing & Communications.

Otago beyond Otago

Tags

1920s, 1930s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Auckland, Christchurch, clinical education, executive programme, Invercargill, medicine, public health, radiation therapy, teacher education, university extension, Wellington

In the late twentieth century changing government education policies allowed universities to become very entrepreneurial and expand into the territories of other institutions. Massey University opened a new campus in Albany, not far from the University of Auckland, in 1993 and merged with Wellington Polytechnic, not far from Victoria University of Wellington, in 1999. Otago’s first expansion into other territories came decades earlier, when New Zealand’s universities were under much stricter central control and direct competition was discouraged. The expansion resulted from a desire to provide improved clinical education for senior medical students, at a time when Otago had New Zealand’s only medical school.

In 1923 the undergraduate medical degree was expanded from five years to six, with the last year to concentrate entirely on clinical work. Finding sufficient clinical experience in Dunedin for the lengthened course proved difficult. Dunedin was New Zealand’s largest urban centre when the medical school began teaching in 1875, but by the 1920s Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch were all home to larger populations. The medical school began sending some of its sixth-year students to hospitals in the other main centres and in 1938 these were formally established as the Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch Branch Faculties of the Otago Faculty of Medicine. The Auckland Branch closed in 1972, as the first students of the new University of Auckland Medical School reached senior level (the Auckland course began in 1968).

An aerial view of Wellington Hospital in 1971, soon before its Branch Faculty of the Otago School of Medicine became a full Clinical School. Image courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library, negatives of the Evening Post newspaper, reference EP/1971/0946-F.

Meanwhile, big changes were afoot in Wellington and Christchurch. A major 1968 review of the Otago Medical School, undertaken by Professor Ronald Christie (Medical Dean at McGill University, Montreal), recommended big changes to the Otago programme. Noting the inadequate experience then available in Dunedin, Christie advised that, unless the medical school was to be downsized, it needed to expand its Christchurch or Wellington facilities into full clinical schools. After considerable political negotiation (with considerable resistance from advocates for the alternative of the University of Canterbury or Victoria University of Wellington opening their own medical schools) both Christchurch and Wellington became full clinical schools of the University of Otago, in 1971 and 1973 respectively. After the first three years of education, medical classes were divided into three groups, destined to spend the final three years of their education in either Dunedin, Christchurch or Wellington.

Since the 1970s the Christchurch and Wellington campuses, originally known as the Christchurch/Wellington Clinical Schools, have had name changes which reflect their expansion beyond the teaching of undergraduate medical students into other courses, and their significant roles in research and postgraduate education. In 1984 they were renamed the Christchurch/Wellington Schools of Medicine and in 2007 the University of Otago, Christchurch/Wellington. The Wellington campus now has nine academic departments, including radiation therapy, for which it is the sole national provider of undergraduate and postgraduate education. Its Department of Public Health also provides an undergraduate Certificate in Health Promotion by distance education. Wellington researchers, especially public health professors Philippa Howden-Chapman and Michael Baker, frequently appear in the national news. The Christchurch campus today has eleven academic departments, together with a Centre for Postgraduate Nursing Studies and Maori Indigenous Health Unit. Its postgraduate students have outnumbered its undergraduate medical students since the late 1980s.

The University of Otago’s activities beyond Dunedin have not been confined to the health sciences. In the late 1990s it moved into the competitive Auckland education market, offering an executive MBA and opening its Auckland Centre. That centre evolved into an information and liaison facility for Otago in the north, but still offers some Summer School papers and postgraduate distance courses. Closer to home, the university has run numerous courses around Otago and Southland over the years as part of the former Department of University Extension. Its adult education programme was very active in Invercargill and the Faculty of Commerce, among others, also offered various distance papers there for its degrees. The university opened an administrative centre in Invercargill in the 1970s, located in the Southland Polytechnic grounds – a sign of the cooperation between the two institutions in that period. The merger with the Dunedin College of Education in 2007 brought a new relationship between the University of Otago and Invercargill, because the college also had a Southland campus. The university now offers various teacher education programmes in Invercargill, including a degree specialising in primary bilingual education.

When people think of the University of Otago they often think of its iconic Dunedin campus, but it is clearly much more than that! Do you have any stories to share of the northern, and southern, campuses?