I farewelled Macquarie University over two weeks ago, but it has taken until now—with the holidays over and the kids in their second week back to school—to document this life-changing transition.

I have had many roles in my decades on Wallumattagal campus: undergraduate and postgraduate student; casual, contract and continuing, part-time and full-time, professional and academic staff member; teacher, researcher, supervisor, manager, and committee member. So many memories!

I have featured the university on these pages many times: university stories, walking the campus, birds and trees, sculptures, parenting on campus, the impact of the pandemic before lockdown, graduations and more graduations, beginnings, endings and lifetimes in between…

The title of this post—university as palimpsest—refers to the traces of earlier versions of the university, and my experiences of it, that remain while the campus changes.

The idea for this came from the most recent reading of the Idea of the University reading group: Enacting the University: Danish Reform in an Ethnographic Perspective. What a great read it is! The university as palimpsest is mentioned in passing, but it is a rich idea in which “new ideology gets manifested in new structures and processes, which overlay but do not obliterate other forms of organising which came from previous ideologies” (Wright, 2020, p 37). Here is an excerpt that describes what the authors aim to do:

We treat the university as a space populated by managers, academics, and students, all of whom can be knowingly initiating changes or less consciously enacting small shifts in their day-to-day activities. All are involved in a continuous process of organising and trying to routinise, challenge or reform the university’s purposes and processes. Managers, academics, and students, along with policy makers, other interest groups and the media are all involved in trying to imagine, define and enact the university.

Palimpsest is also a metaphor that Ruth Barcan uses in Academic Life and Labour in the New University: Hope and Other Choices (thanks to members of the reading group for reminding me!) to describe the “hybrid beast” of the university.

I have previously referred to Derrida’s hauntology—the present always interrupted by the past and the future—and Foucault’s heteroptopias—places that are different, special, transforming or strange in some way— as well as Barnett’s imaginary landscape or poetics and the thousand tiny universities from Grant’s work. Universities on universities layered in a palimpsest.

When I imagine the university, my children are there at childcare, my partner is working in the old library building, I am sprawled on the grass after a philosophy tutorial, there is bushfire smoke, the pandemic has emptied the campus, buildings are demolished and rebuilt, graduands are crossing the stage and I am one of them and I am on stage in the academic procession, my office is on the 9th floor and the ground floor and at the western end of the campus and in a small cottage. My daughter, not yet a teenager, is on a beanbag next to me. I am drinking a coffee from Marxines, a glass of wine in the staff cafe, a cup of soup at the soup kitchen, and eating stuffed vineleaves from the grapevine in front of the cottage.

I am talking and listening to colleagues, students, teachers, mentors, supervisors, visitors and friends. I occupy spaces that no longer exist on campus. I acknowledge that I am on Dharug country and all of this time is but a moment.