Room to move

Ormondians remember their room at College, whether they had a grand Main Building study or a quiet corner of McCaughey. 

When Ormond opened in 1881, each student was allocated a small bedroom of their own and a ‘sitting room’ shared with another student, who was known in Ormond slang as a ‘wife’. Sitting rooms contained a fireplace for heating and for making tea; students had to chop and cart their own wood to light a fire. When Ormond’s second residential area, Picken Court, opened in 1962 it provided some studies and bedrooms but also single rooms called ‘hermits’ that substituted the bedroom-and-study combination. McCaughey Court, opened in 1968, offered only ‘hermits’ and this became the norm in later buildings and developments. Today, there are few ‘studies’ left at Ormond. Instead, some later year undergraduates have rooms in Wyselaskie House, share flats in McCaughey Court or have their own larger room in Main Building. Graduate students have en-suite rooms in purpose-built buildings.

Some of the more unusual rooms at Ormond include the Gables, rooms built into the attics of Main Building. Some Gables rooms have mezzanine sleeping areas or other quirky design features. Also unique to Ormond are the rooms inside the College’s iconic clock tower, with its panoramic views across Melbourne. These were once studies allocated to pairs of students each year. In 1998 they were converted into common rooms, giving more students the chance to use them.

When Ormond opened, it had all the mod cons of the late Victorian era, meaning that there was no hot water or plumbing in Main Building. The College was sewered in 1906, but hot water took another 50 years to arrive. When the Olympics came to Melbourne in 1956 Main Building’s plumbing was renovated to better provide for the visiting film and television journalists who were billeted at University of Melbourne colleges during the Games. 

Today, all Ormond students have their own comfortable room in Main Building, McCaughey Court, Picken Court, the Wyselaskie Houses, Oval Wing or the Graduate Buildings. As this photo gallery demonstrates, whilst the tea kettles and pipes have gone, some things have remained constant over Ormond’s 140 years: personal photos and textiles and even a comfortable cushion remain favourite ways for Ormond students to make a space feel like their own.