Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, and graduates.
\nI want to express my great appreciation of the honour the university has bestowed on me with\u00a0this award. I came to Curtin in 1977, fresh out of completing my PhD in the UK, and worked\u00a0here until 1985. It was an exciting place to work, with an innovative interdisciplinary\u00a0teaching program and a wonderful cohort of students who were often the first in their family\u00a0to have had the chance to attend a university. They were such a pleasure to teach. Over the\u00a0time I was here, I moved from teaching in literary studies to developing programs based on\u00a0approaches emerging from what were then the very new fields of cultural and media studies:\u00a0the program here was one of the earliest in Australia to embrace these new fields and Curtin\u00a0has maintained its leading position in cultural and media studies ever since. These were, in\u00a0effect, new academic disciplines and it is not surprising that their take-up was highly\u00a0contentious at the time. I will admit that I was probably the one who was most responsible for\u00a0generating that contention: I was the one who wanted to introduce cultural studies. I have\u00a0suspected that Curtin was probably quite glad to see the back of me when I left, so this award\u00a0is an especially welcome form of recognition and perhaps of forgiveness for all the trouble I\u00a0caused!<\/p>\n
Cultural studies, media studies, and gender studies were all part of a program of academic\u00a0renovation that over the 1980s came to be called \u2018the new humanities\u2019. Their development\u00a0did cause some consternation, both inside and outside the academy: The Australian\u00a0newspaper still occasionally throws out an editorial warning about the threat from what they\u00a0call \u2018postmodernism\u2019. Rather than constituting a threat, however, the new humanities were a\u00a0necessary complement to the traditional studies in literature, history, philosophy and so on.<\/p>\n
They helped us to find better ways of enabling our disciplines to understand the dramatically
\nchanging social world that had emerged from the 1960s.<\/p>\n
Even so, the changes we faced then are nothing to what we face now, particularly in the way\u00a0our use of the media has become so thoroughly integrated into our lives. There are some\u00a0serious challenges there, as I am sure many of you will have discussed in your classes. As our\u00a0society becomes more and more mediatized, as humans lose the battle for attention to their\u00a0handheld devices, and as social media and email have allowed the world of work to colonise\u00a0our social lives, the need for people who can understand this new environment and suggest\u00a0how best to address it, is now quite urgent.<\/p>\n
I have spent much of my life advocating for the relevance and importance of the humanities\u00a0disciplines, such as those within which you have just graduated, so forgive me if I dwell on\u00a0that issue for a moment. Society is now taking an increasingly instrumental view of the
\nfunction of higher education, and universities are encouraged to reinvent themselves as\u00a0businesses or solely as training institutions. It is important that we maintain our awareness of\u00a0what risks being lost as a consequence of such tendencies. Among the fields at risk are the
\nhumanities and creative arts. The mission of the humanities is to help us to understand what it\u00a0is to be human, surely an important mission. However, in a world where politics so often\u00a0focuses on the growth of the economy before the enrichment of its social fabric, it is easy for the value of the arts and humanities to be overlooked. That value has a number of\u00a0dimensions, however. One of those, of course, is as a means of training people to take up\u00a0positions in the workforce and contribute to the economy. Over 60% of the Australian\u00a0workforce with a tertiary education has a degree in the humanities or social sciences. But, the\u00a0primary benefit of the nation\u2019s investment in higher education in the humanities is not in the\u00a0end merely economic. It is more fundamental than that. As we have seen elsewhere in recent\u00a0times, a nation and a public culture that loses its respect for the truth, that forgets the lessons of history, that underestimates the power of language, and that ceases to observe the ethics of\u00a0debate in its strategies of critique, endangers the fabric of its society. Your success, your\u00a0education, and how they are put to work, are among the ways in which we can guard against such dangers.<\/p>\n
So, I congratulate you on the choice of your area of study, as well as upon your success. And\u00a0I hope it has brought you more than just success. At their best, degrees in the humanities\u00a0provide you with an education that is ultimately highly personal. The really important things\u00a0that happened to you during this degree happened in just that way only to you: the class, the\u00a0idea, the reading, or the teacher that made the most impression on you is a personal\u00a0possession and now part of what you are. At its best, an education in the humanities is an education of the self.<\/p>\n
