The Melbourne Newsroom

Child health researcher and 2003 Australian of the Year Professor Fiona Stanley AC has been appointed the latest Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Melbourne.

Siri Hayes' introduction to her presentation to the Festival of Ideas
First published in The Age iPad edition, 18 June 2011

Not too long ago I made some work in Northcote around the Merri Creek. It is an interesting place to make a contemporary Australian landscape photograph because it quite clearly reflects a European history through its flora and also shows an environment in ecological decline. This natural landscape is a grand expanse of introduced weeds from the other side of the world. Framing the scenes like an 18th or 19th Century landscape painting seemed appropriate to accentuate the awesome and grand feeling of the tree canopy I experienced when encountering the area. The Merri Creek looks like a lovely and pure bubbling English brook but on closer inspection it is actually a polluted creek full of rubbish in a colonial outpost on the other side of the world.

Can we have a unified sense of Australian identity given the multiplicity of Australian culture and society? How does indigenous Australia shape an overall sense of Australian identity? How does the immigrant experience shape it?

Emeritus Professor Chris Wallace-Crabbe's introduction to his presentation to the Festival of Ideas
First published in The Age iPad edition, 17 June 2011

Australian identity plays out a complicated set of games with our selves, with individual identity. It is bound to those selves by their idioms, by their flavours of imagination, by their barracking, by their voting patterns. It thinks of itself as egalitarian – sometimes; as healthily outdoor – intermittently; as unlike Europe or Asia – when we want to; or as Robin Boyd’s regrettable Austerica. These are some of the predicaments of our novelty as a nation-state. Some of us can recall grandparents talking about Britain as “home”: if that was home, where were we holidaying?  And did those relatives have anything constructive to say about our aboriginal predecessors, whose cultures occupied this continent for 200 times as long as we have?

While landscape art was traditionally seen as a key way of representing personal and cultural identity, well-known art historian and writer Professor Timothy Clark believes that many 19th Century painters resisted such a push.

How has the past shaped contemporary Australia? What sort of ideas, landscapes, movements, institutions of the 19th century have had an impact and what do these influences mean for us today. Kate Darian-Smith, Director of the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne, discusses.

Tom Keneally's introduction to his Keynote address to the Festival of Ideas
First published in The Age iPad edition, 15 June 2011

The aspect of identity that fascinates, teases and comforts me is the existence in our new century of the Utopian view of Australia that rose in the late nineteenth century.  Australia, Bernard O’Dowd’s famous poem first published in the Bulletin in 1900, raised the issue of whether Australia would be ‘a drift Sargasso where the West/ In halcyon calm rebuilds her fatal nest?’ (that is, a repeat of Old World injustices), or would it be the ‘Delos of a coming Sun-God’s  race?’ To this day, at ceremonial events, it’s O’Dowd’s idea of the Sun-God’s race, and our good fortune in escaping the ‘fatal nest’ of the outer world, that is invoked.

Gareth Evans' extract / introduction to the Festival of Ideas
First published in The Age iPad edition, 15 June 2011

The sense of national identity is never stronger than when countries are at war with each other, at imminent risk of war, or remembering war. Even in this mercifully laid-back country of ours, where front-porch flagpoles are almost as absent as they are omnipresent in the United States, it is the events at Anzac Cove nearly a century ago which, more than anything else, still seem to captur –not least for the younger generation who flock there in extraordinary numbers now every April–the national sense of what it is to be Australian.  And we are not the only country in which a strongly war-forged sense of identity has been based not so much on military triumph as adversity.

Dr Patrick McCaughey,  offers an insight into the second Festival of Ideas, on the theme ‘The Pursuit of Identity: Landscape, History and Genetics’.   He introduces tonight’s keynote speaker, UK Scientist and writer, Dr Matt Ridley, and his ideas about the way human trade and exchange of expertise has  influenced our genetic evolution.

Matt Ridley's introduction to his keynote presentation to the Festival of Ideas
First published in The Age iPad Edition, June 13, 2011

There is a paradox at the heart of human evolution. The explosion of our species into technological sophistication and global dominance happened pretty suddenly – by which I mean in the last 100,000 years at the most – whereas all the biological changes to which we attribute our specialness as a species happened gradually over five million years. Scientists have been able to identify precisely nothing that changed in our biology that triggered our take-off into what eventually became ‘civilisation’.