AUSTRALIAN PLANNER MARCH 1999

Abstract

This year, 1999, is the 50th anniversary of formal programs of planning education in Australia. The first course began in Adelaide on 14 February 1949 at the South Australian School of Mines and Industries. Professor Denis Winston’s postgraduate course commenced at the University of Sydney in the following month and the University of Melbourne also offered a course of ‘‘. . . about 100 lectures in Town and Regional Planning’’ that year (McLoughlin 1988, p 14). There were, of course, earlier attempts to provide training in the principles and practice of town planning. Freestone has described the Vernon Memorial Lectures delivered at the University of Sydney in 1919, 1921, 1923 and 1926 by John Sulman as ‘‘the first systematic planning instruction in New South Wales and a precursor to the formal tertiary courses established after the second world war’’ (1992, p16). Sulman’s lectures were published as ‘An Introduction to the Study of Town Planning in Australia’ in 1921, a work which is still fairly easy to find for anyone interested (Sulman 1921). Attendance at the series of 20 lectures cost ten shillings, or one shilling for a single lecture. A certificate was available to candidates who passed an optional examination. Readers of Australian Planner may like to try their hands at the examination questions set in 1923 which are reproduced below (after Freestone 1992, pI5). Sulman’s published lectures conclude by observing that ‘‘In all walks of life the specialist is coming to the front wherever efficiency is desired, and most of all it is required in the management of municipal affairs’’ (Sulman 1921 p213). But it was not until the years after the second world war that the first formal programs of ‘specialist’ planning education came to be established, in parallel with the development of professional organisations for town planning at state and, eventually, federal level, and with the renewed interest in the post-war years in legislative reform and metropolitan planning schemes. The Adelaide course which commenced in February, 1949, under the leadership of Gavin Walkley, was open to persons qualified in what were regarded as the relevant basic professions architecture, engineering and surveying. It was a two-year program in which the subjects and syllabuses were Australian versions of those prescribed for the external examinations of the British Town Planning Institute. The subjects included at the outset were ‘History of Town Planning’, Town Planning Practice’, Town Planning in relation to Architecture and Amenities’, Town Planning in relation to Engineering’, Town Planning in relation to Surveying’, and ‘The Law relating to Town Planning’. Successful graduates received a certificate awarded jointly by the School of Mines and the Town Planning Institute of South Australia. Soon after its establishment, the course curriculum was extended ‘‘in order to give belated recognition to the important parts to be played in Planning education by Geography, Geology, Sociology and Economics’’ (Walkley 1976, p34).