Finding a name for the PULP office

Words by Patrick McKenzie

Names of buildings and rooms can mean many things. Whether prescriptive (Sydney School of Veterinary Science), descriptive (Eastern Avenue Auditorium), or commemorative (the Honi Soit office is named after late 2016 Editor Sam Langford), names give character, imply history, and best of all, bring life to the spaces to which they are assigned.

Notably, names can also be fraught and contentious. At USyd, the naming of the Wentworth Building, which sits at the corners of Butlin Avenue and Maze Crescent, has long been decried as an antiquated monument to a noted coloniser. Naming and renaming is as sentimental as it is political, and it is as important to question why things are named how they are, as it is to remember the names themselves.

Our own working space ‘The PULP Office’ as it’s colloquially referred to, holds a prescriptive name with little character or history. While we now call the first door on your left through the level 1 entryway of Manning House home, for the preceding seven years in which PULP — previously stylised as pulp — was an online-only publication, it had no office space at all.

As the inaugural team to edit PULP in its fully capitalised, semi-glossy, CMYK-colour printed form, we’ve had the honour and responsibility of beginning the history of our room’s new purposes. Suffice it to say, it wasn’t always The PULP Office.

“I was running the website from the tables at Courtyard,” a former Editor once told me.

You don’t need a midweek afternoon appointment at the Fisher

Library Rare Books & Special Collections room to tell you that Manning House has a history beyond mid-2022. Far before it was host to Sydney Comedy Festival shows and some of Sydney’s premiere hardcore gigs, Manning House was opened at 3:30pm on Monday, March 26 1917 by Lady Cullen, Patroness of the Sydney University Women’s Union and wife of then-Chancellor Sir William Cullen.

It was first a non-residential club to provide female students of the University with “a centre for their intellectual and social life,” William Good writes in Manning House, the women’s preserve. Even then, construction of the building in 1913 under a 4000-pound budget was the culmination of a decades-long campaign by women at the University for a quality space for “retiring”, study, and to conduct meetings and debates in. Only since 1885 had they even been allowed to be admitted to the University, following a special act of State Parliament.

What is now The PULP Office was first The Common Room in the original wing of Manning House. While Good notes that no photographs of Manning’s interior survive from 1917, photographs from 1962 show it in a “near-original” state. In the room 61 years ago, a long table and wooden chairs seem to function as a sort of study space. Today, it is occupied by two desks, two couches, and a fridge.

1962 was also the year that extensions to the building were completed, and “extensive rearrangements of the existing facilities” saw The Common Room renamed to The Graduates’ Room, a title transferred from another area on the same floor with an adjoining shop. A further — and seemingly final — round of refurbishments were completed in 1985, and The Graduates’ Room became home to The ACCESS Centre, containing the administrative part of the USU responsible for funding Clubs and Societies and student publications.

It could be said that The PULP Office is named both The Graduates’ Room and The ACCESS Centre. A slightly worn brass plaque screwed onto the inside wall of the room reads:

“This room was named in gratitude of the interest shown in the Women’s Union by the Graduates”

Merely alluding to its former naming. Meanwhile, an occasionally taped-over fibreglass plaque to the right of the door still identifies us as the ‘ACCESS Centre’. Consequently, hardly a week goes by without a random assortment of students bursting through the door with a question about a room booking or a request for some sort of club-specific resource.

It’s hard to distinguish which element of history to most closely identify with. While not used for its original purpose since the separate Women’s Union was amalgamated into the USU in 1972, The PULP Office is at once a Common Room for editors and contributors alike, The ACCESS Centre for all those who Google it, and The Graduates’ Room, for everyone who passes through it — editors included — who ought to have graduated by now.

But I wouldn’t be opposed to a renaming either.