The job gets done...

2010 starts for the Australian Indigenous Studies program tomorrow.  I’m feeling primed and ready to roll but deadlines are already pressing. We’re developing teaching materials for new subjects as well as reviewing previously taught subjects. Everything has got to be ready for the coming semester. As well as that we’ve got to finalise our Honours program for 2011 - that has to be completed  by the end of January.  I’d have liked to have been further advanced with these tasks but this is the time frame we’ve got. Add up various other deadlines and commitments and it’s a combination of optimism and fatalism that will see us through.  As for fatalism, one of my former bosses, an ex-army officer, used to say, ‘The job gets done; it might be done differently; it might be done worse, but it gets done.’ Aboriginal affairs generally is bedevilled by short-term goals, and short-sighted, sometimes cynical,  strategies; thankfully  that’s not the case with the Australian Indigenous Studies program. The optimistic vision is that the completion of each of January’s tasks lays the foundations of a unique program.