An institution is an idea, an aspiration, a hope. It is how we take an abstract noun – knowledge, education, art – and give it expression through people and bricks, organization and architecture.
Like all ideas, an institution must find its own way, and will be changed by the journey.
Over time the founding idea is overlaid by rebuilding. As institutions age, they exhibit the marks of successive occupants – tides of people who arrive, work and move on, like strata deposited over time and compressed into history. Eventually the institution can be read like a geological formation, containing on the surface the current reigning ideas and, in layers beneath, traces of earlier minds and ambitions, right back to the original concept.
On another July Monday in Melbourne, 152 years ago, two carriages, travelling in strict order of rank, made a short but significant ceremonial journey between two building sites. Redmond Barry, a judge of the Supreme Court, and Charles Hotham, the new Lieutenant-Governor of Victoria, believed in ideas, and wanted to see them inscribed in two new institutions. A year earlier enabling legislation had been passed and the necessary budgets agreed by the colonial government. Now construction could begin.
To mark this solemn occasion, the procession began at a hillside paddock on the northern outskirts of the city, then rode down a gentle slope to the location of this lecture tonight.
At each stop a foundation stone was laid. Thus on a single day in 1854, Barry and Hotham initiated the University of Melbourne and the Melbourne Public Library, now the State Library of Victoria. Both institutions thrive still, making Melbourne a city of ideas.
On the hillock at Parkville, dressed in what The Argus described as ‘very handsome robes’ befitting the Chancellor of a University, Redmond Barry made a lengthy speech. The Argus indicates that though animated, Chancellor Barry was at his ‘least audible, and our reporter was therefore unable to give a literal report of speech’.
Another account suggests the Chancellor expressed the expected pieties for the occasion – pleasure at the growth of the new colony, the exciting civic possibilities from the discovery of gold, and now the arrival of higher learning. Just 17 years earlier, Barry declaimed in language familiar to his audience, the spot where they stood was ‘inhabited only by savages’. Now it would be location for that embodiment of civilisation, a university.
The procession then travelled to La Trobe Street and a second ceremony. There a brass plate, containing a list of dignitaries and the name of the architect, Mr Reed, and builder, Mr Metcalf, marked the start of work on the classically-inspired Library in which we meet tonight.
The report in The Argus stressed the ritual of the foundation stone, covered with coins and lowered in the ground, ‘where it is intended to remain, like the edifices of the old country, for centuries to come’.
Alas in the case of the University of Melbourne the stone was so carefully planted it vanished from sight, and is presumed lost. Fortunately we have the Latin text, drafted by Redmond Barry and setting out, firmly and forthrightly, the ideals to be embodied in this new place. Translated, it promised a University
'...instituted in honour of God for establishing young men in philosophy, literature and piety, cultivating the talent of youth, fostering the arts, extending the bounds of science.'
Barry’s formulation looks conventional, but it disposed of one key issue in the opening words. Despite the reference to the ‘honour of God’ and ‘piety’, the new university would be a non-sectarian undertaking.
At a time when obtaining a degree at Cambridge and Oxford required membership of the Established Church, at Melbourne there would be no religious test and no theological studies. While the newly established University of Sydney required student attendance at worship and provided state funding for colleges, in Melbourne churches would provide their own funds for colleges at the University. Professors must refrain from religious and political controversy.
Barry’s choice of appropriate curriculum likewise bowed to tradition but signalled a departure. The mention of science on the foundation inscription was a clue. So was Barry’s language about access. The Irish-born Chancellor determined to avoid the class-based entry which characterised British universities.
Barry set the tone in his first University Council Annual Report. The University of Melbourne, he announced, would be:
'...open to all classes of Her Majesty’s subjects, who are freely invited to enter, who may there contend on an equal footing for the honours and substantial dignities to be awarded to merit alone.'
This appeal to merit over birth resonated in the colony, a place where people could reinvent themselves. Alas rhetoric disguised a gap between founding idea and practice. The labouring classes may be freely invited to enter the University, but principally to build the stonework, cook in the kitchen, and serve in the dining room. Few made it to class.
On another issue of access, Barry selected his words with care. He welcomed young men to Parkville, but women young or old would find no place. His position, unmoved by arguments to the contrary, was captured aptly in a Punch cartoon of 14 December 1871. The cartoon reads:
Ladies (who have passed matriculation examination). – ‘Pray, Sir Redmond, Why are we not to be admitted?’
