UA31316 Lumen Spring 2024 Final Digital - Flipbook - Page 10
Your stories
Mystery solved!
The FJ and the footbridge
By Mark Douglas
It has been one of Adelaide’s great unsolved mysteries for more
than 50 years: just how did an FJ Holden end up dangling from
the Uni footbridge above the River Torrens in 1971?
Now, for the first time, the perpetrators of the University’s
greatest Prosh prank can be revealed, by Lumen.
Breaking their silence, the group of students who successfully
carried it out revealed all during a reunion at the bridge earlier
this year, sparked by a callout for information in the Autumn
2024 issue of our magazine.
This story all started in 1970, when a group of engineering
students made the first attempt – hoping to suspend a Morris
Minor from the bridge – and failed, with the car ending up in the
river. In 1971, they recruited new participants to swell their ranks,
and the wheels were again in motion.
The prank was inspired in part by an even earlier famous Prosh
moment, at Cambridge University, where in 1963 a 1928 Austin 7
was successfully suspended from the famed Bridge of Sighs.
Prosh – short for “procession” – has a long and ignoble, more
than century-long, tradition at this and many other universities,
being a time when students are allowed some latitude to play
practical jokes. Students often dress up and
march as part of the celebrations, and the fact
they have not always been completely sober
events is suggested by the fact that the word
“prosh” is believed to have been coined as a
representation of how an inebriated student
might attempt to say “prosheshion”.
There was no drinking this night though.
Well, not too much. Everything had to go like
clockwork to avoid detection, and there were a
lot of moving parts in play.
How it unfolded
Piecing together exactly who did what, when,
on the night of 6 August 1971 is not as simple
as it sounds. Memories tend to shift over time,
and contemporaneous accounts were masked
by aliases and exaggeration.
A story in the Adelaide University
Engineering Society’s magazine Hysteresis that
year, edited by David Gray, was entitled The
Suspenders. The author went by the alias Ram
Hobson, who can now be revealed to be
Hamish Robson.
10
