The Inaugural ABR/Flinders University Annual Lecture

Glyn Davis, vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, is having a rather busy year as he implements radical structural changes at his university. But that didn’t stop him from writing for us in the August issue, when he reviewed Derek Bok’s book on higher education. Now Professor Davis has agreed to deliver the inaugural Australian Book Review/Flinders University Annual Lecture, a major series intended to present significant writers, scholars and commentators, and also to reflect the strength of the new partnership between ABR and Flinders University. Professor Davis’s theme will be ‘Forty Years of Australian Public Policy’. The lecture will take place on campus, on Thursday, November 30. More details will follow via e-mail and in the November issue.

Ronald de Leeuw in Adelaide

Ronald de Leeuw, a commanding figure in the European art world, will present a major lecture in Adelaide on Monday, October 30. The title of his illustrated lecture is ‘Rembrandt and the Rijksmuseum’. Since 1996 Professor de Leeuw has been director of the Rijksmuseum; prior to that he was director of the Van Gogh Museum. His expertise, erudition and general élan make him a highly engaging and charismatic speaker. No one interested in European art or cultural innovation will want to miss this talk. ABR is presenting the lecture in association with it sponsor Flinders University and with the Art Gallery of South Australia. The lecture will take place at 5.30 p.m. on Monday, October 30. The venue is the Radford Auditorium at the Art Gallery of South Australia. Demand for this lecture is high, so ABR subscribers are urged to reserve tickets as soon as possible, before the event is widely advertised. Tickets cost $10. Each current ABR subscriber is entitled to one free ticket. Subscribers wishing to take up this special offer should call Lorraine Harding at ABR on (03) 9429 6700 or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. The Art Gallery of South Australia is handling all other sales and enquiries.

No plodding do-gooder

Melbourne is about to welcome a new independent player. Affirm Press will be headed by Martin Hughes, outgoing editor of The Big Issue. Hughes, who doubled the sales and readership of The Big Issue during his two years at the helm, is anxious not to be seen as a ‘plodding do-gooder’. What can we expect from his new venture? ‘We’re basically going to publish books we think have a positive impact on the community, which we hope will influence and impress by delight, lively writing and high design (rather than by being too earnest or worthy),’ he says, stressing that he will not be confined by genre.

Vale Colin Thiele (1920–2006)

The life of the mind doesn’t always rate in this country, where the deaths of adventurers and sporting figures can generate, shall we say, monster media coverage and public grieving rarely accorded to writers or artists or performers or scientists or educationists. On August 30, Naguib Mahfouz, the sole Arabic-language writer to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature (1988) and surely one of the supreme writers of the twentieth century, died in his ninety-fifth year, but his death (front-page news throughout the Arab world, Europe and North America), was only cursorily noted in this country. For the record, Mahfouz, who survived an assassination attempt by Islamic extremists in 1994 and who published thirty-four novels, hundreds of short stories, dozens of film scripts and five plays during a seventy-year career, was given a state funeral.

It was pleasing, therefore, to note that Colin Thiele’s death was widely reported in the press and on television. Few Australian authors have published in so many genres or have enjoyed such varied careers. Thiele, who published about a hundred books, found time to work in high schools and to head a teacher’s college; he also served with the RAAF in World War II. His best-known book is Storm Boy (1963). Thiele was made AC in 1977.

We invited Pam Macintyre, an authority on Australian children’s literature, to comment on Thiele’s oeuvre. She wrote: ‘As well as being a wonderful storyteller, Thiele was a master wordsmith. His child characters are courageous and resourceful, willing to strike out, away from family. In his concern for the environment, representation of indigenous Australians, construction of resourceful, active, yet contemplative boys, Thiele charted territory in writing for young people in Australia that was taken up much later by writers such as Allan Baillie, John Marsden and James Moloney.’