Sir Redmond. – ‘Ask me not Why, Ladies, we have no reason. We won’t admit you because – because – we won’t – there.’
It would take until 1880 before women were admitted to all degrees except medicine, and a further seven years before this final barrier was removed. Not until 1989 did women constitute, as today, the majority of students at the University.
II
Sir Redmond Barry, though ‘obdurately conservative and authoritarian’ in the words of historians Stuart Macintyre and Richard Selleck, proved a liberal spirit at the Library once installed as founding President of the Trustees. (Only one other person has held the dual positions of Chancellor of the University and President of the Library Board, and did so sequentially rather than simultaneously. Lawyer Ian Renard today serves as Chancellor of Melbourne, having completed a distinguished term as President of the Library Board in 2000).
No attention was too small for the founding President, who promised the library would be ‘at least the second best ... in the world to the British Museum’. Barry supervised the details of this building and the selection of books, famously excluding fiction from the library’s collection. Since some Trustee meetings list Redmond Barry as the only attendee, he could make decisions without the distraction of dissent. He specified the colours of the bindings and the original security system. The library, he declared, should be an antipodean treasure house containing ‘the best of everything’, as a ‘great emporium of learning and philosophy, of literature, science, and art’.
Here was a core idea expressed as an institution. Like the university, the library would be a force for civilisation. Hence admission to the Public Library of Melbourne should be free to anyone over 14 years of age: ‘Every person of respectable appearance is admitted, even though he be coatless ... if only his hands are clean’. Women were welcome to the Library, if not the University, with a separate area ‘which allows the thirst for knowledge and the poetic or aesthetic desires of every woman to be satisfied, undisturbed’.
Barry commissioned a carving of his family coat of arms over the main entrance of the Library, where it remains, and did likewise within the Old Quad at the University.
Ideas are pure but organisations are expressions of human interplay, and so messy, unpredictable and not always easy to control. So despite Barry’s pride in both institutions, they would not unfold necessarily as their author imagined.
Barry saw intrinsic merit in young minds exploring philosophy, literature, the arts and science without undue concern for future employment. The schoolmasters and parents of the colony were less convinced, preferring practical instruction. As The Age noted, anticipating the opening of the University in April 1855:
'...however excellent and valuable classical education may be in itself, it is precisely the kind of education which they [the colonist] do not want; since it is utterly unsuited to the place, the time, and the character of the population.'
Such clamour for useful knowledge must have bemused Barry. When he graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1837, his Bachelor of Arts certified ability to pass examinations in which classical books were read in Greek and the New Testament and Hebraic Psalms translated into Latin.
The new University likewise required study of ancient languages, but included courses in science and English literature. The only degree offered by the new institution, the Bachelor of Arts, proved a broad and progressive program. Science-oriented graduates left University knowing how to converse in Latin and Greek, while those in the humanities acquired an introduction to geometry, physics and mathematics.
Nonetheless, this golden era of a single all-purpose general education was not destined to last. The original University legislation conceded the need for professional education in Law and Medicine, with the first students in these courses arriving in 1857 and 1862 respectively.
So began the process of institutional evolution, in which an original concept must accommodate new arrivals, each influencing the character and purpose of its host. In a colony built on wealth from gold mining, for example, the need for engineers was, as Barry put it, ‘self-apparent’. In 1860 the University Council approved the first course in engineering.
Other vocational faculties appeared early in the following century, with a Faculty of Dentistry, a Faculty of Agriculture in 1906, and Veterinary Science in 1909. By the end of the Great War Architecture was taught, with a Faculty of Commerce formed in the 1920s. The additions continue, ever more specialised, as new bodies of knowledge support new professions. Some arrivals go unremarked, others become celebrated controversies, but the tremor always passes, the ground settles again, and over time all merge into the landscape we call still a university.
Thus do institutions develop, from idea to practice, each generation subtly recasting organisational aims and scope in their own image. The classical façade of the State Library and the sandstone quadrangle of the University provide a comforting illusion of continuity, masking change within their walls.
In Redmond Barry’s time, both the Library and the University existed to preserve and transmit knowledge. The State Library, noted its Trustees in 1859, was not a place for popular reading. The works on its shelves should not ‘attract the idle and inquisitive, or entertain the frivolous, but invite the scholar, instruct the diligent enquirer and detain the serious’.
