Pecan Summer

  

I had a pleasant interlude on Friday before the mid-semester break. (Sorry, I’m slipping into bloggese.) Deborah Cheetham and the Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts and Cultural Development held their Spring Recital. The Joan Hammond Recital Room at the VCA was full to capacity; Aboriginal and Settler opera singers performed classic arias and excerpts from Ms Cheetham’s  opera Pecan Summer for an appreciative audience. Pecan Summer intertwines Deborah Cheetham’s personal history with communal history and gives meaning and profundity to that banal term ‘shared history’. The excerpts we heard were superb. Pecan Summer will premier next year and the production has auditioned for the 2010 Melbourne Festival.

http://www.deborahcheetham.com/pecan_summer

AIS Major up and running

I’ve just received news that our proposed major in Australian Indigenous Studies has been signed off on by the final university committee. The approval was a lengthy process as the proposal was vetted by ascending layers of university committees.

 

It’s the only interdisciplinary Australian Indigenous Studies major in Australia, founded on the principles of intellectual exchange, interdisciplinarity,  and social relevance.

 

The major itself was developed during 2008 - a difficult year for everyone in the Faculty of Arts, and it would have been easy to walk away, but I know from experience that its often in times of organisational turmoil, or what Dabrowski would term ‘creative disintegration’, that opportunities for innovation and rapid development arise.

 

The AIS team is now developing teaching templates for all the AIS major subjects for 2010. The challenge is to develop ways to maximise the intellectual inputs of lecturers perpetually short of time.

Foundation for the Future

Our First Year course Australia Indigenous Studies has 388 students enrolled in it this semester. When we ran it for the first time in 2008 it had 188 students. One of our goals has been to transform possible perceptions of Australian Indigenous Studies   as a minority interest field to one of mainstream relevance. It’s a privilege to have so many University of Melbourne students choosing to do this subject and it’s the foundation for the future of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne.