This text is from a lecture by Associate Professor Chris Mackie from the Centre for Classics and Archaeology in the School of Historical Studies begins by exploring the place of Classics and Greek myth in the mind of Gough Whitlam, as enunciated in a recent biography of him by Jenny Hocking (and launched by Kevin Rudd). The lecture then turns to two Greek myths of love and separation – Demeter and Persephone (which, we learn, moved Gough to tears in his childhood), and Danae and her son Perseus. The end of the lecture draws some conclusions from all this about Greek myth and its place in the contemporary Australian context.

On the day that Michael Cathcart asked me if I would do one of the talks in this series on mythologies an article appeared in the Age describing the launch of the biography of Gough Whitlam by Jenny Hocking.   The book was formally launched by Kevin Rudd, and the Age had a rather delightful photo of the two gentlemen at the event itself.  It captured in a rather striking way the meeting of two Labour PMs who now seem very far from each other in time, place, and even politics.  Gough Whitlam won the first election that I could vote in, and I duly danced with my friends on the bar of the Cambridge Hotel in Newcastle on the night that he won.  This particular establishment was not for the faint-hearted, and that was especially true on that particular night.  I knew many bars in Newcastle in those days, but that was the first time that I had ever danced on one.  And you’ll be pleased to know I haven’t danced on any since. 

I was able to go through University – virtually for nothing – on the back of Gough Whitlam’s innovations in the tertiary sector, and like many others of my age group I have had a personal sense of affection and gratitude to the man.  Whether you like him or not Gough has probably had an impact on your life, and that is not a bad testimony for a former PM.  The article in the Age, however, didn’t focus on Gough’s politics very much at all, or Kevin’s for that matter, but rather his passion for Classics and Greek myth. Gough’s interest in antiquity, and the humanities generally, have always been part of his profile, perhaps part of the mythology of the man. In the book by Jenny Hocking there are plenty of references to his early encounters with Greek myths, his studies in Latin, French, English and Greek at high school and at University.  On one particular occasion it seems that a mythical narrative from the Greek world had a particular impact on him, and this is the episode that Kevin Rudd focused on at the launch.  Part of the Age article went like this:

‘Prime Minister Kevin Rudd seized an opportunity to tease Gough Whitlam, recounting how the tragedies of Greek mythology were enough to reduce the Labor elder statesman to tears as a toddler.’

‘In a normal Australian household toddlers become saddened by the loss of a ball or someone stealing their blocks’ Mr Rudd said. ‘Only a toddler like Gough could be saddened by the unfortunate twists of Greek mythology.  But therein lies the man’.

Mr Rudd was speaking at the launch of Jenny Hocking’s new book Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History.  In it the author tells how Mr Whitlam’s mother found him sobbing in her room on the day after he learned that Persephone, daughter of Zeus and queen of the Underworld, had been taken away from her parents.  ‘That made him very sad’ Mr Rudd said.

The Age article then moved on to Gough’s flair in Latin as a school and University student, and his contribution to Australian life and politics.  So, on the back of Michael Cathcart’s invitation to give this lecture I thought it might be appropriate to say something about Greek myths of love and loss and separation – the sorts of narratives that moved the young Gough to tears all those years ago.  It is quite astonishing how many people, even today, encounter the Greek myths as children.  I often start my tutorials at the beginning of a semester with queries about how students first became interested in antiquity, and the response is often that they encountered Greek myths at a young age – the Gough experience.  What evidence there is from antiquity, however, is that myths were encountered primarily by adult audiences of epic poetry or drama or art.  We don’t really know very much about how myth operated in a kind of local or domestic context, and virtually nothing about how children encountered them. In today’s world the inherent or explicit violence of Greek mythology sometimes raises questions about their appropriateness very young audiences.  Books and stories of Greek myths are occasionally bowdlerized within an inch of their lives.  It is unclear whether such anxieties existed in the ancient domestic context.

The first myth that I will focus on –the narrative of Demeter and Persephone - is actually one of the most famous from the Greek corpus, at least as far as modern audiences are concerned.  Equally noteworthy is the fact that Demeter especially is not very prominent in myth outside of the story that brought the young Gough to tears.  This is her defining myth, so to speak, and this is essentially true of Persephone too.  Some mythical figures have an extensive mythology, some have very little, and the reasons for it can often be hard to identify. The other myth I will talk about concerns another mother and child, the Argive figure of Danae and her son Perseus.  I will be particularly focused on the mother-child relationship and the suffering endured when violence confronts it.  At the end I will come back to Gough and Kevin and make a few observations about Classics and the Humanities in our contemporary context, and probably be more political than I usually am in these sorts of settings.