Likewise, the University was not a place for invention. As Selleck observes, academic freedom and research were ‘almost as far from the thoughts of Barry and his colleagues as was the possibility that women would enrol’.
By the time of Barry’s death in 1880, 12 days after the hanging of Ned Kelly, a fundamental reappraisal of the role of universities was underway. The idea of creating knowledge through research had found a new constituency. Just two years before, in 1878, University of Melbourne Council member Charles Pearson asserted that the main function of a university professor is to ‘impart, not invent’. Yet in the following decade Melbourne appointed professors of chemistry and biology for whom research was an essential part of their profession. The growth of scientific inquiry, with its requisite laboratories and research staff, became part of the Melbourne story, an important overlay on the original schema for the University.
For Barry, teaching was the core purpose of a university. His successors presided over the slow transformation to teaching and research as the essence. It would take many decades. Not until the 1940s did the University of Melbourne enrol Australia’s first doctoral candidate. Not until the 1990s did research become an expected role for all academic staff as former teaching-only posts disappeared.
Through these changes, the University remained of modest scale. Many more people passed through the doorway of the State Library than studied at Parkville or at various satellite campuses. Forty years after foundation, the University enrolled fewer than 700 students. By 1935 there were only 3,500 students. While numbers grew to 7,000 students in 1955, this was still a tiny percentage of school leavers in a Victorian population at the time of 2.5 million.
Those who made the trip to The Shop were drawn predominantly from affluent families. A 1962 study of Melbourne University students found just 9 percent of law students and 11 percent of medical students with fathers in manual occupations. This pattern changed only slowly despite a surge in enrolments - to 15,000 students by the mid 1970s, 30,000 by 1995 and today nearly 43,000 students and 6,400 staff.
Along with scale came alternative choices for students. For more than a century the University of Melbourne enjoyed a monopoly in Victoria. In 1961 Monash arrived. La Trobe followed in 1967, Deakin the following decade, and new players in the 1990s. The State Library can tell a similar story, as local and regional libraries spread through Victoria.
The transition, from singular to plural, changes how an organisation views itself. Pride in being ancient and revered now sits alongside the insecurity of competition, the fear that available public funds will be beaten to airy thinness, the better to cover all the new siblings.
The need for money, naturally, is a constant thread through the story of any public institution. The founding idea, alas, rarely fits neatly within available budget. Constantly aggrieved over inadequate funding, the University came close to ruin on several occasions. The Depression of the 1890s saw cuts and falling student numbers. A major embezzlement uncovered in 1901 sparked a Royal Commission into University finances. The Great Depression imposed renewed cuts and savings, while the post-war era found the University struggling for teaching space. A 1964 report by the Auditor-General uncovered serious administrative irregularities.
Growth, competition and financial crisis – each left a mark, changing the way decisions are made and priorities set. The idea of the university is strained when reduced, as it must be, to operating plans and budgets, to competing claims and compromise. Cultivating the talent of youth, fostering the arts and extending the bounds of science are all fine, but who is to fund the repair of this roof or build that extension for a research team otherwise threatening to leave for another institution?
National policy too has left its scars. Since 1974, universities have been the responsibility of Canberra, even if their legislation and reporting regimes remain with the States and Territories. Since the high tide of funding at the close of the Whitlam era, successive Commonwealth governments have shared a view that Australian universities are too well funded and should make do with less. In real terms, public funding per student is at best two-thirds of that provided 30 years ago.
Cost cutting, particularly through increased class sizes, and recruitment of fee-paying students, notably from overseas, have kept universities afloat. The injection of diversity through an international student body has enriched Australian education. Such moves come at a price, though, making Australia’s public universities reliant on market income to sustain their core mission.
III
The first Council of the University selected an appropriate Latin motto - postera crescam laude, to grow in the esteem of future generations. The words are drawn from the Odes of Horace (iii.xxx), and a poem usually translated as ‘I Have Built a Monument’. Horace proclaims a creation that will prove more durable than brass, pyramids or kings, able to survive the seasons’ gyring gears. His monument is a poem, words that will endure long after the grandeur of Rome is lost. This verse will allow its author to cheat death, insuring instead that future tongues cultivate his praise.
