English: Graduate & alumni profiles
Helen Garner
Writer
"As a student in the English department, 1961-65, I was pretty much a fizzer. I was ignorant, and suspected I might be a lot less smart than my secondary school teachers had led me to believe. I sat silent in tutorials, and nearly died of fear when forced to give a paper. On the rare occasions when I had done the preliminary reading for a class, when my head was bursting with things I didn't dare to say, I sat there seething while confident young men put forward similar thoughts and were praised for them. That's the way things were, in those days.
"What I did learn, though, was how to read. I loved close textual analysis. And we had teachers who felt free to express in a deeply emotional way the joy they got from literature. From the lectures of Professor Ian Maxwell I realised you could read Milton, for example, not as a duty but greedily, racing along with your hair on end and your heart in your mouth. Maxwell, who was then close to retirement, used to pace up and down in front of a packed Public Lecture Theatre, quoting Paradise Lost from memory and wipingaway his tears with a pocket handkerchief. I have never quite got over this and it still thrills me to remember it."
Publications
- Joe Cinque's Consolation (2004)
- The Feel of Steel (2001)
- My Hard Heart (1998)
- True Stories (1996)
- The First Stone (1995)
- Cosmo Cosmolino (1992)
- Postcards from Surfers (1985)
- The Children's Bach (1984)
- Honour and Other People's Children (1980)
- Monkey Grip (1977)
Kevin Brophy
Writer, Lecturer in Creative Writing
I arrived at the University of Melbourne from Watsonia via Coburg in 1970, knowing already that reading was my passion and writing was my vice. I read everything I was asked to read, the romantic poets, Russian novelists, Hardy, Eliot, but drifted off to psychology until the late 1980s when I returned to a Masters Prelim, MA and PhD. Simon During took the evening seminar that introduced me to Post-Modernism, a peculiarly shattering experience, but more importantly Simon carried my one-year old daughter around the room on his hip as he taught. I was lucky to be supervised by three of the best poets and one of the sharpest minds in Australia through my MA and PhD: Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Philip Mead, Peter Steele and Ken Ruthven.
Publications
- What Men and Women Do (2006)
- Explorations in Creative Writing (2003)
- Portrait in Skin (2002)
- Creativity: Psychoanalysis, Surrealism and Creative Writing (1998)
- Seeing Things (1997)
- Replies to the Questionnaire on Love (1992)
- The Hole Through the Centre of the World (1991)
- Visions (1989)
- Getting Away With It (1982)
Elizabeth Campbell
Teacher
"I always intended to study English at university but I started my degree very young and was not prepared for the study or the theory. I was shocked when I failed to get it or even to get good marks. In fact, I spent my entire four years feeling confused, behind and as if I was missing some crucial truth. My mistake was to regard my English degree as some kind of end point, rather than as a foundation for further study, a map of the territory, which has become exceptionally useful, in retrospect. My English degree has been a stepping-stone into further study, but more importantly, further thought."
Fred Ellinghaus
Associate Professor of Law, Law School, The University of Melbourne
"There were several fine teachers in the English Department when I was a student there in 1960 and 1961. But I find I want to talk about only one of them, Vincent Buckley. I was a lazy student and did not attend many classes, but I never willingly missed one of Vin's. Vin had an aura about him, at least for me. It was like a vast gentleness with a powerful current at its core. It was a blessing to hear him talk about poetry. Vin asked wonderful questions, oblique but pregnant with meaning. Above all, I realise now, he showed me that one could speak truthfully about art if one really tried. Vin shared the critical preoccupations of the time - as his book Poetry and Morality, then recently published, demonstrates - but they were not the focus of his teaching. For me he was simply a poet and a lover of poetry who helped me to find that essential thing, my own response."
Professor Ellinghaus is the author, co-author and editor of books and other publications on law, mainly contract law.
Chris Feik
Senior editor, Black Inc; Editor, Quarterly Essay; Associate editor, The Monthly
"Intellectual highlights of my years in and around the English Department were the encounter with modernism and being part of a reading group that worked through Kant. I also remember a great deal of mute nervousness, abstraction and drinking. My Honours year was spent close-reading Freud, critiquing D.H. Lawrence and analysing J.G. Ballard's car crashes and Lyotard's "The Dream-work Does Not Think". After Honours, I completed a Masters thesis and was a tutor for three years. In retrospect I'm proud of the thesis and think I learned a lot from teaching (but could my students say the same?). The years of reading and teaching literature and criticism have been very helpful for my work as an editor."