The narrative referred to in the Age article, and on page 29 of the book, is the snatching of the young girl Persephone, by her uncle Hades, the god of the Underworld. Persephone actually has two names, her other name being ‘Kore’ which just means ‘girl’ in Greek.  She is one of quite a number of mythical figures who have two names. Persephone is the daughter of Zeus, the king of heaven and god of the sky, and of Demeter, an earth goddess fundamentally associated with the growing of grain (Demeter’s parallel in the Roman Pantheon of gods is Ceres).  Demeter and Zeus are actually brother and sister as well as being sexual partners, something of which there is quite a lot of in the unfolding cosmos described by the Greeks. Hera is also a sister and wife of Zeus and it is with her that Zeus commits to his main marriage.  ‘Commits’ may be the wrong word in this case, however, because as we all know, Zeus is a very promiscuous figure in Greek mythology. Hera is his main wife, so to speak, but at some point he has a sexual encounter with Demeter (among many others), the result of which is the birth of Persephone.

The best ancient source for the story is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which is a short hexameter poem of 495 lines.  It probably dates to about the first half of the 6th century BC.  We call them ‘Homeric’ Hymns, although they are not by Homer at all, but rather they are written in the style and language and meter of Homer’s great poems the Iliad and the Odyssey.  There are 33 of these hymns dedicated to individual gods and most of them are quite short – just 4-5 lines in some cases. Four long Homeric Hymns have survived that include mythical narratives, and they are dedicated to Demeter, Apollo, Aphrodite, and Hermes.  It is very possible that these Hymns were performed by rhapsodes, professional reciters of poetry in post-Homeric times.  The context in which they were performed is much disputed.  They may have been performed at recitations of Homeric epic as a kind of prelude to the epic performance.  There may even be a reference to this practice in Homer himself.  In the Odyssey Book 8 Odysseus asks the bard Demodocus to sing the story of the wooden horse at Troy.  Demodocus duly does as he is asked, but the point is made that he first sings ‘to the god’ (8.499) before commencing his Trojan narrative.  This may suggest that he sings a little hymn to a god and then does his story of the wooden horse.

It also seems likely that there were other contexts where these hymns were performed, or at least some of them, and this was in the context of religious cults or festivals or games. It is a pretty fair bet that the Homeric Hymn to Demeter was performed at Eleusis, just a short distance from Athens, in the context of the Eleusinian Mystery cult, the foundation of which is celebrated in the hymn.  Eleusis was one of the first places that I visited in Greece as a young and rather romantically inclined Classicist.  I went there with great interest and enthusiasm on the back of reading the Homeric Hymn to Demeter as a student, but when I got there I found that it was well-populated with oil refineries and oil storage facilities. The modern site quickly dispatched any romantic ideas I had about ancient Eleusis, and so I moved on to the Peloponnese.

The poem itself, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, was actually unknown to the world until 1777 when C.F. Matthaei discovered a manuscript of it in Moscow.  We call it the Homeric Hymn to Demeter because it centres on the grief of the mother Demeter at the loss of her child, and what she does in response, but actually it is a hymn to the two of them, both mother and daughter.  In fact the two of them together were often just called ‘the goddesses’ by the Greeks – a term which emphasizes just how close is the connection between them.  So if you think of a rhapsode - a reciter- in the sixth century BC performing at Eleusis, near Athens, in the context of the mystery cult that existed there, then you are on the right track.  As we will see in a moment the cult at Eleusis seems to have lessened the fear of death for the initiates who went there.  And I want to argue that the hymn is conveying mythically the same sort of thing – that death and the afterlife aren’t as terrifying after the arrival of Persephone in the Underworld as they were before it.  I can think of no better example from pre-Classical times in which myth and cult complement each other so effectively.  So let me run through quickly the basic story of the hymn and then posit some ideas about what it is saying to us: 

