Australia's oldest university once had its own seat in parliament
Founded in 1850, the University of Sydney was built on a radical promise: entry by merit, not by church or class. It admitted women on equal terms from 1881, briefly elected its own member to the colonial legislature, and later funded medical research by selling a Picasso nobody had seen since 1939.
The push came in 1848 from two Legislative Council members, William Wentworth, a Cambridge man, and Sir Charles Nicholson, trained in medicine at Edinburgh. Wentworth insisted a secular state university would serve the poor rather than the rich, and that a society heading for self-government needed one. It took him two attempts. The founding act passed on 24 September 1850, the governor Sir Charles Fitzroy assented on 1 October, and teaching opened on 11 October 1852 in a schoolroom now part of Sydney Grammar School.
Early firsts piled up. John Woolley was the first principal and Sir William Charles Windeyer the first graduate, and a royal charter from Queen Victoria in 1858 gave its degrees the same standing as British ones. That year's Electoral Act also made the university a constituency once it had 100 qualifying graduates; the seat was first filled in 1876 and abolished in 1880, a year after Sir Edmund Barton, later Australia's first prime minister, won it. In 1885 Mary Elizabeth Brown and Isola Florence Thompson became its first women to earn a BA.
Some graduates changed Sydney physically. In 1924 John Bradfield received the first Doctor of Science in Engineering for a thesis on city railways and the harbour bridge, then led the bridge's construction. The philosopher John Anderson, who taught from 1927 to 1958, was so outspoken an atheist and free thinker that the state legislature censured him in 1943. The first PhD went to the engineer William H. Wittrick in 1951.
The honours list is long: eight prime ministers including Anthony Albanese, 26 High Court justices and 110 Rhodes Scholars. In 2010 an anonymous donor gave Jeune Fille Endormie, a Picasso portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter, on condition it be sold. It fetched £13.5 million at Christie's, endowing chairs at the Charles Perkins Centre, which honours Charles Perkins, the first Indigenous Australian man to earn a degree there.
Source: University of Sydney
