The Prophet at Study: The Dilettante Years

The medical school is full,

Of recruits there’s a terrible crop, sir,

And the end of the year will see many a tear,

And they’re nearly all to flop, sir.

Vera Jennings

...this was the nineteen-twenties, the age for youth to prove new freedoms and equalities, and these young people at their easels were, in the Melbourne of that time, the representatives of bohemia, the intellectual avant-garde of an era waiting to be proved.

George Johnson,My Brother Jack

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Signed up as a first-year medical student, Ellery’s arrival at university was overshadowed by a development that was to affect thousands of young men – the war. It was everywhere and impossible to ignore. More and more men, some of whom had been with him at school, were wearing khaki in public, and more than a few of them were never to return. Seeing friends in uniform was one thing; after Gallipoli, with its huge casualty lists, the situation was impossible to ignore and nothing was ever to be the same again in Australia.

Campus life at Adelaide University was limited, provincial and incestuous. As another psychiatrist, Aubrey Lewis, who commenced his studies there found, it was deeply conservative, parochial and prone to bigotry28. Having led a protected life in the bosom of an indulgent family, boarding with one of his mother’s relatives, Ellery was more than a little unsettled.

With all of this going on, he was not going to be an academic highflyer and failed all his subjects except chemistry – oddly, as it is usually the most difficult to pass. This left him no option but to head off to Melbourne and move back in with his parents. In order to enrol at Melbourne University Medical School, he had to pass a foreign language examination, so he spent the summer holiday having French tuition with Joe Knowles, an amiable Bohemian, who helped him achieve his goal. On that note began the extended university stay that wa