Not to be overly serious about all this, I should say that I am sure that there will be other, less\u00a0elevated, but nonetheless extremely useful, informal skills that you will have developed on\u00a0your way through \u2013 skills that your lecturers witness every day. Among the ones that impressed me when I was still teaching are:<\/p>\n
These will all stand you in good stead in the future, so I encourage you to continue to develop
\nthem.<\/p>\n
A word, now, to those graduating with higher degrees, and in particular to those who have\u00a0completed their PhDs, let me say your life can now only get better. No longer will every\u00a0conversation you have with people seem to bear an oblique but still compelling connection to\u00a0your thesis topic. And your loved ones will no longer have to wonder just what is going on in\u00a0your head as you sit staring into space for minutes at a time. You have come through, you\u00a0have prevailed, you have proved you are at least as good as thought you could be, and you now deserve to just relax a little.<\/p>\n
Let me also say a word to the ones who tend to get forgotten at moments like this: the\u00a0parents. The university encounters the parents at their most active while prospective students\u00a0are making their choices \u2013 so, usually at the information sessions on open days. For their\u00a0children at that time, parents are a potentially embarrassing, but unavoidable, presence during\u00a0these early conversations with the university\u2019s teaching staff. Once the students are actually\u00a0engaged in the course, we only get the occasional message from home: \u2018my dad read the stuff\u00a0you sent us to read, and he said it was all a load of rubbish\u2019. And as a teacher of media, back\u00a0in the days when families still sat and watched television together, I used to conduct an\u00a0informal survey on how many fathers would take the remote control with them when they left\u00a0the room to stop other members of the family changing channels while they were out. But\u00a0despite your relative silence, we know that you are out there supporting your children, and\u00a0that today represents an achievement in which you, too, can justifiably take great pride. So,\u00a0congratulations to you, too, on supporting your graduate through this experience.<\/p>\n
Finally, a word about aspiration, about aiming high. The job market is tight these days, and\u00a0people are rightly concerned about where they will find their spot. But it is important to know\u00a0what it is you really want to do, and not to give up too easily on that aspiration. When I was\u00a0teaching here, I supervised a very talented creative writing student, who clearly was likely to\u00a0get his novels published and who hoped to be able to live off his writing. However, I thought\u00a0it wise to counsel him that it would be difficult for him to achieve that ambition; so few\u00a0writers in Australia at that time were able to live off their work and so I told him he was\u00a0going to need a day job. Well, he never did get that day job. That student\u2019s name is Tim\u00a0Winton, he has become one of Australia\u2019s most successful writers of fiction, and his success\u00a0has come from his talent, from a strong sense of self-belief, and from the courage to follow\u00a0his aspirations. There is a lesson in that for all of us.<\/p>\n
Congratulations to all of you and best wishes for a rewarding and exciting future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I want to express my great appreciation of the honour the university has bestowed on me with this award. I came to Curtin in 1977, fresh out of completing my PhD in the UK, and worked here until 1985.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4275,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"_oasis_task_priority":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_research-areas":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"research-areas":[],"class_list":["post-7141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-perth-campus"],"acf":{"post_options":{"":null,"additional_content":{"title":"","content":"","image":false},"related_courses":false,"credits":{"author":"","photographer":"","media":false},"display_author":true,"banner":{"image":false}}},"featured_image":false,"author_meta":{"first_name":"Curtin","last_name":"University","display_name":"Â鶹ֱ²¥"},"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-04 10:38:47","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4275"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7141\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7141"},{"taxonomy":"research-areas","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-areas?post=7141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}