Our History

On 8 March 1911, the Church of England Archbishop of Melbourne, Henry 
Lowther Clarke wrote to all members of the  Melbourne College of 
Divinity  that had been newly constituted by Act of Parliament in 
December 1910. At the time that this formal notice for the first 
meeting of the College was sent, the College faced many similar 
challenges and wide possibilities that it still faces today. From the 
beginning, the College was its people seeking to respond to the needs 
of member churches, to its students and to the issues and needs of a 
changing society often in turbulent world events. It faced the task of 
working through regulations set by government Education Acts, the 
demands of its own Act of Parliament and its place in relation to 
other tertiary institutions. Its endeavours were marked by faith, 
creative interaction and a striving for academic excellence.

During 2009, the Centenary History Project has seen more than 50 hours 
of taped interviews conducted by Monash Historian Dr Pam Oliver. This 
web page will soon contain some of the information from those 
interviews together with the results of archival research on the 
Colleges fascinating history.