Darling Building 1922, pushed by brilliant biochemist Brailsford Robertson, for Adelaide Uni medical faculty

The Darling Building for Adelaide University's medical faculty departments, including physiology (inset), in the 1920s.
image courtesy State Library of South Australia

Adelaide University’s medical faculty found its first proper home with the Darling Building opened in 1922 for its histology, physiology, biochemistry, pathology and zoology disciplines with laboratories, a lecture theatre and a medical library designed to hold 70,000 books.

Before then, the faculty had shared other departments’ buildings until in 1902 it gained a small anatomy school behind the Mitchell Building. This was mainly two parallel rooms – one for dissection, the other a museum – with a small mortuary and service rooms at the ends. A lecture theatre for 200 was added after anatomy professor Frederic Wood Jones arrived from England in 1920.

But the main push towards getting the Darling Building came from former student and brilliant biochemistry professor Brailsford Robertson who, back in Adelaide in 1919, published a stinging attack on the pitiful amounts Australia was spending on scientific research in comparison with countries such as Japan.

With quiet insistence, Robertson budged the university to get part of the government’s old artillery and mounted police site, and a donation of £15,000 from John Darling Jnr’s family, for a medical faculty building.

Robertson planned the layout and specified lighting, furniture, fixtures and equipment. Most woods and materials used were local but the benchtops had New Zealand kauri for its close and even texture. The teaching laboratories were designed with wedge-shaped tables so the microscopes of students furthest away wouldn’t be in the shadow of students closest to the windows.

The red-brick three-storey Darling building, designed by Walter Bagot, was opened in May 1922. The first floor was the principal domain of Robertson with the laboratories he used for research and practical studies in biochemistry. The floor above was shared from 1920 to 1948 by professor of pathology and bacteriology John Cleland and Professor Harvey Johnson who had returned from Douglas Mawson’s expedition from the Antarctic, with two tons of specimens.