Blog

The 2023 academic year has commenced with a record enrolment at St Mark’s, our students pledging to uphold a student-written “Living Document of Values”, and many successful Welcome Week events including the post-Covid return of Old Collegians’ tennis, followed by a nail-biting and exciting win for St Mark’s in inter-college tennis.

The hard work of student leaders and staff to prepare for the new academic year included the writing by student leaders of a statement of values that emphasises integrity, collegiality, respect, growth, and generosity.

This “St Mark’s Collegians’ Living Document of Values” was initiated by student leaders at a retreat last July, fleshed out in lively discussion in the student leadership training last September, and drafted by student leaders over the summer with every returner invited to contribute.

The Living Document was signed during Welcome Week by almost all students, who committed “to seeking to uphold and live out these values in our time at St Mark’s and beyond”. It is expected that all students will soon have pledged to uphold these values. To read the Living Document of Values, click here.

Upholding good values was also the theme of the Commencement Service in St Peter’s Cathedral at the end of Welcome Week. It was addressed both by the Chaplain, the Rev’d Grant Moore (whose retirement has recently been announced), and by the Head of College, Professor Don Markwell AM.  For Professor Markwell’s Commencement Address in the Service, click here.

The record enrolment in the College this year has been made possible through extremely strong demand for College places, and by St Mark’s renting the Cathedral Deanery between Walkley Cottage and the Cathedral. Renting the Deanery has made possible an extra seven student bedrooms.

Many students have been able to come or return to St Mark’s only because of scholarships generously funded by alumni and friends of the College, and many other students have been significantly helped in this way. These students have been writing letters of thanks for their scholarships, and extracts from some of these will soon be available here.

Our new students were welcomed to the College on Thursday 16 February with a Smoking Ceremony and Welcome to Country, our annual Admission Ceremony, and two days of important training, followed by a Welcome Week of further university and College induction and social events – several on the College Club theme of “Top Gun: Maverick”, based on the Tom Cruise action movie of last year.

Our student leaders – College Club Committee, the Academic team, the Assistant Deans and the Wellbeing team, the Charitable Foundation, and others – have worked hard together and with College staff to welcome and support all students.

Welcome Week concluded with Old Collegians’ tennis, which was won by a team of current Collegians, Paddy Douglas and Nick Schofield. They went on a week later to play in the St Mark’s tennis team which scored a close-run and exciting win in the SAAUCC inter-college tennis.

Our win was secured only in the final games against Aquinas in pelting rain, thunder and lightning flashes. It was a day to remember – and an encouraging start to the College’s campaign to retain the High Table Cup won by St Mark’s last year. Next stop: swimming on 23 March.

At the College Club AGM on 1 March, students gave a standing ovation to the retiring Chaplain, the Rev’d Grant Moore, who has served as Chaplain since 2014. Grant, who turns 75 this year, has been transferred to a locum position in the western suburbs of Adelaide before his final retirement. He and Ellie will be much missed at St Mark’s, and we wish them well in their retirement.

The Club’s AGM also made the important decision to review the Club Constitution, and a high-powered committee of College law students will lead this work throughout the year. They invite input on the review. Read more here.

The curators of the Gassie – the 1936 Dodge hawker van which College students have enjoyed since 1966 – are also working on crucial repairs and maintenance to prolong its lifespan, and would greatly appreciate your support here.

University classes are now in their third week, and College life is in full swing, including academic and wellbeing support for our students. Several sessions on key academic skills have already been held, College tutorials are getting underway, and our highest-achieving students in 2022 university results will be honoured in our annual Academic Awards Dinner next week.

Wellbeing support is being ably led by our new Director of Wellbeing, Sally Cassidy, who recently joined the College from the University of Adelaide’s Counselling Support team, and is living in Walkley Cottage with her family and much-loved Samoyed fur-ball, Hachi.

2023 is off to a very positive start, full of potential for the year ahead for all our students.

Photos by Amelie Beltakis

A generous bequest by the late Professor Ivan Shearer AM RFD has enabled the creation of the Ivan Shearer Scholarship to support St Mark’s Collegians to study at the University of Oxford or the University of Cambridge.

An international law academic and practitioner who developed a high global reputation, Ivan Shearer (1938-2019) was Dean of St Mark’s College from 1968 to 1971, and an Honorary Fellow of the College from 2005. Read more about Ivan Shearer here.

The first Ivan Shearer Scholarship was awarded in 2022 to Rebecca Keeley (St Mark’s 2012-14) for study in the 2022-23 academic year in Oxford.

The College now invites applications for the Ivan Shearer Scholarship from members of the College who meet the eligibility criteria and who will be, or expect to be, studying at the University of Oxford or the University of Cambridge in the 2023-24 academic year (including from members of the College currently studying at Oxford or Cambridge).