1.    The Abduction (1-35)
•    The snatching of Persephone by Hades as she plucks the narcissus flower
•    Hecate and Helios hear the cries
•    Persephone clings to hope of seeing her mother again
2.    The Search (36-95)
•    Persephone’s cries resound and Demeter hears her
•    Demeter searches for her but nobody can tell her where she is until Hecate reveals what she has heard
•    Helios reveals all, that Persephone has been snatched by Hades
•    In her fury Demeter leaves Olympus and dwells among the mortals in disguise
3.    Demeter at Eleusis (96-303)
•    Demeter goes to Eleusis near Athens as an older mortal woman
•    She becomes a kind of governess in the house of Celeus, the ruler of Eleusis, where she looks after the youngest child Demophon
•    She feeds him ambrosia and places him in the fire at night to transform him into a god
•    The mother of the child sees the baby boy being placed in the fire one night, and interrupts the process
•    Demeter throws the child down in anger and storms off.
•    A temple is built in Demeter’s honour at Eleusis.  Demeter shuts herself in the temple, separates herself from gods and mortals and indulges her grief.
4.    The wrath of Demeter (305-42)
•    Famine follows Demeter’s separation.  Zeus is forced to intervene to save humanity.
•    He tries to get Demeter back to Olympus, and the other gods plead for her to do so too. But she refuses.
•    Finally Zeus sends Hermes to the Underworld to persuade Hades to allow Persephone’s return.
5.    The Underworld (345-385)
•    Hermes informs Hades of the situation
•    Hades urges Persephone to return to her mother to be honoured among gods and mortals
•    Hermes conveys Persephone to Eleusis to the temple of Demeter
•    But she has eaten the pomegranate seed
6.    The reunion of mother and daughter (386-440)
•    The two of them are united again
•    Demeter reveals the consequences of eating food in the Underworld, even though she was forced to do so.
7.    Restoration (441-95)
•    Zeus sends the goddess Rhea to get Demeter to Olympus and receive honours.  It is decided that Persephone will spend one-third of the year in the Underworld.
•    Demeter accepts Zeus’s terms.  The ravaged land will be restored in spring.
•    Demeter revives the land and introduces her secret mysteries to humankind.  Initiates are blessed with a better afterlife, whereas the uninitiated ‘don’t have the same lot once dead in the dreary darkness’.
•    Demeter returns to Mt Olympus and the poet ends by praying to Demeter and Persephone for a good life.

The story told in the hymn, therefore, is a complex one, and its relationship to the cult of Eleusis only adds further layers of complexity.  On one level it is a mythological narrative of the transition rites of a young girl into adulthood and marriage.  Her encounter with death signifies the end of her childhood and the new stage of her life.  She is dragged abruptly and unknowingly away from her friends and her mother.  It is a violent rupture from the idealized world of the young girl in a field of flowers into a dark world of adulthood and marriage and sexuality.  Picking a flower leads to the opening of the earth where Hades emerges with the horses and chariots. The pastoral setting only enhances the intensity of the moment that she is snatched.

Of course this is exacerbated by the fact that it is taking place within a family – an endogamous arrangement that goes all wrong.  As we have seen, Zeus is the father of the girl, and he has given his nod to his brother Hades to take her in marriage.  But as we know from plenty of other ancient sources it’s not his business to hand over his daughter to another god in marriage without consulting the mother of the girl.  In fact it is about as outrageous as it gets, and Zeus is ultimately forced to do something about it.  I am always telling my students that the Zeus figure in the early Greek myths is not an omnipotent figure who has total control over the lives of the gods around him.  He overthrew his father, who overthrew his father, and the prospect is always there that Zeus could be overthrown himself if he doesn’t watch his back.  So he needs to be careful not to upset too many of the gods.  All this suggests to me that Zeus is a bit like a Prime Minister, or more still like a leader of the opposition in today’s political context.

So Mount Olympus is very political, and one of the principal books written in English on the Homeric Hymns is called the Politics of Olympus.  The fact is that Demeter can cause Zeus a lot of grief, and he knows it (and so does she).  If the humans are dying off because of a famine, which she causes, then who will pay honour to the gods? The gods need humans, just as humans need the gods.  Reciprocity is central to the relationship between them.  And Demeter’s famine is a challenge to this.  The early Greek poets and mythmakers offer us many other examples of the struggles that take place between the male sky gods (Zeus and his father and grandfather) and female gods associated with the earth.  The struggle between Zeus and Demeter is part of a longer rivalry between male sky and female earth deities.

As we have seen, the ultimate resolution of the fate of Persephone sets in train a cycle of nature where Persephone spends one third of her year under the ground and two thirds with her mother and the other immortal gods.  This reminds us of the Near Eastern parallels to the Persephone/Demeter story.  It has been argued that the Greek story is a conflation of two Near Eastern myths, first the Sumerian-Babylonian myth of the journey to the Underworld of Innana/Ishtar; and second, the Hittite myth of Telepinu.  On this scheme, the descent of Persephone corresponds to the descent of Ishtar/Inanna, and the rage of Demeter corresponds to Telepinu’s.  This is OK as far as it goes, but the Greek narrative is so distinctly locked into its cultic and social context that it isn’t hugely helpful to explore the diffusionist aspects that might lie behind it (that’s my view anyway – some people see it differently).  

