Third Age

This paper begins with a brief history of the University of the Third Age (U3A) , which began in France in 1972, when a professor at the University of Toulouse conducted a summer school for retired people with a program of lectures, concerts, guided tours, and other cu.tural activities. It identifies the defining characteristic of the U3A movement in France as its attachment to the term "university. " In Britain, the U3A movement was the creation of its members who decided what was to be taught, by whom, in what ways, and at what cost. U3A was relatively late in coming to Australia. The first groups were established in Melbourne in 1984 and continued to grow and epitomize the community-based, do-it-yourself British model. Following eight pages of background, information obtained through a survey of 16 U3As in New South Wales is presented as vignettes, arranged in the chronological order i