Photo: John Gollings
Anna Funder
Writer
My time in the English Department was the most intense and important period of my university life. Not for what I learnt in particular (that's hard to remember, exactly) but for the sense of the power of ideas, beautifully expressed. Behind every door someone was immersed in their own world - of Chaucer and medieval literature; of feminist theory; of slippery signifiers. It was the heyday of French post-structuralist theory - worship of impenetrable TEXTS - but the department could embrace all kinds of deep eccentricities. It was a place of fierce passions - personal as much as intellectual, and it left me with a sense of wonder: at the beauty and complexities of art, and at the extraordinary thinking held alive in that place.
Publications
- Stasiland (2003)
Belinda Johnson
Senior Executive Officer to the Vice-Chancellor, Victoria University
BA Hons (English/Social Theory) 1991, PhD (English) 1998
"I was pleasantly surprised when I left academia at how well received an Arts degree actually was. The sophisticated analytical and research skills you gain through an Arts degree are valued highly by many employers. Above all, an Arts degree taught me to be flexible and open-minded about new ideas and new ways of looking at the world. This is an invaluable skill: in life and in work."
Belinda spent two years (1998-2000) as a lecturer in the English Department, University of Melbourne, before moving to the Victorian Public Service (VPS), where she worked in a range of areas, including Mental Health, Local Government, and Corrections. Belinda's interest in the higher education sector lead to the position of Policy Officer with the Office of Higher Education, where her responsibilities included preparation of briefings and speech notes for the Minister for Education and Training. Her current role is policy adviser to the Vice-Chancellor at Victoria University.
Patrick McCaughey
Art critic and former gallery director (Victoria, Hartford, Yale)
"The Melbourne English Department was a lively scene in the early 60s. You had the great advantage of frequently being taught by practicing, publishing poets. Vincent Buckley and Evan Jones took the final years honours seminar, a Wyatt to Wordsworth survey of English poetry, providing a fresh account of the tradition and counter-traditions. Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Philip Martin were active intellectual presences around the Department. They cared about literature and talked about it in the same way, inside and outside the classroom.
"I was lucky to have such contemporaries as Peter Steele, Helen Garner, Laurie Clancy and, sad to think of them now, Axel Clark and Graeme Burns who were cleverer, more conscientious and better read. The Department gave me good and lasting intellectual habits as well as life enhancing prejudices preferring Wyatt and Gascoigne to Spenser and Sidney, Donne to Milton, Keats to Shelley, Hardy and Hopkins to Browning and Tennyson. I am grateful for it all."
Publications
- Voyage and Landfall: the art of Jan Senbergs (2006)
- The bright shapes and the true names: a memoir (2003)
- Fred Williams: 1927-1982 Rev. ed.(1996)Ge
- Many exhibition catalogues
Geoff Norman
Lawyer, Legal Risk Management Division, Macquarie Bank Treasury and Commodities Group, Sydney
"As an LL.B/B.Comm graduate with a burgeoning interest in literature, I found the English Department's Graduate Diploma of Arts (English Literary Studies) a worthy introduction to tertiary study of the discipline of textual interpretation. The canon was well covered, but in a progressive manner; the staff were approachable, and full of knowledge; and the zest for learning was ever-present around the faculty offices, amongst both students and faculty members. Based on my experience I would commend the Faculty to anyone with a love of literature."
Michele Pierson
Department of Film Studies, King's College London
"As an undergraduate and postgraduate student in the School of Culture and Communication with Cultural Studies, I had the benefit of participating in an academic environment particularly interested in thinking about the diverse forms that historically situated, and theoretically informed research in the broad and intersecting fields of literary, cultural, and media studies might take. This environment of inter-disciplinary inquiry was vital for shaping my postgraduate research on the historical and cultural reception of cinematic special effects: an area that barely existed when I began this research inthe early 1990s, and is now a rich and diverse field."
Publications
- Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder (2002)
- articles on Hollywood cinema, special effects, amateur film, and avant-garde and experimental film
Philip Salom
Poet
Lecturer, Creative Writing, School of Culture and Communication
"At the end of secondary school I was not contemplating University - I was trying to avoid it. My farming parents suggested I study at an Agricultural College. A few years later, while working as a technician on a cattle Research Station, I met someone who was a keen reader. At the time, I was profoundly, stinkingly bored. He handed me Patrick White's novel The Vivisector, a book of, and about, intense and uncompromising artistry. I began the book in idleness but soon I was reading it like a blazing (if sardonic) revelation.