A university is just such a monument, but one without a fixed meaning. Beyond the familiar sandstone and streetscape, would Barry recognise what happens in his university? Or has the weight of change buried intention beneath the sediment of future generations?
Certainly Barry would find a university much evolved from his original idea. In aspiration it adheres to the German tradition of research. In scale Melbourne dwarfs its original models of Oxford, Cambridge and Trinity. In membership it proudly welcomes women and the descendents of those ‘savages’ so cavalierly dismissed by Barry, along with one quarter of its students from abroad, drawn particularly from Asia.
Only funding arrangements would seem familiar – after a brief national flirtation with free education the university again relies, as at its origin, on student fees supplemented by government grants.
Melbourne is no longer the only university in Victoria, no longer even part of a protected and closed public sector. The city now teems with private higher education providers, a local projection of a vast and competitive global industry.
And now the University founded by Redmond Barry must make decisions for its future, knowing these too will prove but stages in a longer journey with no respite and no fixed destination.
During 2005, the University sponsored an extended conversation among its broader community. How should the institution pursue its commitment to be among the finest universities in the world?
The result is a strategy called Growing Esteem. It finds Melbourne’s future in the metaphor of a triple helix: a public-spirited institution, defined by tightly-bound strands of significant research, internationally recognised teaching and continuous knowledge transfer, each reinforcing the other. Together the strands of the helix define the character and purpose of the University.
The research strand of the triple helix builds on more than a century of original inquiry at the University. Creating knowledge is the great human project - always pressing, never completed.
The University of Melbourne scores strongly on Australian indices of research performance, but less well by international measures. In The Times Higher Education world rankings, Melbourne sits at first in Australia and 19 in the world. But in the more rigorous research performance based Shanghai Jiao Tong index, the University is number 82, one of only two Australian universities among the top 100. The Jiao Tong ranking exposes the space between Melbourne’s aspirations and its research impact.
Does this matter? After all, every university can make a contribution to knowledge regardless of standing. Yet in the global competition for talent, rankings count. Just as good students prefer to study with other good students, the best researchers want to work with able and stimulating colleagues.
Given the rise of a science-based norm of team research, the quality of co-researchers is critical to the success of any individual. Rankings are a poor proxy for an institution’s intellectual capacity, but remain the only measure available.
Global rankings also influence student choice, even though the Jiao Tong index is based on research rather than teaching. Overseas students can select among great universities in Europe and North America and, increasingly, from world-class institutions in China, Malaysia and Singapore. Our standing in global rankings decides whether they will consider an Australian education.
Since solvency for Australian universities depends on such choices, this is no small matter.
Domestically, the proposed Research Quality Framework from 2008 will likely determine future public funding for research endeavours.
Internationally, research remains the currency of academic standing, and rankings threaten barriers to collaboration. ‘We don’t pay much attention to the Jiao Tong rankings’, a senior academic at Heidelberg University told me last year. ‘But then we’re number 64 in the world, so we don’t need too. I notice your institution is only 82nd. Why am I talking with you?’
So a clear-sighted view of current and potential research performance is essential. This year the University commissioned a comprehensive evaluation of every academic department to test whether it is among the top three research performers in its field across Australia. In the long run, the University can invest only in those academic areas capable of national leadership and international relevance. Global markets require global strategies.
Most discussion about Growing Esteem, though, has focused on the learning and teaching strand of the triple helix.
Just as research has become an international contest, so teaching is being transformed. In this region, competitors such as Singapore and Hong Kong are following mainland China in adopting a four-year undergraduate degree as standard, following American practice.
Europe too has been much influenced by the success of tertiary education in the United States. The Bologna Declaration, due for implementation by 2010, will see many professional courses move to graduate level. A typical European student will complete a broad three-year undergraduate degree and then two years of professional study in graduate school to qualify in, say, law or finance.
The educational arguments for a broad degree in arts, science or commerce before specialisation are widely accepted. The logistics of moving to such an approach remain considerable.
So far Britain and Australia have resisted both the trend to four-year first degrees and professional training at graduate level. Prestigious institutions such as Cambridge and the London School of Economics, no doubt, choose their own race. But, in the long run, can Australia stand alone in this region with undergraduate qualifications outside the mainstream of Asia, Europe and North America?
And what of the 60,000 residents in managerial or professional occupations who leave Australia on a permanent or long-term basis each year? They too will watch international trends to ensure Australian qualifications remain widely recognised and valued.
