In our experience, excessive emphasis has been given in recent years to increasing bureaucratic control over teaching and researching in universities. The many layers of university bureaucracy, and their demands, have reduced the efficiency and creativity of our teachers and researchers, and have led to widespread demoralisation in the sector. The attacks on student unionism have undermined the integrity of universities as communities of learning. A significant step towards revitalisation would be to redirect much-needed resources into teaching and research – the core business of universities – and to recover the idea of the university as a place that builds the values and civic virtues for the Australian society of the future.

Australia’s universities should stand at the centre of any serious plan for the country’s future. Yet government investment in higher education has declined, and Australia is spending well below the OECD average in research and development. To regain competitiveness with other comparable OECD economies, a revolution for the higher education sector is urgently needed, one that will make our universities the first choice for our future generations of educators and researchers.

As senior Australian academics, we call upon the Rudd government to honour its commitment to the future by rebuilding the higher education system and restoring Australia’s once strong reputation in education, research and innovation.

Professors Andrew Brennan and Jeff Malpas and 160 other senior academics
(www.academics-australia.org)

Road to Damascus

Dear Editor,

I would like to thank Susan Lowish for her kind remarks (November 2007) on the Dictionary of Australian Artists Online (http://www.daao.org.au). As Lowish indicates, the DAAO’s original source material includes pioneering research by Joan Kerr (and colleagues), as published in the Dictionary of Australian Artists and Heritage, as well as Vivien Johnson’s Aboriginal Artists of the Western Desert. The DAAO also had Kerr, Judd and Holder’s research on Australian black-and-white artists, including extensive material on Aboriginal black-and-white artists. Indeed, it was Kerr’s failure to find a scholarly publisher interested in this work that became the catalyst for the original project. Johnson, whose generous and inclusive approach to art scholarship extends well beyond her own field of Aboriginal art, is Kerr’s nominated successor as editor in chief of the DAAO.

The DAAO, as published, is just the first stage. I would like to invite those of your readers interested in Australian art history to not only access the DAAO but to register as users and, where appropriate, to consider writing biographies. Those of us guiding DAAO are aware that scholarship is not confined to a small club of ‘experts’ but is rather extended throughout the community. The DAAO encourages those who are prepared to have their work subjected to rigorous editorial review to add to this rich tapestry of recording Australian visual culture.

As Joan Kerr was dying, and in the months after her death, I wrote to art history departments in institutions across the country, alerting them to the start of this great venture. Most responded with generosity and good wishes. Some of these are now research partners. The response from Professor Jaynie Anderson was, however, less than forthcoming. She declined any involvement from Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne, as her department was no  longer interested in Australian art. I am glad to see that, perhaps inspired by the forthcoming CIHA conference, she has at long last travelled the ‘Road to Damascus’ and finally accepts the need to research the art of this country.

Joanna Mendelssohn, Paddington, NSW

Jaynie Anderson replies:

From the very first article I wrote, back in 1967 (‘The Early Work of Sidney Nolan’, in Meanjin), I have been involved in research, writing and lecturing on Australian art. So my engagement with my native country is not an affectation that I have assumed for international visitors. When I returned to Melbourne in 1997 to take up the post of Herald Chair of Fine Arts, I tried to establish a post in Indigenous art history, but none of the foundations approached was interested. It was not I who turned down the Dictionary when Joanna Mendelssohn asked for funding. There was funding from the Australia Centre in the University of Melbourne for the project. I admired Joan Kerr greatly and would hope that she never misconstrued my actions.

A niggling chalkie

Dear Editor,

Having read with interest and profit Jeanette Hoorn’s Australian Pastoral: The Making of a White Landscape, I find very irritating Daniel Thomas’s review of the book (November 2007). Thomas writes at once de haut en bas and like a niggling chalkie. To begin a review by disliking a book’s cover is to pettifog too soon. John Cullinane’s sheep in Akubras are not ‘cute’. Cullinane is always sharp. This painting is a nice visual of ‘postcolonial pastoraphilia’. Thomas likes the phrase but not its visual carry-over. Odd.

