The University of Sydney
Australia's first university looks the part because it was built to, deliberately, in a style two centuries older than the country founding it.
William Charles Wentworth founded the University of Sydney in 1850. Edmund Blacket, who resigned as Colonial Architect to take the commission, designed its Quadrangle and Great Hall in the Gothic Revival mode of Oxford and Cambridge, partly modelled on Westminster Hall. Ground was broken in 1855, and the Great Hall was ready for its first ceremony in July 1859, after the builder struggled to find labour with half of Sydney off at the goldfields.
What follows is more recent — students in caps, gowns and hoods filing past its sandstone walls in the 1930s. Several catch Commemoration Day, the annual procession that began as an impromptu student concert in 1888 and grew, after a stand-off with the university authorities in 1897, into a march of witty and political floats down George Street; it ran until 1975. One frame instead catches a women's hockey match on the lawn in 1929, sticks lowered mid-contest — proof the Quadrangle wasn't only ever a backdrop for gowns.
Look for the different hoods and stoles marking a different degree in almost every figure of the procession, and the paling fence that, in 1929, still kept the hockey pitch in.