Eligibility: Under the terms of Professor Shearer’s will, the Ivan Shearer Scholarship is open to current and Old Collegians of St Mark’s College, Adelaide, who have resided at St Mark’s for at least one academic year.

Purpose and value: The Scholarship will be paid towards the travel, accommodation, tuition, and/or general living expenses of the Scholar/s to support them to study at either the University of Oxford or the University of Cambridge. Any part of the Scholarship used for payment of fees will be paid directly by St Mark’s College to the relevant college in the University of Oxford or Cambridge, or to the relevant university, and any part to be used for travel, accommodation, and general living expenses will be paid to the Scholar/s by St Mark’s College.

The award for the 2023-24 academic year will comprise a single Scholarship with a value of up to $37,000 (AUD), or a number of Scholarships totalling not more than $37,000. In the case of more than one award, the selection committee will allocate funds to Scholars according to assessed merit and need. As tuition and living costs in Oxford or Cambridge will exceed $37,000 per annum, applicants are strongly encouraged to apply for other scholarships and sources of financial support.

At the absolute discretion of the College, a Scholarship may be renewed for up to two further academic years subject to satisfactory performance by the Scholar and the Scholar demonstrating need for the renewal of the Scholarship. In exceptional circumstances, the College may give consideration to a further award to enable a doctoral student to complete their doctorate at Oxford or Cambridge; no Scholar should assume that such further funding will be possible.

Criteria for award: The award will be based on:

• excellence in intellect, character, leadership, and service; and
• demonstrated need for financial support to study at Oxford or Cambridge.

Candidates must have applied to, or been admitted to study at, or be studying at the University of Oxford or the University of Cambridge at the time of application. (If a candidate is already studying at Oxford or Cambridge, the Scholarship could support them either to move to a new course, or to complete a course for which they are currently enrolled; in either case, financial need would need to be demonstrated.)

The academic standards for admission to Oxford and Cambridge are very high, and the selection committee will offer the Scholarship only to a candidate or candidates who, in its judgement, is/are likely to be admitted to Oxford or Cambridge, and to achieve at a satisfactory standard there.

The Scholarship will only be confirmed upon successful admission to the University of Oxford or the University of Cambridge, and will not be paid if the Scholar does not take up their place at Oxford or Cambridge. The College may apply other terms if judged appropriate.

Preference will be given to candidates undertaking or intending to undertake a graduate degree.

The Scholarship will not be offered if there is not a sufficiently qualified candidate who is also in need of financial support.

The names of Ivan Shearer Scholars are recorded on an honour board in the Junior Common Room at St Mark’s.

Application process: Applications should comprise a letter of application, addressed to the Head of St Mark’s College, and enclosing:

• a full curriculum vitae (of up to three pages);
• a complete transcript or transcripts of all your university study to date;
• a statement (of up to two pages) outlining:
  • details of the course of study proposed to be (or being) undertaken at Oxford or Cambridge, and the status of your application for admission to that University and any of its colleges (including, if relevant, second preference for a course);
  • your reasons for undertaking this course; and
  • your likely or intended further study (if any) and career after undertaking this course;
• a personal statement (of up to three pages) outlining your interests, priorities, and motivation, which reflects how you fulfil the criteria of excellence in intellect, character, leadership, and service;
• a statement (of up to two pages) setting out your need for financial support to study at Oxford or Cambridge, including details of other scholarships or sources of financial support applied for or likely to be applied for, and the status of those applications; and
• the names and contact details (including email addresses and telephone numbers) of three referees, at least one of whom must have formally taught you in a university course.

The font size of the CV and statements should be no smaller than 11 point.

Applications must be submitted by 5pm on Thursday 13 April 2023.

Selection process: Selection will be by a committee appointed by the College, comprising individuals of high academic and/or professional standing.

The committee will interview only short-listed candidates, and references will ordinarily only be sought for short-listed candidates.

It is likely that interviews will be in May or June 2023.

The award of the Scholarship is at the absolute discretion of the College.

For further information: please consult the Head of College, Professor Don Markwell.

For this information as a PDF, click here.

Through the generosity of his family, a significant scholarship in support of medical students from regional Australia has been endowed in memory of Honorary Fellow of the College and plastic surgeon, Richard Wyndham Watson (5 September 1936 – 14 June 2020).

Richard was a medical student at St Mark’s from 1956 to 1961, and later served the College in many capacities, including as a member of the College Council from 1976 to 1993, in which year he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the College.

Richard came to St Mark’s from Yorketown in South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula. His family – Mrs Mary Watson, and their sons, Mark and Guy Watson – have generously donated to create a scholarship that will enable future medical students from regional areas around the country to have the same opportunity to be at St Mark’s.