Hence a new concern with international transferability is reshaping Australian university offerings, with a focus on credit transfer, aligned semesters and twinning partnerships. Some institutions have established campuses off-shore, such as RMIT in Vietnam, UNSW in Singapore and Monash in South Africa. Others are reworking domestic courses for an international audience. Swinburne University is offering joint degrees with the China University of Mining and Technology and with Northeastern University in the United States. The first international university has arrived in Australia, with Carnegie-Mellon offering American degrees taught in Adelaide.
In this context, the University of Melbourne has elected to rethink its courses from first principles. The vehicle for achieving this has been a Curriculum Commission, the first in the history of the institution. Under the leadership of Professor Peter McPhee, the Curriculum Commission has examined the 140 undergraduate degrees now offered at Melbourne, and proposed instead a small number of broad undergraduate degrees followed by specialist professional training. This approach is consistent with emerging European practice and will ensure continuing international recognition of Melbourne qualifications.
Starting in 2008, the ‘Melbourne Model’ will offer students a choice of six new-generation undergraduate degrees, in Arts, Bioscience, Commerce, Environments, Music and Science. The first graduate schools, in Architecture, Forest Science, Law and Nursing will also open in 2008. Others will follow, in a transition that will take about a decade.
Allied to curriculum change is a renewed focus on the student experience. Melbourne’s students value the opportunity to study alongside the brightest minds in this country. A ‘cohort experience’ – ensuring students spend time with peers as they progress through their degree – is a feature of the new generation degrees. This will be supported by small group teaching, coherent undergraduate programs, and improved learning hubs and on-line content.
To make the triple helix tangible, new-generation degrees include opportunities to participate in knowledge transfer and in discovery on a campus with some of Australia’s great researchers, including four Nobel Laureates.
Undergraduate courses will avoid too early specialisation. Indeed from 2008 undergraduates must take around one-quarter of their course from outside their home degree.
This Melbourne Model recognises that often school leavers have no clear idea yet of their future goals. Many new students drop out of university because their first choice proves not right for them. Among those who persist, 30 percent will change courses during their undergraduate years while an unknown number toil in programs they feel obliged to finish despite growing reservations. As a result, a significant number of graduates never practice in their chosen profession.
Direct entry from school to a professional degree also creates a too-tight link between Year 12 results and future occupation. ‘Don’t waste your ENTER score’ is unfortunate advice that has sent too many bright students into safe and prestigious, but personally barren, career choices.
Under the Melbourne Model, the vocational decision can be delayed until the end of undergraduate education. On completing a new-generation bachelor degree, a student will have the self-knowledge to make an informed choice about what to do next.
Some may go immediately to employment. Others will elect to enrol in one of Melbourne’s new graduate schools and pursue a professional qualification. Thus a Bioscience student may proceed to Medicine or Dentistry, an Arts or Commerce graduate to Law, an Environments student to Architecture or Agriculture. Some will embrace the joy of research and choose instead honours, masters and doctoral qualifications.
At graduate school, the pace and intensity of learning will be appropriate to mature students. Many will be drawn from Melbourne degrees, but others will have completed degrees elsewhere, and join the University of Melbourne for their professional qualification.
Though the model of liberal education followed by professional graduate school is well known from the United States, it is a departure from the Australian norm. It will not be for everyone. Some risk-averse students may look elsewhere.
But for the brightest students who want to be challenged, and for employers seeking graduates with initiative, breadth and internationally recognised qualifications, the Melbourne Model promises a quality of university education unprecedented in Australia. This is Redmond Barry’s aspiration for cultivating the talent of our best young people in new and exciting form.
The final strand in the triple helix is knowledge transfer.
Universities occupy a public space, with community expectations of a contribution to intellectual, social and economic life. Yet this broader engagement can be largely invisible. We remember the great technology that comes out of a university – a cochlear ear, new vaccines, milk-based Recaldent to repair early tooth decay. We are less likely to know about the University’s deep involvement with schools serving disadvantaged families, about the endless flow of ideas made possible through cultural treasures, about the Student Ambassador Leadership Program which connects with more than 70 community organisations.
Knowledge transfer usually happens out of public view. Companies use University of Melbourne research to create new products, government departments tap into the intellectual capital of the University’s academic and professional staff. The benefits of partnership, of independent advice, of innovation enrich the University and its communities alike.
