Every year an oration honours former Australian prime minister Sir Robert Menzies. Over decades, education leaders from Cambridge and Oxford, Harvard, Manchester and Dublin, alongside speakers from numerous Australian universities, have taken the platform to celebrate the role of Sir Robert Menzies in shaping Australia’s higher education.

At the end of the oration the speaker is presented with a medallion by a member of the Menzies family and feted at a dinner. They sit near a portrait of Sir Robert, robed as chancellor of the University of Melbourne, the public role he chose after life in politics.