TRINITY COLLEG THE UNIVERSITY- OF
EWSLETTER MELBOURNE
DR SHARWOOD HONOURED By a decision of the College Council, the Music Room and adjacent Courtyard have been named The Sharwood Room and Sharwood Court in honour of the Fourth Warden. At a dinner for members of the College Council and some special guests (Dr Robin Sharwood, members of his family, and the Senior Students from 1965 to 1973) on 15 March 1993, Bishop James Grant recalled the many aspects of Robin Sharwood's contribution to Trinity in a time of decaying buildings and great social change. Before being invited to unveil a plaque commemorating the occasion, Dr Sharwood thanked the Council for the honour that had been paid to him and his family and then continued:
The Sharwood Room and Court
On balance, of course, being Warden here was for me a tremendous privilege, a deeply fulfilling experience, and, for all its comparative brevity (at least as measured in Trinity terms) the central episode of my working life.
"serendipity" over its long history, at least so far as its buildings and grounds are concerned. When you come to think about it, the College's really grand designs have never quite come off
It is rather late in the evening, and I do not want to detain you at length, as I am sure you would much prefer to talk amongst yourselves. But I should like to offer you a few reflections on the buildings and grounds of this College, to which I have now become, in a new and rather special way "attached" - in much the same kind of way (well, not quite the same kind of way) that Eeyore was "attached" to his tail in the Winnie-the-Pooh story. "He was fond of it", said Pooh to Owl, who had appropriated EeyorĂŠ s tail for a bellrope. "Fond of it?" said Owl. "Attached to it", said Pooh solemnly.
The architect Leonard Terry gave the first Trustees a splendid master plan for an entire College; but only one of its proposed assemblage of buildings was ever constructed, namely, the Warden's Lodge (now Leeper) and even that is incomplete (the drawings show a covered cloister along its western front). That was in 1870.
In the mid 18th century, Horace Walpole coined the wonderful word "serendipity" to describe "the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident" (to quote the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary
In 1878, when more money became available, Bishops' was erected. It is more or less where Terry had planned to put a building, and indeed looks rather like his drawing; but, as we all know, for reasons of economy it was built in variegated brick, in the Victorian "Venetian Gothic" manner, rather than in Tasmanian stone; and under an architect named Wyatt - not Terry for some reason, although he was still around. Wyatt, too, produced a master plan.
I am rather inclined to think that this College has exhibited
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