The most prominent way of interpreting the myth since ancient times has been as a straightforward case of nature allegory. According to this reading Persephone’s descent represents the grain-seeds going into the earth, and her ascent represents the rising of the crop in the spring.  This is often related to a popular interpretation of the myth that descent is the mythic equivalent of autumn and ascent symbolizes the spring.  It would be very unusual, however, to find a myth in the ancient Greek world that so neatly corresponds to ancient agricultural practices.  Moreover it is often pointed out that the germination period in the Mediterranean is much shorter than 4 months – which is the time when Persephone is meant to be under the earth.  In response to this problem two prominent Classical scholars in the early 20th century Francis Cornford and Martin Nilsson proposed a parallel argument in which the period of Persephone’s descent corresponds to the time that grain is stored in underground silos during the hot dry summer.  Her ascent, in turn, corresponds to the first rains in autumn when the grain is duly removed.  This may suit Greek agricultural practices more neatly, but it obviously runs counter to the notion of the seasons, which, you would think, lie somewhere in the story.

It seems to me that the best approaches to this myth attempt to explain the range of cosmic and ontological issues dealt with in the hymn.  Walter Burket, the great guru of Greek religion in our own time, seems to offer a much more profound sense of the hymn than agricultural parallels when he writes that ‘what the hymn founds is a double existence between the upper world and the Underworld: a dimension of death is introduced into life, and a dimension of life is introduced into death’.  So in the final resolution of the poem, life and death aren’t separate mutually exclusive conditions of existence at all – there is death in life and life in death and that is what the myth is establishing (so says Burket anyway)

As a consequence of the resolution of Persephone’s placement in the cosmos she has a kind of dual existence as a goddess in myth.  She is Kore a deity of youth and joy in the world of young women where she is especially associated with the nymphs; and she is also the Queen of the Underworld where she teams up with her husband Hades to govern the fates of souls.  As we have seen, the Eleusinian mysteries seem to have held out to initiates the favour of the two goddesses, Demeter and Persephone, and a better fate after death as well as in life.  It is here that part of the complex relationship between the hymn and the cult is apparent.  As a realm of the male god Hades, the Underworld is a forbidding place of darkness and awe.  The introduction of a feminine presence in the person of Persephone transforms the earlier character of the Underworld.  A dimension of compassion for those who suffer is also introduced, which is built upon personal experience of it.  I have only been pondering some of these issues recently, but it commonsense when you think about it. How can you preside over the suffering of souls that have been separated from their loved ones if you have never endured it yourself?  Having undergone this very process Persephone is now in a position to deal with the souls who have suffered in the way she has.  So she not only adds a feminine presence to the government of the Underworld, but she offers an element of compassion for shared suffering that was not there beforehand.  Even Zeus in Iliad Book 16 has to endure the loss of a mortal son Sarpedon, and this bereavement informs a measure of the compassion that he feels for what humans have to go through.  Hades, by the way, inherited the role of king of the Underworld by drawing the short draw with his brothers Zeus and Poseidon.  Zeus got the sky, and Poseidon got the earth and the sea.  There is a sense in this myth that Hades on his own wouldn’t only be lonely down there, but that his house would be grim and unpleasant for the souls of the dead – a little bit like a rugby house I lived in once when I was an undergraduate.  The hymn therefore and the cult celebrate the new realities that are finally put into place that makes the house of Hades less intimidating.

In many ways the power of the myth is built upon the raw emotion of the most painful of all losses – the loss of a child.  Demeter is a kind of archetypal mother figure.  She even has the word ‘mother’ meter in her name.  What the De means is anyone’s guess.  People have tried to argue that the De stands for Ge, which means ‘earth’.  This would be very neat and convenient of course because her name would then mean ‘Earth Mother’.  It is also extremely unlikely on all sorts of grounds, including linguistically. But the mother aspect is beyond any doubt. Demeter might have expected to be with her daughter forever in the way they were beforehand because both are goddesses, and thus ‘immortal and ageless forever’, as the phrase goes.  But the snatching of her daughter to the Underworld means essentially that Persephone has been ‘killed’, because the Underworld is not Demeter’s realm and she can’t go there. Separation is the same as death, and they would be totally separate unless she can do something about it. Implicit in the hymn is the fact that human beings anticipate death because that is their condition of existence, but gods have no such expectation.  In ancient Greece for a young girl ‘to marry Hades’, or the parallel phrase ‘to be carried off by him’, are metaphors for death, and whole books have been written on this notion in the Greek myths.  So Demeter essentially has to deal, out of the blue, with something that runs counter to everything she might have expected.

