Bulletin

Issue: September/October 2007

News

La Trobe at the Writers’ Festival

La Trobe University for the second year in a row has sponsored the opening session of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival. The session’s key-note address was by cultural critic, author and entertainer Clive James who drew a near capacity audience to the Melbourne Town Hall.

It was a largely light-hearted address dealing with a weighty tome. ‘It can break your foot if you drop it,’ Clive James warned, holding aloft his latest book, Cultural Amnesia.

Subtitled Notes in the Margin of My Time, the book is billed as ‘one man’s view of 20th century arts and letters’ and features a hundred essays on some of the most significant figures of the century. In his address ‘Our Inextinguishable Fortune’, Clive James said: ‘Ours was an age of extermination, an epoch of the abattoir. Yet throughout, the impulse to create thrived alongside the impulse to destroy.’

Vice-Chancellor, Professor Paul Johnson, said La Trobe was delighted to be a sponsor of the Festival.

‘It helps highlight the University’s place as a major centre for public intellectuals and for studies of society, literature and the humanities in general. It is also an extension of our long-standing support for other major cultural, artistic and literary events in Melbourne and regional Victoria.’

As part of the sponsorship arrangement, La Trobe students also acted as volunteers at the festival, providing students interested in careers in events promotion and publishing with ‘industry-related’ experience.

Ten academics and authors from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences were involved in this year’s program.

Political affairs commentator, Professor Robert Manne, and colleague, Professor Judith Brett, featured in a session assessing the Prime Minister’s reputation as the canniest political operator of his generation.

Dr Sue Turnbull, Media Studies, appeared in conversation with crime-writers Karin Slaughter and Gabrielle Lord. Dr David Tacey, whose books encompass psychology, literature and the sacred, was on stage with AB C religious affairs presenter, Rachael Kohn.

Former Deputy Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, Dr Lilit Thwaites – who has helped organise La Trobe University’s Festival contribution for many years and has a strong interest in promoting the work of women writers – spoke about cultural, political and personal displacement with Indian-Canadian writer Anita Rau Badami.

Sociologist Professor John Carroll’s most recent book is The Existential Jesus. He spoke at a session on ‘Man, God and Myth’. Historian and Emeritus Scholar Dr John Hirst has written extensively on Australian social and political history and civic culture. He shared a session with former colleague, Dr David Potts discussing notions of happiness and misery during the Great Depression, based on Dr Potts’ book The Myth of the Great Depression. Award-winning historian and author of Beyond the Ladies Lounge: Australia’s Female Publicans, Dr Clare Wright, was on a panel examining ‘The Many Lives of Marvellous Melbourne’, while Language Centre student advisor, Adrian Hyland, who recently published his first novel Diamond Dove, spoke about what it takes to get a novel published.

Germaine Greer on Jane Austen

Author and feminist Germaine Greer will give a public lecture in Melbourne on Wednesday 28 November to launch an international conference on Jane Austen and comedy.

The conference, co-presented by La Trobe University’s English Program and the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English, will be held on the Bundoora campus. However, Professor Greer’s opening lecture will be in the City, at the Capitol Theatre, Swanston Street, at 7 pm. La Trobe Jane Austen scholar, Professor John Wiltshire, is conference convenor. Further details from organiser, Laura Carroll, email: l.carroll@latrobe.edu.au or visit www.austen2007.net