To refer to my old colleague Frank Campbell’s altogether silly review of Australian Pastoral as a ‘rebuke’ is just to misuse language. Campbell is a man of wit, but here fell into mere railing when what was needed was a solid, sober evaluation. The whole episode would be best forgotten by all concerned.

Why does Thomas write of ‘a slightly dyslexic air throughout the book’, and then go on to imply that dyslexia leads to self-contradiction? We dyslexics have no trouble with logic – we do with reading, and spelling is a nightmare. The logic of Hoorn’s book is fine: her arguments are well formulated. That she has hand-threshing done with a scythe instead of a flail is a plain mistake. One for Thomas: but I can’t find many more.

What Jeanette Hoorn’s book usefully offers is a pair of frames to put over the landscape: the Pastoral, the Georgic. This, if contestable, is very interesting. Her using it in setting out an history of exploitation is fascinating.  If Thomas had followed this strategy carefully, he might have had something useful to add.

Thomas’s last line ‘Hoorn skewers silly white men well’, is a compliment which just may come back to prick him.

Patrick Hutchings, Melbourne, Vic.

Daniel Thomas replies:

I am glad my review of Jeanette Hoorn’s Australian Pastoral: The Making of a White Landscape (November 2007) has provoked her (December 2007) and now Patrick Hutchings to contribute enlightening responses. However, the ‘ugly’ cover of the book also suggests the likelihood of some discussion of overstocking and land degradation, whereas that most significant aspect of Australian pastoral capitalism received only two token last-minute paragraphs. The book is about social, not environmental, exploitation.

The introductory promise of classical-poetic Pastoral and Georgic framing of colonial Australian hard-nosed, non-poetic, lower-case pastoral capitalism was similarly rather under-fulfilled; it too looked like a late overlay on an earlier, primarily cultural, text. I am very happy to be a niggler about frequent inconsistencies and errors in spelling names: readers familiar with historical names are thereby alerted to irritation, and living victims to insult, when they embark on a book which, despite warnings I made, sounds very interesting and well worth buying.

Both correspondents take my niggling too personally; I was targeting Fremantle Press as well. In one crucial inconsistency (supporting Hoorn versus Campbell), I specified ‘her editor’s or publisher’s captions’. Besides names, misunderstood art terms (picture ‘plain’ for ‘plane’) and Australianisms (Western District of Victoria starting at Melbourne airport) are, in the end, the publisher’s responsibility. However, Tom Roberts’s Shearing the rams was a different matter: it is fair enough for present-day viewers to perceive it as an image of outback life, but the particular shed, near Corowa on the Murray, was in the bush, not the outback; 1890 viewers would have recognised that the small unmodern shed was in the inside country, whereas on, say, the Outer Barcoo, huge sheds with up to fifty shearers were being built of iron, not rude timber. Hutchings’s compliment on the threshing-flail is accepted, but I could have added more such errors: for example, a colonial sheepwash is not a ‘dip’. Finally, Hoorn noted her own name misspelt. But not by me in my review. ‘Jeannette’ in the heading was an editorial error by ABR.

Authorial credentials

Dear Editor,

Thank you for the review of my book Racers of the Deep: The Yankee Clippers and Bluenose Clippers on the Australian Run 1862–1869 (December 2007–January 2008). However, it would seem to me appropriate for a reviewer to have some knowledge of the subject of the book reviewed. I believe some of Gillian Dooley’s remarks to be debatable. My sentences are uncomplicated, otherwise my publisher would have reworded them. I notice such expressions as ‘must have’ are found in other history books. The important thing is whether such expressions are appropriate.

Gillian Dooley thinks it is important to know the writer’s credentials. My previous works are Jolly Dogs Are We: The History of Yachting in Victoria 1838–1894 (1984). This was favourably reviewed in ABR. I was founder, publisher and editor of Landscape Australia (a respected journal in landscape architecture) for more than twenty years. That earned me recognition in 1994 with an OAM.

Ralph P. Neale, Mont Albert, Vic.