William Wardell's 1859 St John's College - a rare realisation of Pugin's ideal Catholic College?

William Wardell’s St John’s College, Sydney, considered the grandest and architecturally most distinguished university college in New South Wales, is an exceptional example of 19th century Gothic Revival architecture.  The information board outside the college states that St John’s is ‘a rare realisation of Pugin’s ideal Catholic College’ and further that ‘it demonstrates [Pugin]’s profound influence on the work of Wardell’. This is but a small part of the story. The commission for St John’s College was far more complex.  The correspondence between the architects, William Wardell, Edmund Blacket and others, and St John’s Council indicates that right from the beginning there was a general lack of understanding of Wardell’s original design concept for the building. This has continued to the present day, as evidenced by the information on the board outside St John’s College, in which it is incorrectly assumed that Wardell’s proposal included a quadrangle as featured in Pugin’s ‘ideal College’. This paper, based largely on primary sources, investigates such claims about St John’s, considers William Wardell and the Gothic Revival, examines St John’s College within the University of Sydney – its design and its translation and posits a few conclusions leading to new understandings.

Jocoserious ‘ignorance shifting’ or ‘aestho-psycho-eugenics’?: interrogating Joseph Furphy’s Bulletin ‘apprenticeship'

Annotating Joseph Furphy’s first publication for the Bulletin raises some intriguing questions: to what extent was Furphy the product of the Bulletin writing academy, the late nineteenth century equivalent of a writing course, or to what extent was his talent sui generis? I intend to put this question to an extreme test, by reading closely his first published contribution to the Bulletin in 1889, ‘The Mythical Sundowner’.

Interview with Joseph Kata

Joseph Kata is a Papua New Guinean who studied at the University of Wollongong in 1992-1993. He studied on an Australian government scholarship and completed an MBA. He has since contributed to the development of the University of Goroka and worked for several NGOs. The interview was conducted in English on 22 January 2015 by Dr. Jonathan Ritchie of Deakin University and Dr. Musawe Sinebare of the Pacific Adventist University. This set comprises: an interview recording, a timed summary, and a photograph.