Lumen Autumn 2025 - Flipbook - Page 34
Celebrating our legacy;
inspiring our future
graduate skills, real-world impact, and
engagement with industry, business,
governments, and the community.
By The Honourable
Catherine Branson AC SC
Creating a new university for Adelaide in
1874 was ambitious and not universally popular.
Indeed, newspaper articles and letters from that
era regularly portrayed the concept as
overzealous and likely to fail.
2025 will be a transformative year as we
continue efforts to achieve the successful
establishment, and opening, of the new
Adelaide University. I will continue to work with
my colleagues on Council to protect our values,
our people, our students and our goals to deliver
the best possible outcomes for our University of
Adelaide students, staff and stakeholders.
Fast forward to today, however, and the
manner in which our University has grown and
stamped its place on our city and our State is
indisputable. Our impact on South Australia, and
around the world, has been significant.
Concurrently we will be diligent in our efforts
to ensure that, when the doors to Adelaide
University open on the first of January 2026,
we are prepared to play our part in a change that
will resonate across future generations. I have no
doubt becoming Adelaide University is the
necessary next step in our evolution.
Yet some of those concerns heard more than
150 years ago can still be heard today as we take
the necessarily “ambitious” steps required to
secure and advance our University’s future.
Throughout the history of this wonderful
institution, change has been a constant. It is certainly
not the same place now as it was when I first came
to “Adelaide Uni” in the 1960s as a young woman.
Buildings have come and gone. Courses of study
have arisen and faded. The needs of our community
have changed. Our society has changed. Our work
lives have changed. Our technology has changed.
Our world is so different.
“I SHARE YOUR
LOVE FOR OUR
PAST. INDEED,
I SHARE THE
SAME PAST.”
What has not changed is the essence of this
wonderful institution which I credit with
transforming me and my life for the better. This University helped
shape the person I would become and the life I would live. Not just
by providing a country girl from a conservative family with a legal
and liberal arts education but, perhaps more importantly, by
broadening my horizons.
I share your love for our past. Indeed, I share the
same past. Yet I do not mourn this change. It will not
erase any of us, or what we have achieved. Rather,
it will ensure the future of an institution of great
importance to our State, its people, and to us.
It will ensure we can pass on the light of learning
and research for many generations of students to
come. We need to ensure we can make them ready
for their era, as we were readied for ours.
The future students of “Adelaide Uni” will need, as we did,
a University embracing transformational teaching and learning,
reimagined research, exceptional student experience and
powerful partnerships.
They too will then have the good fortune, as do we, to be able to
say they are graduates of Adelaide Uni. Nothing will change that.
It is a powerful place which has changed the lives of many
because the University’s core business has not wavered during its
history. The sole object remains the advancement of learning and
knowledge. That is, teaching: passing on knowledge – and
research: generating new knowledge.
The Hon. Catherine Branson AC SC is the Chancellor of the
University of Adelaide. Catherine graduated from the University with
an LLB in 1970 and a BA in 1977. Her career saw her appointed the
first female Crown Solicitor in Australia; as CEO of the AttorneyGeneral’s Department, the first woman to head a government
department in South Australia; a judge of the Federal Court of
Australia; and President of the Australian Human Rights Commission.
In my current role I am fortunate to spend time on our
campuses. I see on them an increasingly diverse cohort of young
people committed to developing their own understanding of the
world and addressing its many challenges. I also see our exceptional
academics dedicated to the University’s core purposes of creating
and sharing knowledge.
Catherine was appointed to the University of Adelaide Council in 2013,
was elected Deputy Chancellor in 2017 and Chancellor in 2020.
Images: Catherine addressing guests at the University’s 150th Gala
Ball; her graduating law class in 1970 (Catherine is front row, fourth
from left).
This place has always done that, but how it achieves that has
involved growing, changing and adapting regularly. In the
contemporary environment, it’s critical that we focus on
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