I moved to the city, intent on becoming a painter, maybe even a writer. Becoming, I assumed, was a spontaneous process; and creative determination surely fed on desire, and on personal projection, to achieve and to explore the artform. However, if you have little knowledge of form - and I had none - you flail around in the energies but cannot contain them, cannot fit one to the other. I enrolled at university. I studied literature, theatre, film and poetry. It gave me the techniques, the intellectual rigour and the structure to write well enough for the writing, finally, to speak back to me. Everything fell into place. I was a poet."
Publications
Poetry
- The Well Mouth (2005)
- A Cretive Life (2001)
- New and Selected Poems (1998)
- The Rome Air Naked (1996)
- Tremors (1994)
- Feeding the Ghost (1993)
- Barbecue of the Primitives (1989)
- Sky Poems (1987)
- The Projectionist (1983)
- The Silent Piano (1980)
Novels
- Playback (1991)
- Toccata and Rain (2004)
Plays
- Always Then and Now (1993)
James Simpson FAHA
Professor of English and American Literature, Harvard University, 2004-
Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English, University of Cambridge 1999-2003
Life Fellow, Girton College, Cambridge
"The Melbourne English Department gave me what neither school nor family had: something to push against. School and family either encouraged and/or ignored intellectual resistance. By contrast Leavisism, then dominant in the English Department that I entered in 1972, was a sterner opponent: it created resistance and took resistance seriously. Well at least some teachers were capable of educating to that exacting standard, and I'm thinking especially of Robin Grove. He was the most articulate, stylish and profound exponent of a tradition by and against whose pressure I found my intellectual feet. Beside that stringent and focussed commitment, I guess I profited most from a more catholic (and in many cases Catholic) tradition with a warmer, wider intellectual embrace. I stand deeply indebted to George Russell, Vincent Buckley and Penelope Buckley."
Publications
- Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England (2005 )
- Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350-1547. Volume 2 of The Oxford English Literary History (2002)
- Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille's "Anticlaudianus" and John Gower's "Confessio amantis" (1995)
- Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text (1990)
- Parisian Libraries, for The Index of Middle English Prose (1989)
- Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of G. H. Russell (1986)
Photo: Tony Amos
Lee Tulloch
Author
"I really had no idea why I was at uni. I suppose I was just marking time. I've always been a natural writer, so English Language and Literature seemed, at the time, to be the subjects to pursue. In some ways, critical analysis of the great works of literature is an oppressive thing to do if one wants to be a writer of fiction - it took me years to have the confidence to put ribbon in the typewriter. But now I realise what a gift an unfettered liberal arts education was for me. It gave me a sophistication that I was able to carry with me around the world. I still draw on obscure bits of knowledge I picked up in those years - although I've never had cause to speak to anyone in Old Norse!"
Publications
- Perfect Pink Polish (2005)
- The Cutting (2003)
- Two Shanes (2001)
- Wraith (1999)
- Fabulous Nobodies (1989), translated into Spanish, Italian and Japanese; new edition forthcoming, 2006)
Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Poet
"I came up to the university after a couple of years working in the city, in 1953: to study English and Philosophy. I did first-year English with Barry Humphries and Finals with Germaine Greer. The place was a little nest of singing birds; moreover, poetry provided the backbone of an English course, culminating in the Finals double-seminar, which used to be subversively replicated in Germaine's loft -- now the Alan Gilbert building. We ran a little magazine called Compass, in which Bruce Dawe was the star. And in the Baillieu, I discovered where each book was, so I didn't need to use the catalogue."
Petra White
Publishing assistant, Nelson Thomson Learning
"At the age of 24, I went university for four reasons: 1. Austudy was (then) more than the dole; 2. I wanted a library card; 3. I wanted to learn German; 4. I wanted to study all of English literature in the hope that it would make me a better poet. The latter aim was perhaps the least likely to be fulfilled at a time when English departments were overrun with postmodern theory (which I loved, but had already read) and PhD theses on Big Brother.
But at Melbourne I found that all strands of 'English' co-existed (though not always without some highly entertaining sniping from lecturers about their colleagues from the 'other side'); it was fine to study Buffy, Harry Potter or Milton or Jane Austen or anything else. I attended lectures by Robin Grove on Shakespeare, Peter Steele on everything from Swift to Mandeville to Calvino (with Peter Steele one 'surfed' all of English literature in the space of a lecture), Bernard Muir on the Bible, Aristotle and Homer, and in 4th year, learned to read Chaucer with Stephanie Trigg.
I will always be grateful to those lecturers and tutors who encouraged me to articulate my own ideas - which involved much rambling and stuttering in tutorials - and to read and think critically and imaginatively: skills which, I'm discovering, are actually sought after in the corporate world."
Petra White is also a poet, currently working on her first manuscript, Planting.