The advent of the Campus Access Policy foretells a university barren of hijinks and animated antics. With the university threatening to remove temporarily-deserted property, and detain megaphone-wielders, days of spontaneous student-run campus activities are relegated to the archive. But we can’t forget the veritable campus Saturnalia, Commemoration Day. Sometimes an intellectual display, more often a mess of “grown-ups” revisiting high-school “muck-up” traditions, Commemoration Day has likely influenced your campus experience more than you think, even if it’s a memory as distant and overused as fee-free university.
Commemoration Day: a brief history
Like many traditions, the first Commemoration Day festivity was unrehearsed. At the annual conferring of degrees in 1888, students treated the Great Hall audience to an impromptu concert. For the next eight years students upheld the concert convention. A “special undergraduate Commemoration song committee” was established, its name leaving little of its function to the imagination. Such choral coterie published each presentation’s lyrics in a periodical.
However, in 1897, the atmosphere was thick with tension between undergraduates and students, and Commemoration Day dynamos realised it was time to take the tradition to the streets. 300 plucky adventurers led a procession from Sydney’s Town Hall (the fin-de-siecle Great Hall replacement) down George Street, now the most central and remembered feature of Commemoration Day activities. Each year, a legion of weird and wacky floats coloured the city. Think: an actual hearse owned by college students, packed with 94 students, Trojan-horse style, and flanked by fake mourners filled with crocodile tears. Morbid, memorable.
Its annual procession was faced with a fair dose of public opposition, occasionally navigating bans or ordinances to re-route. Police inevitably intervened, fining and occasionally arresting students for offences such as setting off fire-crackers, hitting an officer with a flour bomb, and puncturing police wagon tyres. Each year saw charges in the tens, though these were typically dropped with the help of the SRC’s legal assistance and clear legal advice printed in Honi. The legislature was often the SRC’s adversary: in 1944, the SRC failed to apply to the University of Sydney Senate for permission and had to call the procession off, and in 1945 the Senate blocked the application for the procession to take place in the city. What unrepresentative swill!
Within this tradition emerged briefer, but equally cherished, customs. Each student was expected to take part in at least one “stunt”, registered with the SRC prior. Whether this involved dumping dry ice into Hyde Park’s Archibald Fountain, or an ominous “visit of Arab Party”, a student made a statement, and a need for clean-up. A 1965 Honi mentioned a Medical and Engineering students’ annual flour-and-water fight, which “got out of hand”, leading to property damage. In 1964, this same doughy fight considerably damaged the Fisher Library entrance. It unfortunately comes as no surprise that such celebrations swelled with male entitlement. However, Commemoration Day was often a force for good; in the ‘60s, Commemoration Day organisers used the occasion to fundraise, or, in Honi’s words, “collect boodles” for various causes, such as the “Inala” Steiner School tucked away in West Pennant Hills. Such altruism caught the attention — and financial contribution — of banks, television programs and radio stations.
Due to “declining student interest”, the SRC of 1975 voted to strike Commemoration Day from the year’s calendar, cutting the octogenarian’s legs from under it.
Like all good things, there have been countless attempts to revive it over the years. First in the 90s and then in the early 2000s — the former was more of a one for one recreation effort, whereas the latter tried to formulate a modern day commemoration event through a music event titled Sounds in the Grounds. Sadly, neither of them stuck.
What Commemoration Day has given us
Commemoration Day was much bigger than its tracks left on George St. It acted as an incubator and ignition for elements of student life and culture that we still enjoy today.
The USyd tradition of revue can be traced back to Commemoration Day celebrations, with a theatre party spinning off into a Commemoration Revue in 1930. This would firmly entrench a student revue, then composed of contributions from various colleges and student groups, in the campus culture.
Even the publication you’re reading these very words in can be traced back to Commemoration Day. Honi Soit was founded to rebut and reframe media smears against USyd students after an alleged Commemoration Day incident at the Sydney Cenotaph. Finer details of the campus rag find their origins in Commemoration Day as well. For the last edition of each year, editorial teams will publish a ‘comedy edition’ usually ripping off a better known, mainstream publication. This tradition first began as a Commemoration Day supplement, and now is the highlight or bane of an Honi editor’s term, depending on who you ask.
Calls for revival on deaf ears
In this time of an increasingly corporatised and commercialised university experience, ardent campus-life commemorators recall something like Commemoration Day as exactly what we need — an opportunity to make and engage with a student culture that is distinctly USyd in character.
As a largely commuter university with a huge student population, the University of Sydney is particularly vulnerable to an evaporating student culture. What’s left is often only accessible through limited and unique opportunities like student politics and student journalism. Or, only available through cliques and atomised experiences like clubs and societies.
The closest thing we have to a celebration of student culture is Welcome Week (of former O-Week notoriety). But even that is a rigidly formatted and corporatised campus experience with a greater focus on introducing new students to the University than codifying any sort of student identity.
But with the SRC’s Unauthorised Stalls Day on July 31 rebelling against University policy by erecting informative tents, we are light-years estranged from the days of property damage, intellectual interference and political provocation. It seems to belong to another University entirely.