It is very Greek to build a poem around a raw emotion in this way.  The first word of the Iliad is menis, which means ‘wrath’, ‘anger’ of an extreme or even a demonic kind.  The wrath of Achilles, or the pain of Achilles’ separation from Patroclus, is a kind of epic parallel to the fate of Demeter in the Homeric Hymn – although there is a different type of relationship in each case.  The power of the mother-child relationship is the anchor which holds the hymn and myth in place.  There are plenty of parallels from our own world of course of such separation.  Some years ago it was widely reported in the media that a woman had her baby snatched by somebody intent on persecuting her in a local domestic dispute.  When the child was recovered unharmed she said that ‘I feel like I am alive again, like I was dead and now I’ve been re-born’.  It is worth bearing in mind too that about the same time that the Homeric Hymn to Demeter was composed in Greece the Buddha was teaching his followers in India to develop positive emotional states using the mother and child as his example: ‘ As a mother would risk her life to protect her child, her only child, even so should one cultivate a limitless heart with regard to all beings’.

So the Greek poets and mythmakers are at their most poignant and their most profound when they are exploring suffering associated with the loss and separation of loved ones.  The Iliad and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter are two great examples of this, but far from being the only ones.  Many of the surviving dramatic works of the Athenian tragedians are built on core emotional responses to disassociation from the loved.  Another poem that centres on this relationship is by a poet who rarely gets a mention today – even around Classics programmes.  This is probably because none of his extant work is complete, but only survives in fragments.  The poet is Simonides of Ceos, the uncle of another famous Greek poet called Bacchylides.  Simonides was born sometime in the mid-late 6th century BC, perhaps a bit after the composition of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.  Tradition tells us that he lived till he was 90, which reminds us again of how many of the literati from the 6th and 5th centuries BC lived to a ripe old age.  There is also a tradition that Simonides was rather miserly by nature, and that wouldn’t do anything for anyone unless he was properly remunerated.  He seems to have been quite a versatile poet, and he wrote choral lyrics, laments, elegies, praise poems, and even a pocket epic called Plataea. 

One of his most famous poems is to the Greek dead at Thermopylae in the vain struggle to keep the Persians at bay in 480 BC.  Those who died at Thermopylae were a kind of Spartan equivalent of the Athenian soldiers who fell against the Persians at Marathon a decade earlier.  These were the sorts of feats that were usually remembered by professional poets and artists; and Simonides duly made his contribution: ‘Glorious is the fate of those who died at Thermopylae, and beautiful their death; their tomb is an altar; for lamentation they have remembrance, for sorrow praise.  Mould will never darken such a winding sheet, nor all-conquering time.  This shrine of brave men has taken the glory of Greece to itself; Leonidas, King of Sparta, too, is witness, who has left behind him the great glory of his valour, and undying fame’.

Poems about glory in war, however, never quite match more personal reflections of love and separation, or so it seems to me.  The poem of Simonides that has always caught my attention is a threnody about Danae – another victim of paternal violence in the Persephone mould.  The story goes like this.  A king called Acrisius received an oracle which decreed that his daughter Danae would bear a child who would grow up and kill him. Acrisius took the oracle very seriously and he tried to avert his fate by locking his daughter in an underground chamber which he guarded carefully (note the echoes of Persephone’s fate being under the earth).  The aim was to make sure that she bore no child, but it was all to no avail because Zeus made her pregnant in a shower of gold.  She duly gave birth to the child whom she called Perseus.  When her father Acrisius discovered what had happened he cast mother and child into a locked chest on a boat and set them adrift.  The boat drifted to the island of Seriphos where a fisherman discovered them and brought them on to land safely.  Notice they go from one kind of confinement to another – from a bronze chamber under the ground to a chest in a boat at the mercy of the sea.   Other adventures await the pair on Seriphos, especially after Perseus grows up, most famously when he goes on his great quest to get the head of the gorgon Medusa.  He does eventually kill his grandfather Acrisius too, which just goes to show that, as in the case of Oedipus, you can’t avoid your fate no matter how hard you try.