The Richard Watson Scholarship will be awarded annually to a student from regional Australia who is or will be studying medicine. It will be awarded on the basis of academic excellence, commitment to service, and financial need, and may be awarded to either a new or returning student.

The details of the Richard Watson Scholarship and other scholarships, along with details of how to apply, are on the College’s website here. Scholarship applications from new students close on 17 January 2023.

Richard Watson was born in Yorketown in 1936. Growing up, he spent many hours driving through the countryside making house calls with his father, a GP. He was educated at Yorketown Area School and then as a boarder at St Peter’s College, where he was a House Prefect and took part in rowing, football, and the debating, science, and music societies.

He came to St Mark’s in 1956 as a resident student while studying medicine at the University of Adelaide. Richard was highly regarded over several years as the coxswain of the Adelaide University Boat Club’s Senior VIII. His crews won state championships and represented AUBC in the Intervarsity Boat Race (a three-mile race) between 1957 and 1961. Awarded a University Blue for rowing, he served in 1961 on the Blues Committee of the University Sports Association, and on the University Boat Club Committee. In the same year, he served on the committee of the Adelaide Medical Students’ Society.

Alongside his contribution to College rowing, for which he was awarded College Colours and Letters, Richard was very active in other aspects of College life throughout his six years in residence at St Mark’s. His College Club roles over the years included Comptroller of Coca Cola, Curator of Telephones, Buttery Curator, and member of the College Club Committee in 1960 and 1961. He served as College Archivist in 1961.

At the end of that year, Richard graduated MB BS, and subsequently added FRCS (Edinburgh) (1968) and FRACS (1972) to his medical qualifications. His early medical work including lecturing in Anatomy at Guy’s Hospital, London, in 1964-66, and working mainly in plastic surgery in Bristol and Glasgow (1967-71).

Richard returned to Adelaide as Senior Visiting Specialist (Plastic Surgery) at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, from 1972, and helped set up and was head of the Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Unit there from 1989. From 1972, he also lectured in surgery at the University of Adelaide.

In the 1950s, Richard had undertaken National Service in the Royal Australian Navy, and during the years spent in the UK from 1963 to 1972, he joined the British Army as a medical officer, was made a captain, trained as a paratrooper, and was subsequently appointed patron of the British Airborne Forces Association of South Australia, a position he held until his death. He also served from 1972 as a consultant plastic surgeon to the Australian Army and RAAF.

Richard’s other professional service from the 1970s to the 2010s included as a foundation member of the Australian Association of Hand Surgeons, Chair of the AMA Medico-Legal Committee, and member of the SA Health Commission Task Force on Patients’ Rights. He served as ship’s surgeon twice on supply ships to the Antarctic, in 1982-83 and 1986-87, charged with recording the bird logs on both expeditions, and as ship’s surgeon on Pacific Island cruises from 2003.

Soon after his return to Australia from his medical work in the UK in the early 1970s, Richard resumed his active involvement with St Mark’s which continued until prevented by ill health not long before his death. Richard served on the College Council from 1976 to 1993, including on the Executive and Finance Committee from 1979 to 1993, and on the Education Committee from 1986 to 1993.

Richard also served on the Committee of the Old Collegians’ Association from 1977 to 1981. He was active in fundraising for the College from the 1970s, including as a member of the Foundation Board from 1984 to 1989. Amongst many other gifts, Richard donated the equipment which enabled the College to set up a drafting room for engineering and architectural students, and an anatomical skull for use by medical students.

One of Richard’s most important contributions to St Mark’s was to the Library. In 1988, at his instigation moves were made to set up a Library Sub-Committee, of which he became the enthusiastic chair, and a professional librarian was appointed. Richard chaired the Library Sub-Committee until he went to Oxford in 1993 for graduate studies, and rejoined it in 2001, serving until 2009. He had a strong commitment to the modernisation of the Library, including the security and expansion of the collection and the preservation and display of the rare books.

Pirjo Rayner, the professional librarian whom Richard helped to appoint over 30 years ago and who continues to serve as our Librarian today, has written that we owe Richard “a great debt of gratitude” for his commitment to the Library, “his unwavering support and also for his very enjoyable company”.

This enthusiastic involvement with the St Mark’s College Library reflected Richard’s wider literary and scholarly interests. For some years he wrote book reviews in the weekly literary section of The Advertiser. His interest in history and classics led him in 1989 – in his 50s – to undertake the secondary schools’ matriculation course in Classical Studies, which he passed as equal top student in the State.

