Robert Bowden Madgwick (1905-1979): Educationalist and Vice Chancellor

Abstract

It needs to be said, at the outset, of this selective biographical sketch, that it's subject deserves to be remembered as a courageous visionary who: changed the face of both further and tertiary education in this country, particularly for those who were not recent school-leavers; and was personally the great shaper of Australia's unique and amazingly innovative eighth founded university. His institution, as moulded by him, has not as yet been sufficiently recognized to have transformed, right across the world, the hitherto prevailing orthodoxies as to how to provide and deliver tertiary education. Further, and, more immediately, he altered the prevailing notion of 'New England's wealth' from its being based on primary produce for export to a range of 'products' generated by and for the mind, and to be ultimately delivered throughout the nation and beyond by a range of technologies that are still barely understood by many of its beneficiaries.