The short poem of Simonides imagines the mother Danae addressing her young child and the fear that she has of his loss, which fortunately, in this case, does not happen.  It goes like this:

‘When the wind blew on her in the carved chest, and the water was rough, she fell back with fear, her cheeks wet with tears, and put her hand round Perseus and said ‘ Child, how much I suffer, but you sleep, and like a tender baby slumber in this joyless, bronze studded chest that shines in the night, lying stretched out in the black gloom.  You do not notice the deep foam of the wave passing over your hair, nor the cry of the wind as you lie in a purple blanket, with your face so beautiful.  If what is terrible were terrible for you, you would open your soft ear to my words.  Sleep, child, I bid you and sleep the sea, and sleep the measureless suffering.  May some change appear from you, father Zeus.  Forgive me if I speak too bold a word, or what is beyond my rights’.

So the fear of death and separation of the mother and child, or the actuality of it in some cases, form the basis of some pretty powerful mythical narratives from Greek antiquity. And the poets pick up these narratives, often in very brilliant and imaginative ways.  One function of myth in its early Greek context is bound up in its mnemonic character – its capacity to remind us of the things that people do to one another and the effects on the lives of others.  The fates of Demeter and her child, and Danae and hers, end happily enough, after a fashion, especially when compared to the young Trojan boy Astyanax, who gets thrown from the walls of Troy, or Iphigeneia who gets sacrificed by her own father.  One of the more remarkable things about Greek mythology is that many of the atrocious acts are perpetrated by the Greeks themselves.   In the Trojan war narrative which is a huge and prominent series of stories, it is the Greeks, not the Trojans, who perform all worst excesses in the struggle for the control of the city. The Greek poets of antiquity had an astonishing capacity to explore the darkest aspects of human conduct in war using their own people as the agents of horror. 

Now Gough Whitlam’s childhood response to the story of Demeter and Persephone, as described in the book by Jenny Hocking, is a kind of universal response to something we all share, something that we, as humans, all have to confront – separation from the loved.  As I mentioned earlier, a popular misconception of Greek mythology in our time is that it is all kids’ stuff, just a lot of stories really, not worthy of serious study and analysis in their own right.  Even within the world of Classics itself, there have been those who eschew the study of the Greek myths in favour of what were perceived as more solid, more empirical, and scholarly pastimes.  In the 1980s a Dean of one Australian Faculty of Arts (not Melbourne) encouraged its Classics department to offer a subject on Greek mythology to cater to the apparent interest in this subject among the student population.  The Department duly refused and the rather despondent Dean hired a postgraduate to do it.  And yet it is the corpus of myths and their raw creative energy, that lie behind so much of Greek literature and art and architecture.  For those who are lucky enough – like me, and perhaps like you – the Greek myths can be the continuing subject of a lifetime’s reflection.

Well, so much for the Greek myths. Now a final thought on Gough and Kevin.  In working through the book on Gough one gets the sense that the study of Classics in particular, and the humanities in general, were not peripheral to his personal and political identity, but were central to it.  Gough is probably our most mythologised Prime Minister, or certainly one of them, not least because of his own sense of the moment in time, and self-consciously aware of his place in the broader landscape of politics and history.  If you are old enough –like I am - you may think of him - as I do - as the last Prime Minister in office with a genuine affinity for the humanities (with due emphasis on word ‘genuine’).  And much has changed since Gough’s day of course.  It is certainly true to say that the absence of much interest in the humanities in places of power in the previous decades – from both political parties- is beginning to tell, especially in the Australian tertiary sector.  If you are not familiar with federal funding of Universities you probably won’t know that humanities, subjects like Classics, English literature, History, and Philosophy, are funded at the lowest level of all, even lower than some other subjects within their own faculties. My first observation is that one can’t really imagine such a policy being put in place in Gough’s day, although, as I say, that was a long time ago, and things have moved on.  And in fact it wasn’t put in place by the current government either, but by the previous one.  I am too far down the food chain to know what precipitated the policy, but the funding formula is still in place, and it is the source of much anxiety and despondency among people working in the humanities in Australian universities. Kevin 07 is now Kevin 09, and we are waiting to see what emerges from his government after a long period of under-funding and neglect of Universities, especially in the humanities. 

I hope that I have shown tonight that one small part of the humanities – the Greek myths – are not esoteric subjects of no relevance to the lives of ordinary people, but are central to the human experience.  And they should be widely available to a student population who are also engaged with them in new and creative ways.  This was something that Gough recognized, and so we hope that Kevin will take a few leaves out of Gough’s book, not just in re-establishing funding parity for the humanities, but in helping to restore their centrality in the broader educational climate.