The Power of the City in Defining the National and Regional in Education. Reactions against the Urban: Universities in Regional Australia

Abstract

Australian higher educational history illustrates the tensions that exist between the city and the country over the provision of university education. While for many non-Australians the nation appears as the land of the outback the reality is that Australia is dominated by the city where the majority of the population live and where governments and their policy advisers are located. This article compares the attempts of two of Australia's historic rural cities to establish universities. These cities are Armidale, New South Wales and Bendigo, Victoria. Their attempts illustrate a persistent theme in Australia's educational history - namely conflict over equitable educational provision for Australia's rural residents. The proposal to establish a university at Armidale represented a major departure from the traditional Australian policy of universities in capital cities only as it was the first time that an Australian rural city was chosen as the site of a university. However, the establishment of Australia's first rural university was later used to thwart the establishment of additional country universities. In 1938 when it succeeded in establishing its university Armidale was a small inland city of 10,000 inhabitants economically reliant on agriculture. Armidale depended on the efforts of a former farmer and now influential member of state parliament, Drummond, who faced opposition from capital city based state governments, to establish a university. The Armidale campaign for a local university was driven by powerful rural discontent, which stressed the economic and social importance of Australia's primary industries and their associated country towns while simultaneously arguing that metropolitan cities dominated Australian life and politics. Armidale's university campaign was based on the typical Australian philosophy of a "fair go" for country people. Drummond relied on the support of the citizens of Armidale and their defensive loyalty to the country. Many of their beliefs irrationally extolled the virtues of the country, the wickedness of the city, and the conspiracy of governments against the country. Drummond fully realized that the majority of Australia's population lived in the capital cities and the commercial, financial and cultural affairs of the state originated there. However, he realized that this also led to an attitude that assumed that nothing good could come out of the country. Bendigo with a population of 46,000 made its attempts to secure a university in 1970. Located in country Victoria the city originally derived its wealth from gold mining but now depended on its role as an administrative and service center for an agricultural community. Bendigo leaders were influenced by state government policies of the time, which aimed to create towns and cities throughout the state where living conditions would be similar to those in the capital city. Just as at Armidale previously, Bendigo leaders realized that to secure decentralization of services in the state attractive educational facilities, including a university, were essential. Bendigo leaders used arguments reminiscent of those previously used in Armidale in their efforts to establish a local university. They spoke of the quality of life in smaller communities, the social advantages of decentralization, the necessity of equitable educational provision for all Australians, the lack of university facilities outside the Melbourne metropolitan area and the loss of country population to the city because of a lack of educational facilities in the country. However, their campaign also met with strong and almost hysterical resistance from the state's university leaders who noted that the concept of a country university was educationally undesirable. Very importantly the citizens of Bendigo confronted a much different educational system to that of their earlier Armidale counterparts. Of most importance the who now had full responsibility for funding of university education would not support the establishment of a university in Bendigo. Reasons for this reluctance included the lack of potential students in the Bendigo area and fear that the establishment of country universities would lead to a reduction in funding for city based universities because small campuses were seen as more expensive to establish and operate than large city ones. There were also fears that establishing a university in Bendigo would lead to the destruction of the Australian binary system of higher education. In any case it was argued that it was simply unfeasible to provide the same degree of access to university facilities for country students as was available to their city counterparts as it was not economically and educationally possible. It is likely that governments used the university at Armidale to argue against the establishment of a country-based university at Bendigo. They reasoned that the University of New England illustrated that country universities were small, second rate, had difficulties in attracting staff (who were diffident about going to country locations) and were especially expensive.