Local higher ed providers to mark major milestone

LA Trobe University and Bendigo TAFE have announced a year-long celebration to mark one hundred and fifty years of tertiary education in the city.

Bendigo Tertiary Education Anniversary Foundation chair Penny Davies said it had been a journey that started with the mining industry in 1873.

“With the mining in Ballarat and Bendigo and other centres around Australia, there was a call put out that we really needed to educate these miners,” she said.

“We had just passed the industrial revolution, and we were starting to think about machinery doing the jobs of people.

“Some auspicious citizens got together in Bendigo and formed a committee and very soon after that the School of Mines was established.”

Although, it wasn’t always smooth sailing Ms Davies said.

“It continued to have prosperous and less than prosperous times over the next century,” she said. “It was funded not by governments but by contributors.

“The thought miners or mining companies might finance the place ran off the rails a bit because there were a number of mining depressions during that time.”

The Bendigo School of Mines managed to survive until 1959, from there several changes took place. said.

“Governments had become very involved by then, so the name was changed to the Bendigo Technical College,” Ms Davies said.

“More name changes came again in the 1960s to the Bendigo Institute of Technology, then in 1976 to the Bendigo College of Advanced Education.”

In 1987 the Northern District School of Nursing also joined, and it was around this time a partnership with a university was considered Ms Davies said.

“Universities were really growing in Victoria,” she said. “There were four unis by then Melbourne, Monash, La Trobe and Deakin.

“La Trobe had similar philosophies and policies to our own. Whilst the initial courtship was a bit rocky, we have been very pleased to be with La Trobe formally since the 1990s.”

Ms Davies said it wasn’t just the University that was on a path of growth throughout history.

“In the middle of all of that, we had the technical division that we know best as TAFE,” she said.

“In 1983 the TAFE College separated from the College of Advanced Education and they have gone on to have various name changes and changes in their own focus.

“TAFE has always had an underlying trade look at the world and that has been their prime target.”

An academic procession to celebrate 150 years of higher education will take place Friday, 21 April with a list of all events found via bit.ly/3TrCa0h.