The Founding of The University of Melbourne, 1852-1855

Abstract

In part this paper is about ideas, especially those held by some men in nineteenth-century Melbourne who set about establishing a university. They had carried a set of ideas about what a university should be with them as they journeyed across the world, some of them in search of a promised land. They found that turning these ideas into reality was complex and disappointing, but their struggle sheds light on the social, political, and educational life of Antipodean society.