1 Geography at the University of the Witwatersrand Gordon Pirie & Charlie Mather In Visser, G., Donaldson, R. & Seethal C. (eds), The Origin and Growth of Geography as a Discipline at South African Universities. SUN Press, Stellenbosch (2016), pp. 71‐93. For a century, albeit under three different names, the Geography Department at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) has been home to a total of about forty academic staff. It has graduated an equivalent number of published postgraduate students, and housed about half the number of researchers in two affiliated research units. There are doubtless several possible readings of one hundred years of teaching and research by one hundred people. The following account picks out some key academic themes and organisational turning points. Foundations Geography as tertiary study started in Johannesburg at the School of Mines and Technology in 1917. It began in an Arts Faculty under the leadership of a twenty‐ nine‐year‐old Scot, Mr James Hutcheon. 1 In the same year in the thirty‐one‐year‐ old upstart city, he launched the South African Geographical Society on 8 June, and edited the first issue of the Society’s Journal (Jackson, 1978). Establishment of a Geography Department at the successor University of the Witwatersrand (‘Wits’) followed in 1922. Never part of a colonial university college, like so many in Africa, the Wits Department nevertheless had British ties from the start. Hutcheon died on 4 June 1921; he had come to sunny South Africa in 1913 to deal with a heart weakness aggravated doing fieldwork in the Scottish winter. 2 He was succeeded by John Wellington, a Cambridge‐trained geomorphologist. Also aged twenty‐nine at the time of his appointment as Senior Lecturer in 1921, Wellington was promoted to a professorship in 1923. By then Geography had moved into the Science Faculty (Murray, 1982). Wellington led the Wits Department for thirty‐five years. In keeping with the ‘useful knowledge’ thrust at the infant University (but hardly assisting local industry and commerce), his stamp was landscape geographies, typified by field research in South Africa, Okavango, Etosha, Kunene and Swaziland. 3 The work was the backbone of his mammoth two‐volume 1955 book ranging across physical and human geography (Wellington, 1955). The achievement won him a DSc degree from Cambridge University, the first it awarded to a geographer. A third volume followed – on South West Africa (Wellington, 1967). Along the way 1 In Cape Town, Hutcheon received his second MA, taught at the South African College High School, and, in 1915, was the first lecturer in Geography at the South African College, predecessor of the University of Cape Town. Source: S2A3 Biographical Database of Southern African Science (http://www.s2a3.org.za/bio/Biograph_final.php?serial=1361) (consulted July 2015). 2 Macgregor, W. R., 1921. ‘In memoriam’, South African Geographical Journal, 4, 79‐81. 3 Approximately 2,500 of Wellington’s 1930s regionally‐sorted photographs (mountains, mountain passes, rivers, rock formations, capes and bays, dams, harbours, vegetation and crops, collieries, buildings) are preserved in the Wits Historical Papers Collection (No. A2861).