Origins and construction By the late 1950s, the University of Adelaide's North Terrace campus was approaching capacity. In 1960, the
Premier of South Australia,
Thomas Playford, announced that of state government-owned land in Burbank (now
Bedford Park) would be allocated to the University of Adelaide for the establishment of a second campus. Planning began in 1961. The principal-designate of the new campus, the economist and professor
Peter Karmel, was adamant that the new campus should operate independently from the North Terrace campus. He hoped that the Bedford Park campus would be free to innovate and not be bound by tradition. Although the Labor Party had favoured the name "University of South Australia", academic staff wished that the university be named after a "distinguished but uncontroversial" person. They settled upon British navigator
Matthew Flinders, who explored and surveyed the South Australian coastline in 1802. Its original coat of arms, designed by a professor in the Fine Arts faculty, included a reproduction of Flinders' ship
Investigator and his journal
A Voyage to Terra Australis, open to the page in which Flinders described the coast adjacent the campus site. A significant early initiative was the decision to build the Flinders Medical Centre (FMC) on land adjacent to the campus and to base the university's medical school within this new public hospital – the first such integration in Australia. Flinders accepted undergraduate medical students in 1974, with the FMC opening the following year. and Biomedical Engineering were established shortly afterwards. In 1991, as part of a restructuring of higher education in South Australia, Flinders merged with the adjacent Sturt Campus of the former South Australian College of Advanced Education. In 1992, a four-faculty structure was adopted. In 1998, the Centre for Remote Health, a rural teaching hospital based in
Alice Springs, was established jointly with the
Northern Territory University (now
Charles Darwin University). This was expanded further in 2011 with the establishment of the Northern Territory Medical Program. Since 2000, the university has established new disciplines in areas including physiotherapy, occupational therapy and more disciplines in engineering. In 2011, the bacteria genus
Flindersiella was named after the university after the strain was found on a tree on campus grounds. In 2015, the university opened a new campus at
Tonsley, the former site of the
Mitsubishi Motors Australia plant in Southern Adelaide. This campus houses the university's School of Computer Science, Engineering and Mathematics, along with the Medical Device Research Institute, the Centre for Nanoscale Science and Technology (now known as the Flinders Institute for Nanoscale Science & Technology) and Flinders technology start-up company
Re-Timer. In 2016, the university celebrated its 50th anniversary with a calendar of public events, and a publication summarising the highlights of the university's history, research and alumni achievements over the last 50 years. The year also saw the opening of the award-winning student hub and plaza, transforming the central campus. The university's strategic plan,
Making a Difference - The 2025 Agenda, released in 2016 set an ambitious vision for the coming decade for Flinders to reach the top ten of Australian universities, and the top one per cent in the world. On 1 July 2017, the university restructured from a two-tier academic system of four faculties and fourteen schools, to a single-tier structure consisting of six colleges. In 2019, the university announced an additional $100 million investment in research and a further $100 million in education over a five-year period to support it to meet its strategic goals. The university also in 2019 announced plans for a substantial development on a tract on land on the northern portion of the Bedford Park Campus adjacent to the Flinders hospitals precinct. Known as "Flinders Village" the decade-long development will deliver research facilities, student accommodation, commercial premises and amenities. The catalyst for the initiative was the extension of the Clovelly Park rail line to the Flinders precinct. The $141m rail line and Flinders Station project began operation in December 2020. Stage one of the Flinders Village development is the construction of a health and medical research building. Construction began in December 2021 and the building, which will be home to the Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute, was scheduled for completion in 2024. In 2021, the university announced that it would be expanding its
Adelaide CBD presence, establishing a vertical campus as the anchor tenant in Festival Tower, a major development scheduled for completion in 2024 adjacent to Parliament House and the Adelaide Railway Station on North Terrace. In 2022, the newly elected state Labor government led by
Peter Malinauskas proposed setting up a commission to investigate the possibility of a merger of South Australia's three public universities: the
University of South Australia, the
University of Adelaide and Flinders University. The University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia indicated their intention to merge. Flinders University chose to remain an independent entity. ==Governance and structure==