LIVING IN THE NORTH

Whilst acknowledging that its not the North to those further up the Australian map, for me this is the NORTH. Coming across JIM BELSHAW’s NEW ENGLAND Blog put a match to a few wee sticks of smouldering resentments which I have been allowing to burn softly. “Resentment” isn’t applicable to all of the issues. Some are simply observations. They are, however, wee sticks on a fire which flares now and then.

 

	One of these wee smouldering sticks is this. Peter Knox, BCA Hons. MA. Hons. PhD Canditate through University of Wollongong, interrupted his  PhD Candidature for 2 years, 2006/2007 to participate in the research and development of the huge AUSTLIT PROJECT
AUSTLIT. AustLit is a non-profit collaboration between twelve Australian Universities and the National Library of Australia providing authoritative information on hundreds of thousands of creative and critical Australian literature works relating to more than 100,000 Australian authors and literary organisations. Its coverage spans 1780 to the present day.	On completion of his contract with AUSTLIT and having become enamoured of the NORTH, he decided to continue his PhD in this Region and proceeded to apply to the Universities of New England and the Southern Cross with the intention of transferring from UOW. Both establishments found themselves unable to take on this candidature for various reasons including lack of anyone capable of supervising this particular thesis. None of these included verbal or personal contact. Simple email responses with one exception. I have no intention of fighting Peter’s fights for him. He is able to do that. My burning sticks are these:
Peter’s thesis is about Melinda Kendall, a poetess born in NSW in 1815 and one of the very early settlers of the Clarence.  I, myself, would like to see her story emerge from the heavily forested rivers of history but it appears it won’t be done with the support of UNE or SCU. Odd! One element of Peter’s request for transfer was “the very fact of her presence in this region and that  the University of New England, like the University of Wollongong, doesn’t seem to be situated philosophically and academically in the area of its physical location.”	Is there not a simple basic  courtesy in the way we deal with one another academically?  Are there so many PhD Candidates applying for transfer  that personal interviews would exhaust the valuable time and energies of the prospective supervisors and institutions?
In the meantime, UOW continues to support this project at a distance whilst leaving the Northern Universities unruffled by Southern Invasion.	And in a less rankled way. The NEW ENGLAND STATE BLOG, aroused in me a desire to see the area which has been home to me and mine for generations , truly retrieved from the shadows and not only by the Genealogists and Volunteers who work hard to keep safe the fragments of a barely examined past.
In the ARCHIVES in ARMIDALE, we were really shown the ropes and I was MOST IMPRESSED. It even smelt sacred in there.
The CLARENCE RIVER HISTORICAL SOCIETY was equally cooperative as was the TWEED RIVER MUSEUM and the CAMDEN HAVEN HISTORICAL SOCIETY.	Nevertheless, it seems to me, as a NSW Northerner, with a passion in particular for the RIVERS, that the next development in historical maturity would do well to involve far more  tertiary level involvement.

 

http://www.austlit.edu.au/