It is time for this third stream of activity to take its place alongside teaching and research as a core role for a university. Knowledge transfer makes public universities distinctively public, a continuous commitment to be in, and of, the society that supports our institution.
Like research, knowledge transfer is a departure from Redmond Barry’s original idea - or perhaps such realisation of unnamed aspirations. In that momentous year of 1854, when the Melbourne Public Library and University of Melbourne began construction, the colony also founded the National Museum of Victoria. The Museum soon moved to Parkville, to the site now occupied by Union House. It remained for many years the most popular feature of the campus, attracting visitors and family picnics by the lake, an early expression of a commitment to reach beyond the student body.
Today the campus houses the Ian Potter Museum of Art and nine other museums and galleries, alongside the numerous collections of the Baillieu Library, including papers and memorabilia left by Percy Grainger. The University supports Asialink, Melbourne University Publishing, Melbourne Theatre Company, a significant art collection, publications such as Meanjin and numerous concerts and performances by the Faculty of Music and the Victorian College of the Arts, alongside conferences and public lectures.
And so it should – a university intent on fostering the arts and extending the bounds of science is an institution that must share knowledge with a wider audience.
Though the language of knowledge transfer is new, the idea is not. When Woodrow Wilson addressed Princeton’s sesquicentennial celebration in 1896, he titled his remarks ‘Princeton in the Nation's Service’. A great university, he argued, shapes the nation through engagement with contemporary public problems. It produces graduates who will participate in the world’s transactions. When the times demand action, the university ‘...dare not keep aloof’.
Such a call to engagement is a long way from Redmond Barry’s belief in professors who refrain from religious and political controversy. Knowledge transfer suggests a place no longer apart but rather an institution deeply enmeshed with the world.
IV
Woodrow Wilson opened that 1896 speech with a striking image.
‘We are but men of a single generation in the long life of an institution which shall still be young when we are dead’ he said. ‘But while we live her life is in us’.
Institutional life can be long indeed. The form of the modern university can be traced back 900 years in Europe, more than 150 years in Australia. The model for a library is even more ancient.
As Redmond Barry hoped, his contribution to both traditions has endured. A man who chisels his name into two great public institutions intends his fame to endure through greedy rain, frantic thresh of wind, the flight of years. That we gather here tonight in his memory shows he succeeded.
Yet neither institution he helped create remains a single idea carried forward toward infinity. An organisation acquires ever more layers as it moves through time, becoming increasingly complex, perhaps even internally contradictory, as each generation imagines anew the purpose and rationale of the institutions it has inherited.
Thus since that memorable carriage ride on a Monday in July 1854, the State Library of Victoria and the University of Melbourne are the same yet unrecognisable. New opportunities have encouraged new directions, while some original aspirations were lowered into the ground along with the University foundation stone, or perhaps with Redmond Barry, whose remains lie in the Melbourne General Cemetery in sight of an academic building honouring his name.
For the State Library, technology has changed fundamentally how people access information. Clean hands and coatless or not, the library collection is as likely to be visited electronically as perused in the Redmond Barry Reading Room. The ambitious aim of slv21 is to digitise key parts of the collection, so making the library available anywhere, anytime. This is an aim consistent with the founding vision – a true treasure house - but using means unimaginable.
For the University of Melbourne, a century and a half has seen shifts in curriculum, the overlay of research as a key goal, and now the hope of knowledge transfer. The institution has been shaped by its founding ideas, by restless debate within, by the exigencies of government and budgets from without. It is not one place but many traditions overlaid, each on top of earlier ideals, to build something remarkable.
The Growing Esteem program described this evening, with its triple helix of research, the Melbourne Model and engagement, seeks to move the University toward its goal of being one of the finest universities.
But Growing Esteem is the work of a single generation, the fleeting moment of those who lead now. In time, this program will be interred under new layers of thinking. Something called the University of Melbourne will endure, as will the State Library of Victoria. Neither will be quite the institution Redmond Barry imagined, but something altogether richer still for adapting to their times.
Linked through history, sharing common goals and in constant dialogue, the State Library of Victoria and the University of Melbourne will both still be young when we are all gone. Buried somewhere within their layers of meaning will be this moment.
Thank you.
Transcript of the Redmond Barry Lecture 2006, State Library of Victoria, Monday 17 July, 2006.
Close
