Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University and chair of the social sciences editorial board of ANU Press. He has published books with Melbourne University Press, Black Inc., Monash University Publishing and University of New South Wales Press.
Welcome to Australia. I am writing to protest against your decision to destroy an eighty-five year-old Australian academic press, UWA Publishing, with a superb record of publishing non-fiction, fiction and poetry. While its list is diverse, in my own field of Australian history UWAP has been a most distinguished contributor to ground-breaking Australian scholarship. I think of Geoffrey Bolton's classic study of the Depression era, A Fine Country to Starve In (1972) and John Robertson's life of a Labor Prime Minister, J.H. Scullin: A Political Biography (1974), still the standard work on the topic after 45 years. There are Mary Ann Jebb’s Blood, Sweat and Welfare: A History of White Bosses and Aboriginal Pastoral Workers (2003) and Regina Ganter’s Mixed Relations: Asian-Aboriginal Contact in North Australia (2006), both the recipients of prestigious national awards. The record of high-quality publication in the field continues through to more recent first-class work: Robert Crawford and Jackie Dickenson’s Behind Glass Doors: the World of Australian Advertising Agencies 1959-1989 (2016), Tony Hughes-d'Aeth’s Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt (2017), Anna Haebich’s, Dancing in Shadows: Histories of Nyungar Performance (2018) and Jo Hawkins’s Consuming Anzac: the History of Australia's Most Powerful Brand (2019). There are also massive, ground-breaking collective projects of the Western Australian historical profession such as A New History of Western Australia (1979), edited by Tom Stannage, and the Historical Encyclopedia of Western Australia (2009), edited by Jenny Gregory and Jan Gothard (2009). What a rich legacy this is: and what an atrocious betrayal of it by the present University of Western Australian management. I am struggling to recall a more ill-considered decision by an Australian university in my twenty-five years as an academic, as sure a sign of a university leadership that has lost its way as it would be possible to conceive. The UWA then vainly seeks to obscure with risible management-speak the reality that it has failed to register even its basic responsibilities to the community that created it, and which it is supposed to serve. It is a decision that, if not reversed, the University of Western Australia will wear like a crown of thorns for years. Outstanding, internationally important Western Australian historians such as Bolton and Stannage would be turning in their graves at this appalling vandalism. Like so many others who have helped make UWAP a success over the years, they fully understood the importance of telling Australian, and especially Western Australian, stories. The university has shamefully repudiated everything that they stood for. The current Director of UWA Publishing, Terri-ann White is widely admired for her understanding of this valuable legacy and essential mission, as well as for the innovation, energy and creativity she has brought to UWAP. The reprehensible nature of the decision is only underlined by the growing importance of UWAP during her tenure as place for telling the stories of the Nyungar people, including books by leading Indigenous writers and artists. What a message for the University of Western Australia to send to the nation and the world, a university that claims to be committed to supporting the right of Noongar people 'to practise their values, languages, beliefs and knowledge'. But not, it would seem, if it costs the university anything. I call on you to reverse this decision. Yours sincerely, (Prof.) Frank Bongiorno AM FASSA FRHistS ***** Support UWAP by signing the petition at Change.org Comments are closed.
|
ArchivesCategories |