Wright College and its Development

Abstract

The formal opening celebration today in the original Wright College Dining Hall - on the sixteenth day of July 2014 - of the occupation of the first of the New Wright College buildings, and the re-linking of them with the 1990s renamed 'Wright Village', are a time of much warranted celebration. This combination of history, of place, and of institutional memory affords us the opportunity to take stock of what we of the greater 'Wright Family' have built here, and of what you are inheriting in Australia's unique and most unexpected and imaginative college, and in its rural setting, that so well described by our poet, Judith Wright - who has stood to speak of our heritage, exactly where I am standing at the academic and residential education foundation spot, - for what she so well described as this 'high lean country'. Not only was New England, - or the UNE - the first Australian non-capital city University today, University, but Wright College was - and is - the founding block for our rurally set college system, one housing in fellowship and life learning the vast bulk of our full time UNE campus-resident students. We in this place today, in 2014, - and all the earlier Wright people, - are immensely proud of what we share and which has already helped us, and will continue to develop all its members to serve our further spheres of work and living so uniquely. Let us reflect with pride, as well as with a strong sense of our ongoing responsibility to its challenges, that the current UNE college system must continue to be, as it has been described in the resounding words of the last Vice-Chancellor, Professor James Barber, - 'the jewel in the crown of this university'.