A common space for all

The Junior Common Room, or JCR, has long been the hub of student activity at Ormond.

While the Dining Hall is where the College congregates for meals, celebrations and formal events, the JCR is where students can while away the hours.

Modelled on the common rooms of Oxford and Cambridge, the room serves as a common space for all and for many years the term ‘Ormond Junior Common Room’ also denoted the undergraduate student body.

In the 1980s and 1990s the JCR was where students collected their mail from a carved set of pigeon holes. Each evening after Hall, a coffee trolley was wheeled into the JCR and students could enjoy bitter, over-brewed coffee while delaying the inevitable call of overdue assignments. 

The JCR was simply furnished with a large rug, several well-worn sofas and many basic armchairs. The furniture was not stylish, but it was functional and comfortable, inviting students to lounge in groups, continuing the discussions that had started in Hall or planning that evening’s trip to the pub. 

Importantly, the furnishings were moveable. Sofas were regularly rearranged by the students. The rug was rolled up and dragged, along with all the furniture, to the Billiard Room for each smoko. The waxy floorboards would be revealed, the lights dimmed, and the JCR turned into a dance floor, anointed with beer spilt from cheap plastic cups.

Once a year the room became the venue for the College Revue. Memorably, the Engineers entranced the College with their own composition, “I R NG”, at one Revue in the late 1980s. 

The Students’ Club Annual General Meetings were also held in the JCR. In 1988 we had Extraordinary General Meetings where the rights and wrongs of the sale of the Club’s Brack painting were debated at length. The entire student body crammed into the room as budding barristers took to the floor and displayed their virtuosity with legal parlance.

The newspapers were delivered to the JCR each day, and for the Arts students this meant prolonging the morning and delaying the walk to lectures after breakfast with an hour spent lolling about the JCR. Each Saturday there would be a race to the room, when the many thick sections of The Saturday Age would be divided amongst students, who took up a corner of a sofa to read. It was here that many of us followed the fall of the Soviet Union, the separation of the Baltic States, Glasnost, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the horrors of Tiananmen Square.

In the room next to the JCR was the Shop, which opened after Hall and again at 10pm, dispensing mixed bags of sweets and chocolates. For fifty cents a generous fistful (depending on who was serving) of milky buds and chocolate freckles offered a welcome end to study, and another chance to congregate in the JCR. For the procrastinators, this really was the place to be.

Mike Smith (1987), who now owns the Sun Theatre in Yarraville, ran 48-hour movie marathons in the JCR. The furniture was rearranged, again, and a large screen covered the windows. What more could the Students’ Club need, than an entire weekend of movies, punctuated by the obligatory screening of ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’? 

Each semester would conclude with a slide night. Again, most of the student body would cram into the darkened JCR to watch images of sporting events, boat races, smokos, water-bagging and O-Week, all accompanied by a soundtrack of smoko classics.

Members of the General Committee took turns writing the weekly Students’ Club news, known as the Rumour Sheet. Largely a work of fiction, rich in exaggerated anecdotes and overblown rumours, the Rumour Sheet was pinned to the JCR corkboard each Sunday night. Throngs of students would gather around to read the news and enjoy the skills of this week’s author.

For all the post-Hall buzz, for many hours of each day the JCR was a quiet space. Mid-morning, there might be one or two students checking their mail, or just one person rustling through a newspaper. The JCR ebbed and flowed, a bit like the students themselves, with bursts of music, raucous laughter, and heated debate, followed by quiet reflection. It really was a common space for all: adaptable, changeable and an integral part of College life.