Bulletin

Issue: April 2005

News

Two New Adjunct Professors

The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Michael Osborne, has also announced the appointment of two new adjunct professors, the co-founder of the Lonely Planet travel book publishers, Ms Maureen Wheeler, and composer and artistic director, Mr Jonathan Mills.

Ms Wheeler will be adjunct professor in the Department of Sport, Tourism and Hospitality Management in the Faculty of Law and Management and Mr Mills will be in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Maureen Wheeler
Maureen Wheeler is one of Australia’s foremost experts on the travel industry. With her husband Tony, she co-founded Melbourne-based Lonely Planet Publications, the world’s largest publisher of travel guides.

She left her home city of Belfast at the age of 20 for London where she met Tony Wheeler. In 1972, they travelled overland across Europe and Asia to Australia. At the end of their trip they were asked so many questions about how they did it they decided to write a travel guide.

They wrote it at their kitchen table and trimmed and stapled it themselves. The book was called Across Asia on the Cheap. They wrote their second book South-East Asia on a Shoestring in a backstreet hotel in Singapore.

In 1975, after they had decided to settle in Australia, she completed a Bachelor of Social work degree at La Trobe University, convinced Lonely Planet could never support herself and Tony.

The mother of two children Ms Wheeler received the Inspiring Woman of Australia Award in 1999. In 2001, she was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Ulster and voted Business Woman of the Year.

Ms Wheeler is on the board of Tourism Tasmania, often sits on advisory panels such as Heritage Victoria and is Patron for the Ronald McDonald House at Monash, a facility for seriously ill children and heir families.

Ms Wheeler and her husband still own the company which has offices in Melbourne, Oakland (USA) London and Paris. The company sells six million books each year, 90 per cent overseas.

Jonathan Mills
Formerly an adjunct professor in Environmental Design at RMIT University, Mr Mills is a commissioner of the Australian Heritage Commission and a member of the Australian International Cultural Council.

He studied composition with Peter Sculthorpe in Sydney and piano and composition with Lidia Arcuri-Baldecchi in Italy.

In addition he is one of Australia’s most experienced festival directors.

He has been Artistic Director of the Blue Mountains Festival from 1988 to 1990, Artistic Adviser to the 1995 and 1997 Brisbane Biennial International Music Festival.

More recently he was Artistic Director of the Melbourne Festival in 2000 and 2001 as well as Director of the Federation Festival for the celebrations of the Centenary of the Federation of Australia, in May 2001 and Director of Melbourne’s Millennium Eve on 31 December 1999.

Between 1992 and 1997 he was Composer-in-Residence and Research Fellow in Environmental Acoustics at RMIT University where he established the Australasian Soundscape Project.

He is regularly commis-sioned by major festivals, orchestras and companies in Australia and increasingly in Europe and the UK.

In 2002 he was Composer-in-Residence for the Bundanon Trust where he completed another chamber opera The Eternity Man, with Dorothy Porter for the Genesis Foundation, Almeida Opera and the Aldeburgh Festival.

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