NSW Fellows Event - July 2026

Dear NSW Fellows

We are delighted to invite you to the next NSW Fellows’ Event featuring special guest Professor Julia Horne, who will be speaking on Australian Universities and the Post War Recovery, 1943-1953

Event Details:
• Date: Wednesday 29 July
• Time: 4.00 - 6.00 PM
• Venue: The Refectory, Level 5, Belinda Hutchinson Business School Building
• Speaker: Professor Julia Horne
• Hosted by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia

Canapes and drinks will be provided.

This event is exclusively for NSW Fellows of the Academy.

Please register by Wednesday 22 July, for catering purposes.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Kind regards,
Marian and Michele

Universities and Postwar Recovery in Australia 1943 to 1953

At the end of World War 2 the governments of many countries around the world turned to higher education as a pillar for national reconstruction. The instrumentalist view was that increased student numbers provided an expanded skilled labour force to meet the demands of a new economic age powered by expertise. The social democratic view was that funding student expansion would broaden educational franchise and offer economic opportunities to a new generation of students previously unable to access higher education. Furthermore, governments would also fund the expansion of professions that fed their social democratic agendas of widened access to health services, education, and social welfare services.

This paper explores the case of national reconstruction approaches by the Australia government at the end of World War 2, with a particular focus on the Curtin Chifley higher education reforms. It probes the question of ‘social access’ in the 1940s, the debates around universal access to universities that were prominent in Australia, and the funding of new courses that would expand the welfare state in Australia.

Julia Horne is Professor of History at the University of Sydney and writes on the history and politics of higher education. Her books include Australian Universities—A conversation about public good, (Public and Social Policy Series, Sydney University Press, 2022, co-edited with Matthew A.M. Thomas); Preserving the Past: The University of Sydney and the national unified system 1987-96 (co-authored with Stephen Garton, MUP, 2017) Sydney: the making of a public university (Miegunyah Press, 2012, co-authored with Geoffrey Sherington), and A Cultural History of Higher Learning 6 volumes (General Editors Ning de Coninck Smith, Julia Horne and William Whyte, Bloomsbury 2025). She leads an ARC funded project on the post-war Labor Curtin-Chifley higher education reforms which reimagined Australian higher education after World War 2.