So long, and thanks for all the fish.

It occurred to me as I started writing this one that if I didn’t start writing this one I probably never would. Procrastination, you see. Putting off the inevitable.

The last blog.

‘Why write the last one now?’, I hear you cry, avid readers. Well, I could wait until 2026 – and to the end of March when UniSA’s legislation is repealed – but I’ll be the last person standing at that point – and it’s not much fun writing for an audience of one outside of diarying. So, here it is.

The last blog.

May as well get it done while I’ve got all this free time.

The big picture blog series kicked off in 2014 – and over 12 years and (now) 48 thrilling instalments I’ve managed to variously pigeonhole and (out)date myself through variable popular cultural references, grammatically challenge myself through increasingly long sentences and use of nested parentheses (as an aside, as I started typing this one I did wonder if I would reference Star Trek (I did) or Star Wars (I did that too) (or repeat my mixed presentation of both which I trialled in the last blog (I didn’t)) or Indiana Jones (yes, there he is) or Jaws (duh dum duh dum (check)) which have, with occasional wanderings into T.S. Elliott or Pratchett or Tolkein – or indeed, whatever happened to be front of mind during these rare moments of downtime when I can put cursor to page and indulge the urge to write a missive, allowed me to allegedly convey a message which has relevance to the operations of the university to those souls brave enough to take on a one hundred and ninety-seven word sentence that meanders over several column inches without really getting anywhere – and it comes to the end of the line here, today, in October 2025.  The irony of the fact that if I had gone for a two-hundred-word sentence just then, I would have had to type an additional four, not three, words, is one of those things that gets me out of bed every day. Don’t spend too long thinking about it.

Writing this entry, as we head into Q4 of 2025 and with almost all our focus on Q1 2026 and the opening of the new university – spoiler alert - Adelaide University, is a cause for mixed emotions. A lot of what we’re up to right now is about green shoots and new beginnings. But they come at a cost. Their price is an ending. The ending of a 35-year run of a challenger brand, a new kid on the block, an up and coming, take-no-prisoners / make-no-apologies manifestation of a university – the end of UniSA.

Many of my public speaking notes make use of the word ‘wistfully’. It’s a blessedly underused adjective, and it’s not one I really want to apply here. I think that we should be ending unashamedly triumphantly. Gloriously. Auspiciously. We’ve done something nobody else has done in this century in this country. We’ve done something of unparalleled global scale and ambition. We’ve hit the warp speed button on the bridge of the University of Enterprise and taken it to a strange new world. Boldly. Knowingly. With purpose.

And that’s bloody good.

A little over year ago, when we were conducting the interviews for the AU DVCs – to populate the (co-)Vice Chancellors’ Executive Leadership Group (the VCELG – it’s article 302.481.195, you’ll find it in Aisle 28 Location108, near the POANGs) when we asked that group to describe and to project to how they thought we would be travelling now, one word was used over-archingly. ‘Bumpy’. I don’t know that it’s been as bumpy as they thought it would be. It was rattly and wobbly from time to time. But we were travelling off-road. Thankfully, we had good GPS signal on where we wanted to get to – and the best support crew you could ever hope for.

I don’t really have that much time for those who cry ‘takeover’ or ‘loss’. We made a deliberate and informed conscious decision, based on solid modelling and business reasons to do something which would endure for generations. We doubled down and took our Act as the foundation stone upon which the new institution would be built. For me, the mission of AU is a clear evolution of the mission of UniSA. Just as UniSA picked up the missions and purposes of SAIT and SACAE in 1991, and those institutions picked up teachers’ colleges and schools of mines and schools of art from generations before them. There’s always been a baton pass. There are great enduring bones. There’s an amplification. And, in that, the essence of UniSA stands out as a catalyst. As a lapsed chemist, I can tell you that a catalyst is a substance that speeds up a chemical reaction without being consumed in the process. If needed, it can be used again and again. I believe that the catalyst for the creation of Adelaide University - is us. Our people. Our way of doing things. Our dedication. Our hard work. Our ambition. Our consideration. Our thoughtfulness. Our tenacity and our impact. Those things were never going to be consumed in this reaction. They will propel the product of the reaction to new and to greater things than we could ever have achieved on our own. Faster, further. The price, as I have said, is an ending. The prize is a broader palette, greater opportunities and synergies, the most contemporary curriculum in the country, a student-centric university of scale, enhanced research – and, above all, the infinite possibilities of the new.

I really don’t want to finish this blog speaking about AU or 2026, nor do I want to wander or wallow in the mists of rose-coloured reminiscence and nostalgia. MoD. UniSA Online. Pridham Hall. UniJam. A former PM stretched out fast asleep on the couch in my office. International graduations. Local graduations. Research firsts. World firsts. A former Python going out of his way to deliberately crack me up mere seconds before I had to address a crowd of thousands of people.

Fun times.

Halcion days.  

Hard to type through teary eyes days.

You lot.

We gave it a red-hot crack, didn’t we?

Don’t panic.