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Uni unaffected by the deluge
23 May 2009
After two days in meetings in Sydney early in the week, I returned to the University after the deluge from the storms.
In the early morning I walked around the campus and again the University was unscathed – a testament to the successful earliest master planning, confronted by the challenges presented by a badly-drained boggy cane field.
The transformation of the campus across 14 years is dramatic. I stood near a spot where I had ruined a good pair of shoes posing for a journalist’s photograph in 1995. At that time, I had to wade up to my ankles in mud for him on what was then a muddy, undeveloped site. At that time too, we had just had another deluge which threatened the completion of two buildings for the looming opening date. But we made it – just!
Now, in that same spot, the campus was green, surface water was draining normally through the swales to the lakes, the kangaroos were drying out, the traffic entering the University was constant. In a moment of indulgent reflection, I was struck by the level of physical transformation from 1995.
And all of this during a decade or so that everyone now regards, including the OECD, as a horror decade of underfunding in Australian higher education.
Hopefully, after the more promising funding environment of the next decade, someone will stand and reflect on even more significant developments in 2020, physically and academically.
In the meantime, a new but temporary traffic entry point is being prepared, to allow for some alterations on the main entrance roads in the next month. It is timed to cause least disruption.
It seems that come hell or high water, the University continues to thrive and enhance both its local beauty and regional effectiveness.
Professor Paul Thomas AM is Vice-Chancellor and President at the University of the Sunshine Coast.