Alumni fondly recall their university days while current student anticipate an eventual longing for the present moment. While nostalgia is bittersweet, memory and history are tools with which the nation manufactures its authority and power.

‘My mum won’t stop talking about South Lawn. She says the best days of her life were spent on South Lawn. I don’t know why she’s so obsessed with it,’ says one of my friends, who jokingly whines about her mum’s South Lawn obsession almost as much as her mum obsesses over South Lawn. 

Her obsession isn’t surprising, though. All of the older people in my life–parents, high school teachers, aunts and uncles–seem particularly attached to their university days. 

In trying to find a reason for this, I stumbled upon a psychosocial phenomenon known as the ‘reminiscence bump’. This theory of memory argues that most people remember significantly more from their second and third decades of life than any other stage. The reasons provided for this phenomenon by two recent researchers, Judith Glück and Susan Bluck, are that ‘events in the reminiscence bump are characterized not only by positive valence, but also by high perceived control and high perceived influence on later development.’ The events that people remember from their teens and twenties are often the ones they felt that they had control over, that had a significant impact on their later life, and/or that they see in a positive light.

In my experience, university memories often align quite closely with these three characteristics. I definitely feel a greater sense of control over how I choose to live my life–what subjects I’ll study each semester, what days and hours I’ll be on campus, who I’ll hang out with–than I did in my school days. It does feel like this period of my life will have a greater impact on my future than any earlier or later stage–unlike VCE, what I specifically choose to study now will probably determine which career I go into. University has been the source of some of my first ‘adult’ friendships and my first relationship—it certainly seems like I’ll spend the rest of my life with at least some of the people I’m surrounding myself with now. And, whilst this certainly isn’t a universal experience, I view my first semester in an almost entirely positive light—the ratio of happiness to stress is a kind of inversion of what Year 12 was.

So this might explain why I’ve encountered so many adults who look back on their university days with such fondness and nostalgia. The ages that we live through at university, and the kinds of experiences we have there, are particularly conducive to the formation of long-term memories.

However, what this doesn’t account for is a sensation I often feel as I wander around campus, that some of my friends note too–a kind of ‘pre-nostalgia.’ A sense of wistfulness and bittersweetness that relates to the present we’re still living in.

I discuss this with my friend Abi, a fellow first-year Arts student, who relates a few reasons for the sensation of nostalgia she feels when she’s on campus.

‘Melbourne is such an old institution and being around all the old buildings, feeling like you’re a segment in this very long history, that drives me to romanticise that past aspect of the university.’ 

‘I also think we’re made to feel nostalgia towards our university experience because I think as you’re growing up you hear a lot of people older than you talking about their university days … and I think that’s with a lot of people’s parents as well as pop culture, movies, TV show, books set in colleges, even this whole Dark Academia aesthetic that’s come out, it all drives us to start looking back while we’re in it, like we’re monitoring our experiences to see if they fit that aesthetic mould that we’re made to understand universities through.’ 

What interests me about Abi’s explanations is that they all link back to processes of romanticisation and idealisation, relating to the university itself rather than the student’s own life. 

Many of the students I talk to describe the University of Melbourne as ‘historic,’ often linking this perception to its sandstone architecture and the fact that it’s presumed to be pretty old.

But the university’s age and architecture, and the way they intersect with Australian history, is more complex than the prevailing conception of them as ‘old.’ Unlike many European sandstone universities, Melbourne’s architecture, particularly its first building, the Quadrangle, is neo-gothic rather than gothic. It is also an imitation, modelled on St David’s College in Wales and Queen’s College, Ireland. And it’s only 170 years old. Oxford University, for some context, has evidence of teaching dating back over 1,000 years. First Nations people have lived in Australia for over 65,000 years. In the context of both universities and Australian history, Melbourne is relatively new, calling into question the accuracy of viewing it as an old institution, and romanticising it as such.

Dark Academia has faced similar criticisms of inauthenticity. By virtue of it being an internet aesthetic, it is predicated on curation–a highly selective focus on the aspects of the university experience that fit a classical and traditional campus experience.

At one Farrago meeting, as we discuss Dark Academia and sandstone universities, the more senior non-fiction writers are quick to mention Robin Waldun, a highly successful Dark Academia influencer who once attended the University of Melbourne. They note that his posts prominently feature buildings such as the Quadrangle and Old Arts, ignoring the university’s newer buildings (which cover a significant proportion of the campus.) In this way, his aesthetic relies on promoting an arguably false image of himself and the University.

