The Australian Women's Register

Pamela Louise Colville nee Braund is in the rare position of having been awarded a Bronze Medal to mark 25 years’ service to the University, despite having twice briefly resigned. She was, during her long periods of employment in different Departments, however, regarded as someone whose work made that of all who worked with her more efficient and frequently more enjoyable.

When the Head of the Department of Zoology put the case for her reclassification to a higher grade, the note read in part:

Mrs Colville is not the sort of person who settles for compromise or improvisation: she works out the best way of running a system and puts it into practice. She is an efficient and enormously energetic worker who makes things happen… She has steadily put all our resources… onto a much better-organized and more easily accessible basis.

As an example, the note recorded her readiness to assume tasks outside her formal duties such as organising the tea club, laundry and blackboard cleaning.

Pamela Colville came to the University in 1971 as a Technical Assistant in the Department of Genetics, having spent the previous year as a secretary with Commercial Union Insurance. She worked her way steadily up the scale, taking her Certificate of Applied Science in 1977 and her Animal Technician Certificate the following year. From 1980 to 1986 she worked in Zoology with responsibility for undergraduate practical classes, care and storage of equipment and for museum specimens. She left in 1986 because of ill health, but finding herself in her own words ‘going mad at home’, in 1989 entered the Department of Engineering, occupying a succession of senior administrative positions in Academic Services and the Office of the Dean.

In 1996 Pamela Colville was appointed to Property and Campus Services, initially as a Research Officer and Committee Secretary of the Planning and Development Committees.[1] She moved to coordinating client services, a position requiring a high level of interpersonal skills and organisation. When she retired, she noted that while she had thoroughly enjoyed laboratory work and interacting with students, her best career memory was of climbing the Old Quad Building with the architect George Tibbits and discovering some stonework from an old City building.

[1] Further information on this Department can be found in Juliet Flesch. Minding the Shop: people and events that shaped the Department of Property & Buildings 1853-2003 at the University of Melbourne. Melbourne: Department of Property & Buildings, 2004.