GAZETTE - Adm.monash.edu.au - Monash University

FOUR HONORARY DEGREES CONFERREDFour honorary degrees were conferred by the Universityat the four graduation ceremonies held on 5 and 19April 1968. During the ceremonies 754 degrees and 256diplomas were conferred on students from all faculties.Citation delivered by Professor J. D. Legge on theoccasion of the conferring of the degree of Doctor ofLetters lsonorts causa upon Lady Bassett.The study of history, Me.Chancellor, is an exactingdiscipline. It calls for patiencein the pursuit of evidence,care and honesty inthe handling of it, imagination,wit and craftsmanshipin its presentation.Mamie Bassett began todevelop these skills at anearly age. It might be indelicatefor me to give theprecise date of her firstpublication - an article entitled'The Foundation ofLady Bassettthe University of Melbourne"which appeared in the University Review.Enough to say that it appeared when she was barely inher twenties. It showed her capacity to use newly discovereddocuments - and perhaps it also foreshadowedher later interest in the foundation of new universities.Lady Bassett sprang from fa solidly academic background.Daughter of Sir David Orme Masson, professorof Chemistry in the University of Melbourne, she livedat the University in one of those old professors' housesof which only two survivors remain to testify to themore spacious professorial way of life of a bygone age.Her brother, also a chemist, became, as his father hadbeen, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and also served asVice-Chancellor of Sheffield. Her sister. an authoressin her own right, married the distinguished pioneer ofsocial anthropology, Malinowski. Mamie Bassett herselfhad an interest in anthropological matters whichdrew her, shortly after the first world war, to make anextended visit to New Guinea. I hesitate to compareher with that indomitable nineteenth century lady traveller,Mary Kingsley, who in bonnet, button-up boots, andtrailing skirts, penetrated to the darker corners of Africa.But in wanting to see things at first hand and in sharpeningher gifts of observation in New Guinea she doesbelong in some degree to that tradition.From her youth lip she thus moved in scholarly circleswhere things are not taken at second hand. As anhistorian in the making, she was sensitive to a varietyof ways of looking at the world - a variety which wasfurther extended by her marriage in 1923 to an engineer.Marriage and the bringing up of a family postponedfor a time her development as a professional historian.[ use the word "professional" advisedly, Mr. Chancellor.Lady Bassett modestly describes her interest in Australianhistory as a recreation, but in 1940 the publication ofThe Governor's Lady, a study of Mrs. Philip GidleyKing, was the beginning of a series of important contributionsto our knowledge of Australian history. In 1954her masterpiece, The Hentvs, appeared. This was a landmarkin Australian biography and in many ways apioneering work in Victorian social history. It was followedby Realms and Islands: The World Voyage 0/Rose de Freycinet and Behind the Picture, a study of thecruise of the Rattlesnake to Australia and New Guinea.In speaking of Mamie Bassett's gifts as an historian itis not only the care of her scholarship, her eye for vividdetail, and the subtlety of her insight - a "penetratingfeminine insight" as one reviewer has called it - whichcommand admiration. ALso to be admired is her eleganceof style. If history is a social science, as somehave claimed, it is also an art. Or it should be. I thinkit was Lord Macaulay who said that he wanted to writein such a way that his History of England would befound in every lady's drawing room. For today's readers,male and female, Mamie Bassett writes as attractivelyas Macaulay did for his readers. Unlike so many of theworks which pour from the presses these days her bookscan be read - and read for pleasure. She falls withinthe tradition of history as a "velvet study" with her interestin persons, her sensitivity to the subtleties ofindividuals' relations with each other, and her ability tocreate a tapestry, to recapture the flavour of the societywithin which they moved.This is one of those happy occasions, Mr. Chancellor,when the particular honorary degree to be conferred isindeed appropriate to the work of the person who receivesit. This is our first D.Litt. I think it is also thefirst occasion in which a D.Litt. has been conferred ona lady in Victoria.Citation delivered by the Vice-Chuncetlor on theoccasion of the conferring of the degree of Doctor ofLaws honoris causa upon Sir Osborn McCutcticon.When you cast your mindback, Mr. Chancellor, almostexactly ten years, tothe early days of your chairmanshipof the InterimCouncil of this University,you will recall that themain planning, academic aswell as physical, was doneby the Buildings Committee.The broad policy thatwas to be followed - that"the University shall haveregard to the urgent needfor the establishment ofcourses in applied scienceand technology, and for theSir Osborn McCutcheontraining of more engineersand scientists for industry and agriculture, and for therelief of those faculties in the University of Melbourne.. at which limitation of the number of students is. . . necessary" - had been laid down in the Act butthere was much to be done to translate this policy intoa functioning university. As the planning consultantSir Osborn Mcc.nrcheon, as he now is, played a tremendouslyimportant part at this stage first by assemblinga great mass of information, about studentpopulation trends for example, from which the Committeecould distil a policy; and then by devising the11