Lumen Autumn 2024 - Flipbook - Page 11
“MY THREE-YEAR ARTS
DEGREE WAS THE BEST
FIVE YEARS OF MY LIFE.”
These were passionate people who
instilled passion in others; in my case
enough to get the required marks to get
into law at the end of first year, but crucially
to help me quickly decide that law was the
last thing I wanted to do. In defence of the
good people in the Ligertwood Building, the
law degree never really stood a chance with
the excitement going on elsewhere. Through
a combination of zero application to the law
and maximum effort towards everything
else, my law degree degenerated into an
abandoned catastrophe.
Central to its demise was the decision to
take a year off study in 1990 to focus fulltime on editing On Dit. We had a likeminded and enthusiastic bunch of students
working together at an exciting time in
publishing. We started the year using a wax
machine, bromides and Letraset sheets of
fonts to cut and paste up the paper by hand.
We ended it using these brand-new things
called “Macs” which had a program called
Pagemaker which let you design newspapers
electronically.
Looking back at some of those old
editions now makes you cringe, with their
cocky, youthful bombast and stories that
were clearly designed to annoy and offend.
But amid the undergraduate nonsense
you can see a rough-and-ready paper
that reflected the community it served,
running serious pieces about campus
security, university funding, the fees debate
and plenty of cultural stuff that paints a
resonant picture of 1980s and 1990s life.
Life can come full circle. My parents
would worry that I was spending too much
time on extra-curricular stuff and that it
was taking me away from my studies and a
guaranteed path to work. The truth is that
all the extra-curricular stuff was the very
thing that created a path into journalism,
by having a crack with friends and
producing a little newspaper that tried to
be relevant and meaningful to its readers.
It was thrilling doing this with no
training and no supervision, where each
week started with 32 blank pages. With
my own daughter now at Adelaide, at the
risk of dating myself as a misty-eyed,
pre-HECS dinosaur, I find myself
grappling with different parental concerns.
Are you sure you’re not doing too much
study, honey? You seem to be coming
home at normal hours, going to all your
lectures and passing all your subjects with
credits and distinctions. Kids these days!
So, thanks to the University of
Adelaide for the opportunities. Thanks
also for the good times. My three-year
Arts degree was the best five years of
my life.
The pages are also noteworthy for their
dramatis personae from the world of student
politics, redolent with the names of future
premiers, treasurers, foreign ministers,
defence ministers, transport ministers,
leaders of parties in their own right. That
late-80s cohort batted well above its weight
on the national stage, as is often the case
with SA’s contribution to public life.
LUMEN
David Penberthy studied at the
University of Adelaide from 1987 to 1991.
He has edited the Sydney Daily Telegraph,
news.com.au, The Sunday Mail, and is a
co-host of the FiveAA breakfast show and a
Newscorp columnist. We asked him to provide
a graduation photo for this issue – and, of
course, he didn’t go.
Images supplied: David Penberthy in full
flight; as a pensive young man; and as
a student newspaper irritant.
