Auckland Technical Institute (ATI) 1972

In December 1972 students were selected for entry to the new School of Physiotherapy being opened in Auckland. Ann McKellar, now Team Leader and Professional Advisor in the Physiotherapy Department at Rotorua Hospital, was one of those students and in July we interviewed her as part of our centenary history project.

Ann had applied to go to Otago, but was enrolled at Auckland Technical Institute with 60 other students from the North Island. The school began in the Methodist Minister’s Training College on the corner of Grafton and Carlton Gore Roads, a stone’s-throw from Spaghetti Junction in Auckland, and for the first few years the physiotherapy students enrolled in the school had the place to themselves. Freezing cold in winter and boiling hot in summer, the V-shaped school with its hidden courtyard and “‘White House” became home-from-home with its canteen, lawned “quad”, teaching rooms and gymnasium.

The school had been established in such haste that refurbishment was ongoing when students arrived for their delayed start. Electrotherapy equipment ordered from Germany had not arrived, neither had the Westminster pulleys, sling suspension frames and weights, and so students were taught massage, patient handling, mobilisations, and exercises with bean-bags instead. Anatomy and physiology classes were taken at the Auckland University Medical School and in laboratories in what is now the Te Tari Awhina building on the AUT Wellesley Campus.

In the second year, students spent the morning continuing their theory education, and their afternoons at Auckland, Greenlane, Middlemore, or North Shore hospitals. Many took buses, and some took lifts from staff to help them make the mad lunchtime dash across the city. In the third year the programme was reversed, and students spent the mornings in the hospital and afternoons back in school.

Students were split into three groups: one third studying cardiorespiratory, one third musculoskeletal, and one third neurology. Students rotated monthly, covering each of the areas once in the three-term year.

Although the students were part of ATI, they were separated from the main campus and so, unlike in Dunedin, they rarely socialised with other ATI students, but did occasionally meet students from Auckland University and the teachers training college. And because ATI was a technical institute, all students had to complete an English writing examination in their first term. The physio students mutinied at the idea, however, and their refusal to take the test led to its demise across the whole institute.

Bonding systems were still in place in 1975 and graduates were allowed to request up to three choices for centres in New Zealand where they would like to work. Perversely, Ann was sent to Dunedin – a place which, at the time, could only be accessed by married Dunedin students. Being the first Auckland student in Dunedin made Ann an anomaly and the object of interest.

Those who were at ATI in the early 1970s may well remember David Williams teaching psychology; Grant Watson and Sue Lord; the girl who knitted under the table in lectures; John Gluckman – the first person to pay commercially to climb Everest; Sandra Sigley and Kate Haswell – both still at AUT; Fran Elkin, Barbara Miller, Janet Thompson, Sue Campbell, Jean Buswell, and others.

Thanks go to Ann McKellar, Erik Dombroski, Sandra Bassett and Liz Culav for helping with the production of this article.

By Dave Nicholls