Bulletin

Issue: August 2004

News

J M Coetzee reflects on a way of life

Old indigenous cultures - those of the South African Bushman, northern Inuit and Australian Aborigine - are being converted into new global commodities for the tourist industry. That was the theme of a literary evening in August featuring Nobel Laureate and two-time Booker Prize winning author, John Maxwell Coetzee.

Addressing a packed audience at the Melbourne Town Hall, he also read a short story dealing with this subject. Professor Coetzee said he was reluctant to use the term 'culture', preferring 'way of life' to emphasise a deeper meaning. Too often today 'culture' signified something that can easily be put on or taken off - such as 'corporate culture' or 'sporting culture'.

The evening was part of the 'Melbourne Conversations' series presented by La Trobe Uni-versity in association with the City of Melbourne, Australian Book Review and Readings Books and Music.

Earlier, visiting La Trobe's main Melbourne campus at Bundoora, Pro-fessor Coetzee, was awarded an honorary doctorate for his outstanding contribution to literature and learning.

Raised in South Africa's Cape Province, Professor Coetzee holds Honours degrees in English and mathematics as well as a PhD in English, linguistics and Germanic languages.

He has taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Cape Town - where he was Distinguished Professor of Literature - and has held numerous Visiting Professorships.

During the past thirty years, Professor Coetzee - who now lives in South Australia where he is an Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide - has published a wide range of works, many translated into French, German and Swedish. His major books include The Life & Times of Michael K (1983), Boyhood (1997), Disgrace (1999), and Elizabeth Costello (2003).

Delivering the award citation, La Trobe Pro Vice-Chancellor and Head of the Mildura Campus, Professor Alan Frost, said J M Coetzee's works deal with some of the major cur-rents of Western thought and present discom-forting analyses of the human condition.

'In doing so, he has also focused on situations and themes which resonate with such horrors of the twentieth century as war, the Holocaust and apartheid. Deploying lucid and spare prose and intricate literary structures, he has unflinchingly probed the dark recesses of the human condition, so as to contemplate such things as slavery, torture and the evils of colonialism.'

Accepting the award, Professor Coetzee thanked La Trobe University and Australia's academic and literary communities for the generous welcome extended to him since his arrival in Australia.

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