In these ways, the Dark Academia aesthetic and the perception of the University as historical appear to be somewhat manufactured, and inauthentic. If these are the main sources of that nostalgic feeling felt by many students I talked to, does that make the feeling itself problematic?

Perhaps. I don’t know if there’s anything inherently wrong with feeling a sense of nostalgia for a false past–I suppose the question is why that false past has been created, and what its present implications are. The transplanting of European history into Australia’s early colonial universities wasn’t just an architectural choice–it was a deliberate act of rewriting history, pretending that there had been a European presence for longer than there really had been. Australian academic John Gascoigne has noted this phenomenon of what is effectively architectural propaganda, positing that ‘the architecture and academic rituals of the newly-founded university were meant to create a sense of the antiquity of the university as an institution … symptomatic of the university’s cultural aspirations to a civilising role.’ In this way, the imbuing of colonial universities with a sense of gravitas and authority, through their building designs, functioned as a denial of both the architectural and educational practices of First Nations peoples. 

Importantly, by romanticising this architecture and this history of colonial education, we’re unconsciously reinforcing the narrative that European history is more ‘romantic’ and more significant than Aboriginal history.  

But I don’t think that these feelings of ‘pre-nostalgia’ evoked by being at the University of Melbourne necessarily need to be tied back to these implications. Talking to different students about the way they feel when they’re at university, I’ve observed two distinct types of nostalgia. 

One is the nostalgia that is linked to romanticisation. It’s impersonal, connected to the university itself, as an artifact of shared cultural memory rather than a locus of personal experience. This aligns with Abi’s experiences–a sense of nostalgia for a version of university that has been constructed through popular culture, others’ stories and our socially-conditioned expectations of the university experience. That’s the type I think is worth being aware of, because it can be wrapped up in dominant societal narratives and falsified versions of the past, and that we therefore need to be conscious of reinforcing.

The other is nostalgia linked to appreciation, rather than romanticisation, and it’s far more personal. It stems from the individual’s perception of the significance that their own university experiences will have on their life. 

This is the kind of nostalgia I get a sense of throughout a conversation with my boyfriend Fin, another first-year Arts student. He describes feeling a sense of nostalgia that relates to a ‘relief and excitement of breaking free from the constraints of childhood,’ combined with an awareness that ‘eventually you fall into the rhythm of adulthood’s own constraints.’ University feels like ‘a direction you take,’ whereas the stages before and after it ‘feel like being pulled along life.’ It’s the sense of autonomy and freedom, and the knowledge that we might never experience these in the same way, that drives this sense of nostalgia.

I think that an awareness of the liminality of this stage of life is one of the main reasons I feel so nostalgic when I wander around campus. I know that there won’t be another time when I’ll just be able to study things I love, regardless of whether they have any relevance to my future occupation or the outside world. And I won’t be able to while away hours on South Lawn, reading or chatting to friends even when I have work to do. Because uni feels like it might be the only time when I can choose to put life first, and practicalities second.

The past few days, as the weather has begun to warm up again, something about the sunniness and slowness of campus life has reminded me of the last few weeks of Term 4 during primary school–when you stopped learning things, and decorated Christmas cards or played on the oval instead. That’s one of the last times that my life felt this carefree, and as replete with possibility, I suppose. So perhaps part of the nostalgia I’m feeling right now is that university kind of embodies some of the best parts of my childhood, whilst making them part of my present. I’m not sure.

Nostalgia is a slippery thing. The specific forms of nostalgia that relate to university are varied and complex in themselves. There’s the type that I’ve observed older people feeling towards their days at university, which stems from a natural yearning for the past. There’s the type that present students feel towards the university because we’re conditioned to romanticise it. And there’s the type that I feel because I’m aware of the transience of this stage while I’m still in it.

As long as we’re conscious of this second type–the fact that its origins aren’t in personal memory, but constructed versions of history and academia–nostalgia strikes me as a really beautiful thing. It’s more tender, bittersweet, than joy–but more nuanced and precious as a result. In my mind it feels warm and sepia-toned.

But I still don’t really understand it. Maybe it’s worth returning to where it all started. The word nostalgia comes from the Greek words nostos and algos; homecoming and pain. A morbid longing for one’s native land. 

Perhaps university makes us feel like we’re returning home.