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Books > Humanities > History > Australasian & Pacific history > General
Still Learning: A 50 Year History of Monash University Peninsula
Campus is an institutional history that brings the lives of
students and staff academic and extracurricular into focus, and
conveys the excitement and atmosphere of the times. Several of
Australia s most famous artists, teachers, writers, politicians and
entertainers studied at Peninsula Campus, and Still Learning
connects significant moments in Australia s history to their time
on campus. Well known children s writer Paul Jennings, artist and
sculptor Peter Corlett and the incorrigible Max Gillies were all
students at the institution. As editor of the student magazine
Struan, Gillies made a name for himself in 1962 over the issue of
censorship, at a timewhen censorship laws greatly impacted on the
value of student reading materials. In the 1960s and 1970s a Miss
Frankston competition, which would not be countenanced today, was a
popular event. Students writing in Struan enjoyed a staple diet of
sport, social activities, rock music, sexual relationships, and
interstate and overseas trips. They nonetheless complained of lack
of funds for food The 1970s were turbulent times in Australia, and
the issues of the day played out in the lives of students and staff
on the campus. Still Learning highlights the Portsea Annexe and the
significant part it played as an external venue for teachers
developing their classroom experience. In its in carnations as
Frankston Teachers College and the State College of Victoria at
Frankston, the institution thrived. However, as the Chisholm
Institute of Technology at Frankston it faced many challenges and
entered into a period of relative decline.The timely merger with
Monash University in 1990 slowly improved the campus s fortunes.
Today, Monash University Peninsula Campus is a significant part of
the southern hemisphere s largest university, with a vibrant campus
and a key focus as a health precinct.
As a journalist, Stewart Cockburn was instinctive and fearless. The
16-year-old copy boy who started at the Adelaide Advertiser in 1938
was to have a career in writing, radio and television that spanned
more than 45 years. Restless ambition took him to post-war London
with Reuters, to Melbourne with the Herald, to Canberra as Press
Secretary to Prime Minister Robert Menzies, and to Washington, DC
as Press Attache at the Australian Embassy. On returning to the
Advertiser, Cockburn's feature-writing won him a Walkley Award and
his opinion columns were ever informative and influential. In 1978
he challenged Premier Don Dunstan's politically charged sacking of
Police Commissioner Harold Salisbury. His tenacious journalism also
prompted the 1983 Royal Commission into the scientifically
questionable murder conviction of Eddie Splatt. His books included
The Salisbury Affair and very fine biographies of South Australia's
long-serving Premier Sir Thomas Playford and, with David Ellyard,
the eminent nuclear scientist Sir Mark Oliphant. In this biography,
Stewart Cockburn's daughter Jennifer draws on his many letters and
journals, bringing to life the father she knew and the changing
times he so closely observed.
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