A research archive for Charles Darwin University

In 1999 I was commissioned to write the centennial history of a student union, a union with a proud history of political activism and an equally proud history of outrageous capping stunts. A beneficiary of compulsory student unionism, it had survived scandals which would have destroyed more conservative organisations. It had become the proprietor of both an award winning union building and a strong sense of its role in the life of the university and the wider community. From as early as the 1920s, the student body had frequently split along often radically opposed political lines. Its location in New Zealand's capital city Wellington had afforded its members ample opportunity to engage stridently and to great effect with issues of national and international concern, from such large matters as the preservation of academic freedom, the anti-apartheid and anti-nuclear movements, to the more mundane but just as pressing matter of the ever-rising cost of student enrolment.