Seek Wisdom

There are 5 universities in Perth and they've been in the press a bit with their recent open days and teh new Good University rankings coming out. You'll note, like all things in Australia (European colonizers didn't arrive in this country until 1788), they're relatively new.

*Aussie translation: "uni" = university

University of Notre Dame 

(no, not the fighting Irish in in South Bend though they are linked)

A private Catholic uni down in Fremantle with 7,000 undergrads split between Freo and Broome. It became a uni in 1989.

Edith Cowan University

A university of 16,000 undergrads across the northern suburbs of Perth (and other few small campuses), it's the only uni in Australia named after a woman (the first woman to be elected into parliament). It prides itself on providing alternative entry into higher education since it's opening in 1982.

Murdoch University

Started in 1973, as Perth's second oldest uni, is in Perth's southern suburbs. It has about 16,000 undergraduates as well as a focus on research.

Curtin University 

(hopefully you've heard of this one)

It's the largest uni in Western Australia with close to 37,000 undergrads. It was established in 1986 and was originally Curtin University of Technology with a practical and growing research focus with the motto "Make Tomorrow Better".

University of Western Australia
(aka UWA)

The oldest uni in Western Australia and a member of the Group of Eight (hoity toity equivalent of the Ivy leagues in the US, but was only started in 1994). It's motto, in a traditional liberal education perspective, is "Seek Wisdom."

Because there is no high profile uni sport (and no mascots!), the rivalry between uni's is a bit more quietly academic and turns into "My engineers are better than your engineers" or "We got more research dollars last year". And because Western Australia is the national underdog competing for research grants with the powerhouses over east in Sydney and Melbourne, they do work together. We happen to be doing some research at UWA (if you remember) and I was over at their beautiful campus twice in the past week. Out of the pages of Harvard and Yale 101, it looks like a university should.

It's got its hallowed hallways (be it mostly outdoors as we are in Australia...

Old buildings with tributes to old, wise men...

 THe normal buildings you'd expect, with the added bonus of palm trees...

Big, old trees and racks of student bicycles...

And students playing a pick up game on the green (albeit the cricket ground)...

And like any good university (Maryland has its black squirrels, Carolina had its aggressive northern mockingbirds, and Curtin with its deformed Australian crow/ravens), UWA has its resident peacocks primarily residing in the Arts building

Those peacocks are fierce, but I'll take a terrapin or gamecock any day.