- Posted on 24 Jan 2018
- 4-minute read
Taking a look back to the photos that have been key moments in the history of UTS.
On 26 January 1988, Gus Guthrie sent a broadcast to all staff that read:
Gus Guthrie Vice-Chancellor of UTS (19881996)
Gus Guthrie Vice-Chancellor of UTS (19881996)
As we celebrate 30 of years of UTS, let’s take a look at our history.
Everything starts somewhere, and it doesn’t always go smoothly. Before UTS and the Tower, we were just a flooded excavation site giving our neighbours water views.
At the other end of the campus, 60 years earlier, we see the industrial area of pre-war Sydney.
And we return to current-day UTS with buildings by world-renowned architects
When the Tower designs were first proposed, not only were there going to be seven of them, the student magazine at the time, Shoplift, believed that the architect’s brief was to create a space ‘in which students would not want to congregate’.
It turns out that the Tower Foyer is a popular meeting spot and breakfast spot (thanks, Bluebird Brekkie Bar!)
Back in 2009, about 30 members of our community marked the 30th birthday of the Tower by abseiling down the side. Here we see Tasman Munro (B Industrial Design) about to descend the Tower. Here’s the experience in his own words:
Tasman Munro Abseiling student
Tasman Munro Abseiling student
Tasman wasn’t the first student to descend the tower. In this photo, a student is abseiling down the Tower building as part of the protests against the abolition of mandatory student unionism in 2006.
Our community also protested a proposal under Education Minister John Dawkins for a Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS). Evidently, it failed, as HECS was introduced a year after this photo in 1989.
The original superlab.
Before the days of My Student Admin, this was a familiar image for our NSWIT students in the late 1970s when they wanted to enrol.
Your first day of uni during orientation wouldn't be the same without our Peer Networkers! The first peer networkers were recruited on UTS’s 10th birthday, back in 1998.
Graduates of UTS are among notable alumni such as Hugh Jackman (BA Comms, 1991), Maile Carnegie (BBus Marketing, 1992) and Nelson Mandela who was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Laws by UTS in 2000.
Transitioning from a teaching institution to embrace research, like other universities, was met with some concern by NSWIT staff. But thanks to the likes of Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research) Lesley Johnson empowering our researchers with time and grants, UTS research radically improved.
What’s a trip to UTS without a 300m walk through the Devonshire Tunnel? It opened up in 1906 and has been going strong ever since!
Before it became a place for cheap wine and good music for the whole community, The Loft was a staff-only retreat.
Byline: Photos and stories adapted from Stories from the Tower (2013), edited by Debra Adelaide, Paul Ashton & Annette Salt.