Its space and furnishings proclaimed the tidy minds of the planners. It had two windows. Lecturers had three windows; professors five. I shared a phone with Tony Hassall whose room, next to mine, was its mirror image. Lecturers and senior lecturers had their own extensions, while professors had their calls mediated by their secretaries. Bookshelves were another measure of status; so were filing cabinets. Because I had nothing much to file, the three drawers of my single cabinet seemed just right, with poetry in the top drawer, fiction in the middle and drama at the bottom. We each had a supply of writing paper with the Monash letterhead in pale aqua, and a bottle of blue-black Quink for the fountain pens we all owned. Few of us could type, and computers were two decades into the future.

Professors had a couch and one armchair in the functional Fler style, and a dozen chrome and vinyl chairs. I had one armchair and eight chairs for the small tutorial groups we then thought normal. It was exhilarating to have my own space, and a key to a door which had my name on it.

All this suggests calm and meticulous planning. Yet Monash in the 1960s was not sedate. Quick decisions about academic staff had been made: there were some safe appointments, and some that could be called adventurous. Some professors were astonishingly young, and many of the junior staff came straight from postgraduate work, with no teaching experience.

With such a small age gap between staff and students, the hierarchical structures were bound to break down. Even the aesthetically dreary Menzies Building (or ‘Ming Wing’), with its long straight corridors, became a friendly place. Staff–student theatre flourished. In this context, the rule that reserved lifts for staff and sent students to the escalators seemed rather silly. Room 727 was on the north side of the Menzies building and less privileged than the south-facing professorial rooms, which looked to Port Phillip Bay. My windows, at first, offered nothing more than the messy building site of the Student Union.

Soon, however, the north-siders had a commanding view of the student protests of the later 1960s and 1970s. The open space between the Menzies Building and the Union was just right for demonstrations. A mêlée of students and a charismatic leader, Albert Langer, made wonderful theatre. Replayed each night on television, it gave Monash its radical image. Everyday teaching went on in much the same way, with ‘continuous assessment’ reducing the pressure of end-of-year exams. Staff shared space in the lifts with students before discovering that the escalators were quicker. Student representation at staff meetings was no great prize for the winners; their attendance dropped off for sheer boredom. The Vietnam protests were another matter. Conscription by means of the birthday ballot, as well as the morality of the war itself, roused matters of principle, passionately held by staff and students alike.

As Victoria’s second university, Monash had to grow in the shadow of Melbourne. Rather than become a colony, it needed to be independent, even assertive. Because the entry bar was lower than Melbourne’s, we tried to give students more attention: smaller tutorial groups; more time with the under-confident and the gifted mavericks. At the end of year exams, however, the bar went up. A Monash degree must not be a soft option. We were told, unofficially, to expect a thirty per cent failure rate, perhaps more. It took time to overcome the ‘second choice’ perception. One mother to another in the mid-1960s about a son’s university entrance: ‘He’s got in at Monash.’ ‘Oh dear, I am sorry!’

Graeme Davison and Kate Murphy have admirably captured the flurry of the early days, the sense of urgency, the political pressures, the energy, companionship, and optimism. An enlightening chapter explains the choice of site. Henry Bolte’s Liberal government chose Clayton in preference to Caulfield Racecourse or the Huntingdale and Metropolitan golf courses, which had the political clout of racegoers and golfers to protect them. The farmlands of the Talbot Colony for Epileptics at Clayton made an easier target. Almost nothing was done to provide public transport. The campus was isolated and inconvenient; its huge car parks soon became inadequate.

Yet the Clayton choice was a natural offshoot of Melbourne’s postwar suburban growth. Industry was moving from the inner city riverside area to the corridor along the Gippsland railway line and Dandenong Road, between Oakleigh and Dandenong. Managers and sales staff built houses in Notting Hill and Mount Waverley. As ‘Australia’s first drive-in university’, Monash was a perfect fit for a region of motels, supermarkets, and drive-in cinemas.

Davison and Murphy are careful not to write ‘history from the top’. Nevertheless, the seven vice-chancellors provide much of the drama. British-born engineer Louis Matheson – capable, charming, dedicated – was the right man for the early days, but was unhappily caught in tempestuous times. Under the equable scientist Ray Martin, the university had a period of stability and consolidation.

If the authors have a hero, it is Mal Logan, the far-seeing (or overreaching) geographer who was vice-chancellor from 1987 to 1997. Under pressure from Canberra, Logan negotiated mergers with other tertiary institutions. As the authors comment: ‘The pain and conflict engendered by the mergers lingered […] [they] may have raised as many walls as they brought down.’ Yet they show Logan as at least half in love with the idea of a Monash Unlimited.

An international Monash followed the multi-campus expansion. It is hard to see the rationale for choices made by Logan and his successor, David Robinson. Having justly described Monash South Africa as a débâcle, the authors do what they can to put a good spin on it, as a philanthropic gift to a society emerging from apartheid, but historian Andrew Markus was surely right to ask: ‘If Monash wanted to help people why didn’t it set up a campus in Alice Springs? ’

As Robinson’s ‘Global Monash’ faltered, Robinson himself crashed. Mild- mannered philosopher John Bigelow took a close look at the vice-chancellor’s early publications, found systematic plagiarism, and went public. Robinson had to resign. There was much rejoicing, especially in the faculties of Arts and Science, which had been depleted and demoralised by ‘crude managerialism’.

Davison and Murphy give a balanced view of the university in the context of its time and place. Their amply documented history is all the better for its occasional severity of judgement and for its readiness to see comedy and absurdity as well as vision and dedication in Monash’s first half century.