In the old lecture theatre beside the main entrance of the John Woolley Building, the rows of desks offer a story of university students weaving through Australia’s post-federation history.
I have been fascinated by the etchings of students from decades past. There are a number of engravings from the years of the First World War. Students must’ve felt at a loss two decades later when they surveyed those engravings, then looked up to see their campus hushed once more by distant guns.
K. Smith and J. Hoets from 1907 have finely carved themselves into one of the desks, and into the physical being of the University. They pushed deep into the wood driven by a desire to leave an indelible mark. I like to think they did it together.
An article last year discussed the affirming messages found on bathroom walls at the University (bathroom graffiti is termed ‘latrinalia’), a broadly similar instance of campus culture and one that shows the best of humanity: needless to say, women. While researching for this article, I found a piece by John Grindal for The Badger Herald of the University of Wisconsin. Writing about that university’s often-political carvings and graffiti, Grindal calls it “more or less a diary written by UW’s student body.” Grindal notes how this wealth of writing may be overlooked, before recounting his own developing interest in it, explaining that he was about to sit his first chemistry exam and saw the words “Chem sucks.”
The engravings in John Woolley, however, are different. They are not political, being little more than names and dates, with some embellishment besides. Still, a comparison can be made. The article references a scientific study into vandalism which finds that graffitists — by extension our engravers — commit acts of vandalism “to relieve boredom and stress, and gain recognition for their artistic talents.”
A-ha! There is not anything more human than that desire for recognition which binds us to the auld scholars of our university. The innate desire for a kind of immortality is perhaps best related by the story of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, who is indeed immortalised on campus. It may also be seen by the succession of other memorialised historical figures, on campus and not, who sought a legacy for themselves or that we sought for them. When we seek to memorialise others, it is in recognition of an injustice in letting our fellow person be forgotten. When we record our own presence, as University of Sydney students have long done, this sense of doing justice must play a part in it too.
One night when a friend and I were sitting curbside next to the National Art School, someone told us about the convict markings on that institution’s sandstone exterior. These engravings were the most apt comparison point for those at our University — which I’ve been informed also exist elsewhere on campus — that I could think of. I took these engravings to be the work of people seeking to be remembered, like Gilgamesh and our students of the First World War, but I was sadly mistaken. The markings were simply a way convicts kept track of their quotas: it’s amazing that the very simplicity of this medium opens it up to misinterpretation. I’m not sure whether that provides a lesson applicable to the engravings in John Woolley, lest students in the early 20th century lived under a form of penal servitude.
A stroll over to the Wentworth Building offers a similar throwback. Notice boards are layered with obsolete posters for society events. Somewhere, behind the years of sheets, there might be a flyer seeking writers for an upstart student newspaper, and one behind it advertising the formation of the Sydney University Women’s Union.
Not only do we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, we sit on their pews and scribble on their desks. Like all humanity, we are the ultimate vagrants. When we stare at the scratchings, let’s look the scribes, and ourselves, in the eye.
