Sydney visitors left impressed by city graduation parade
THE stars aligned for both Dunedin and visitors when the peak day of the cruise ship season coincided with the start of the city’s record December graduation ceremonies.
Members of the Lloyd family from Penrith, near Sydney, visiting passengers aboard Ovation of the Seas, were delighted to have the chance to see the University of Otago’s latest graduation parade as it swirled along George St after 11.30am on Saturday.
This was before a 1pm graduation ceremony at the Dunedin Town Hall. There was another graduation at 4pm.
Natalie Lloyd and husband Peter were both impressed with the parade, and would like to see the idea adopted by the University of Western Sydney’s campus sites in Penrith.
Watching it had been a positive, colourful experience, and they felt holding a public parade enabled the community to acknowledge the educational achievements of the area’s tertiary students.
Mr Lloyd said the parade was a ‘‘great thing’’ and he would ‘‘most definitely’’ like to see the idea promoted in Penrith.
Mrs Lloyd said the parade was also a ‘‘great’’ way of ‘‘celebrating achievement’’.
‘‘It’s nice when they have something special for the graduates,’’ she added.
It was a bonus for them that the day of their visit coincided with the first academic parade and the first two university graduation ceremonies of the year.
Dunedin iSITE manager Louise van de Vlierd said the colourful graduation parades were popular viewing for cruise ship visitors.
Much of the cruise ship summer season coincided with a time of the year when most of Dunedin’s tertiary students were out of town, and visitors otherwise would not realise this was a tertiary education city.
The combination of graduation parade, graduations and cruise ship visits added to the vibrancy of the city.
Port Chalmers was also busier than usual with passengers still streaming off the cruise ships in early afternoon, and a lively market running at the Port Chalmers town hall, she said.
Ovation of the Seas (4180 passengers), Golden Princess (2624) and Caledonian Sky (114) brought more than 6900 passengers and more than 2400 crew to the city, on the only day of the Dunedin cruise season when three cruise ships are scheduled to be visiting.
UNIVERSITY of Otago graduates should celebrate and maintain the ‘‘bonds of love’’ and their ‘‘links with all humanity and all life’’on the planet, Prof Peter Crampton says.
Prof Crampton recently stood down as provicechancellor, health sciences, and Otago Medical School dean.
He was commenting in an address to graduates, mainly in medicine and physiotherapy, at the 1pm graduation ceremony at the Dunedin Town Hall on Saturday.
He was proud of the graduates and knew they would ‘‘bring good to the world’’, and pursue their ‘‘own personal and professional growth’’ in the future.
Prof Crampton also reflected on the life of Thomas Bracken, the former Dunedin poet and MP who wrote the words for the national anthem God Defend New Zealand and was buried in the Northern Cemetery.
Bracken was a journalist, poet and politician, and his phrase ‘‘bonds of love’’, from the anthem also reflected Prof Crampton’s theme.
Bracken won the Dunedin Central parliamentary seat in 1881, and had, in a parliamentary speech, attacked the government’s dealings with Parihaka Maori in Taranaki, and what he saw as a ‘‘dishonourable breaching’’ of the Treaty of Waitangi’’.
Prof Crampton told the graduates he shared with Bracken an interest ‘‘in the history of Parihaka’’ and ‘‘what it represents to New Zealand in terms of nonviolent resistance’’.
Prof Crampton said he could carry on ‘‘making links, and weaving the flax bonds that bind us all within our country and between all of our countries’’.
Graduates were now bound together by those bonds, and to their families and friends.
The careers and travels of graduates would ‘‘scatter many of you to the four corners of the globe’’ but their friendships and family connections ‘‘will remain with you forever’’, he said.
In an address to a second graduation ceremony at 4pm, pharmacy researcher and Otago pharmacy graduate Leanne Te Karu reflected on leadership and ‘‘the very ancient and sacred art of Polynesian ocean voyaging’’.
Some anthropologists had described this Polynesian long distance voyaging as ‘‘the greatest feat of our species’’, and this was also a story of ‘‘vision and leadership’’.
She reminded graduates less than 1% of the world’s population had a tertiary undergraduate degree.
She urged students, before they began ‘‘the next stage of your own voyage’’, to realise ‘‘you have had the privilege of tutelage from a worldclass university and to apply that tutelage to the common good’’.