This led on to Richard’s decision to go back to the UK to study History at Christ Church, Oxford, which he did in 1993-95, graduating with an MPhil – and making life-long friends among students there, just as he had done in his six years at St Mark’s nearly four decades before. For several years following graduation from Oxford, he applied his historian’s skills by leading numerous groups on tours through Europe and Turkey and providing lectures on specific histories of the regions.

Before going to Oxford, Richard’s outstanding services to the College were recognised with his election as an Honorary Fellow of the College, and a dinner in his and Mary’s honour in the Senior Common Room.

Richard’s service to the College continued after his return from Oxford – including serving as Acting Master during Master Robin Ashwin’s leave of absence in April and May 1998, serving again on the Library Sub-Committee, and on the Honorary Fellows Committee for many years.

Richard and Mary Watson have been great supporters of College events, and Richard continued as a generous donor to the College (including for building works and scholarships) and was recognised as a Benefactor of the College Foundation.

Richard is remembered in the St Mark’s community as a kind, gentle, warm-hearted, humble, amusing and engaging man, who was also confidently decisive in a collegial way: in the words of one who knew him well, “a true delight”.

It is very fitting that his memory be perpetuated at St Mark’s, including with a significant scholarship named for him, which will help future medical students from regional areas to gain the benefits of being at the College he loved and which played so large a role in his life.

The College is deeply grateful to the Watson family for this significant endowment and the life-changing opportunity it creates for students.

Australia’s leading historian of volunteering, Professor Melanie Oppenheimer, recently gave a fascinating overview of the modern evolution of volunteering in Australia and issues facing volunteering today, in the J C Bannon Oration for 2022 at St Mark’s College.

The Bannon Oration is a major annual public lecture given in memory of Dr John Bannon AO, the seventh Master of St Mark’s College (2000-07) and the second-longest serving Premier of South Australia (1982-92).

In introducing Professor Oppenheimer, the Head of College, Professor Don Markwell, spoke of volunteering as one form of the community service which St Mark’s encourages in its students, as the College’s founders intended that it should. He spoke of John Bannon – a resident undergraduate student at St Mark’s in 1962-63 – as exemplifying the College’s ideal and tradition of service.

Now based at the Australian National University, Melanie Oppenheimer was previously Professor of History at Flinders University and has held positions in Australian history at the University of Western Sydney, the University of New England, and the University of Tokyo. A Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, she has recently completed a two-year term as President of the Australian Historical Association.

For over twenty-five years, Melanie Oppenheimer has been interested in exploring the role of voluntary organisations, volunteers and voluntary action in times of war and peace, and the history of volunteering, gender and humanitarianism, with a special interest in the Australian Red Cross and the Red Cross Movement.

Professor Oppenheimer’s J C Bannon Oration was entitled “Volunteering for the Ages”, drawing on Shakespeare’s “seven ages of man”, and she discussed how those many individuals who choose to volunteer often do so in different ways at different stages of their lives. She rejected the claim that young people do not volunteer, arguing instead that they often volunteer in different ways from their elders. She referred to experience in one’s own family as an important factor in determining if and how individuals will choose to volunteer.

Professor Oppenheimer drew attention to the evolution of concepts and definitions of volunteering so that it is now accepted as being “time willingly given for the common good and without financial gain”, be that in formal organisations or in informal contexts of unpaid support to non-family members. Volunteering had shifted from being seen to be a leisure activity to being seen as unpaid work. She highlighted that volunteering in Australia had only been formally measured since 1995, with the definition of volunteering and methods of gathering data on it changing over time.

Her overview of the evolution of volunteering in Australia drew attention to the defining characteristics of what she has called the “Australian way of volunteering”, the pivotal role of the 1970s in the growth and development of volunteering and not-for-profit organisations, the scepticism about volunteering that some (such as the British minister Richard Crossman) expressed at that time, the impact of the Sydney Olympics of 2000 and the United Nation’s International Year of Volunteers in 2001 in a resurgence of volunteering, the way that South Australia had often led the way in the governmental recognition and support of volunteering, the launch of a National Volunteering Strategy in 2011 and current work to develop a new National Strategy for Volunteering, and the challenges arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, which has seen a considerable decline in formal volunteering, pandemic burnout for volunteers and for paid staff alike, and the voluntary sector under considerable stress, and in some cases in crisis.

Professor Oppenheimer referred to how volunteering necessarily changed with changes in patterns of paid work, such as are currently underway, and raised a number of issues for governments and others to consider for the promotion and support of volunteering in the changing realities of this third decade of the 21^st century.

Professor Oppenheimer’s Oration will be published by St Mark’s College in coming months as a small book.

Further details of the 2022 J C Bannon Oration, and of Professor Oppenheimer, can be found here.

For Professor Markwell’s welcome and introduction at the 2022 Oration, click here.

Watch the full J C Bannon Oration here: