Vew from the chair: Speeches of Richard WL Austin

I feel greatly honoured by the decision of the Council to bestow upon me the degree of Honorary Doctor of the University and so permit me to join those distinguished Australians who have already been honoured in this way. It is an honour too, but also a pleasure, to have been invited to present the occasional address to graduates of the Faculties of Humanities and Asian and International Studies, and I congratulate all those who have received their testamurs this afternoon and who will now go out into the world with their achievements duly acknowledged. Last year I was invited to speak to students of the Brisbane College of the Arts, who were then graduating for the first time under the auspices of this University. To that audience I spoke, as you might expect, about the visual arts and their place in society. This afternoon, I shall speak of classical and Asian studies and their place in education-not tertiary education in our universities, but secondary education in our schools, because that is what shapes the pool from which future undergraduates will be drawn. I shall be suggesting that, no matter how times change, the present is always in need of guidance from the past. A novel called The Go-Between begins with the words, 'The past is another country; they do things differently there'. That is not to say that they always do them better in an absolute sense, but they usually do them with greater style and elegance than we do in this final decade of the century of the common man; or perhaps I should say, in deference to those who are intent upon emasculating the English language, the century of the persona vulgaris. For example, I would venture to say that, sartorially, those of us who are here i·n historical disguise-I in the garb of a courtier to one of the Tudor Kings, and the staff and students of the University in academic dress dating back to the twelfth century, look considerably better today than we usually do in our nondescript and, as often as not, quite revolting modern clothing. When I was a schoolboy, rather more than half a century ago, it was generally accepted that those who wished to be regarded as properly educated, should have at least a passing knowledge of the classics. Amongst the things expected of us was an ability to call up an appropriate quotation from one of the Greek or Latin authors to cover most occasions. No mention was made of the Chinese philosophers or the Japanese poets and a boy who could quote from the Analects of Confucius, or the Haiku of Basho, would have been viewed with the utmost suspicion. To become a classicist was in the accepted order of things; to have sought to become an orientalist would have been regarded as highly eccentric. Girls, in that male dominated era, were, for the most part, excused from bearing the classical yoke on the basis of Martial's epigram, which begins 'sit non doctissima coniux'-'let my wife not be too learned', and continues with the logic, no doubt born of bitter experience, 'that I may have sleep by night and peace by day'. Boys, on what was then referred to as 'the science side', were also excused, but it was clearly understood that these 'specialists' would, in due course, come for policy guidance under the aegis of the 'generalists' who were, as Shakespeare puts it, 'the lords and owners of their faces, others but stewards of their excellence'. Who better, it was thought, to guide the faltering footsteps of a genetic engineer than a man who already knew from Ovid that men could be turned into frogs; or, from 161