Richard Flanagan's Tasmania

Deputy Chancellor, Acting Vice Chancellor, distinguished guests, members of the University, graduates and diplomates, their families, their friends — my fellow Tasmanians: let me first congratulate those, who, unlike me, worked, and worked hard for the recognition they have today received.

Formerly I aged by years. Now I seem to be ageing by degrees. Like my fellow graduates today, I was educated at this splendid institution to always look beyond the official version of histories, to scratch at the underbelly of life for its truth. In the spirit of this education I wish to offer an alternative educational history to the splendid account we have just heard of the aforesaid Flanagan.

We have discovered Flanagan was indolent and irresponsible. Sympathetic lecturers were known to ring hotel barmen leaving messages pleading for overdue assignments. Unsympathetic academics contented themselves with rightly failing him. He was easily diverted, rumoured to keep bad company, and, at one point, at 11.30 in the morning at Tullamarine airport - while attempting to get back from the mainland early for a supplementary examination by illegally using a friend’s airline ticket - was arrested and charged with the crime of imposition.

As he was frogmarched between four Federal policemen down what that day seemed to him the longest concourse in the world he passed a startled lecturer. "Routine enquiries," he sought to reassure her over his shoulder as with his escort he headed outside. He was, to the best of our knowledge, the only Rhodes Scholar ever to be on probation.

I mention such opprobrium not to bathe in its dismal glories but to make the point that the significance of universities cannot always easily be reckoned on an abacus threaded with the beads of academic achievements.

The great French writer Camus once said that he learnt more about life on the soccer field than he ever did from books. On the rare occasions in my dotage that I now visit universities I feel much the same: the lectures, the tutes, the papers and exams - in the end they were not the stuff of my university education.

Like so many other students, I was largely self-educated in the company of my peers - the talking and the drinking and the laughing and the falling in love and - I should add shamefacedly - the lamentable issue of such combination, the falling over in front of the one with whom you had fallen in love, all of which puts one in mind of that exquisite prayer of St Augustine: "Lord grant me sobriety and chastity - but not just yet" - as good a maxim as any for the personal experience of myself and so many other students, and reminding me that my education was more through the people I met, the friends I made, the conversations I had, the books I read, the films I saw and the music to which I listened, than it was through the formal syllabus offered by the University.

This is not to denigrate the institution of the University but only to acknowledge all that is most remarkable about it: the people who pass through it as students, teachers and staff. Over my time here, I came to recognise that at its best the University still represented an important if embattled idea about liberal education that I happen to believe in: that these places are not where one purchases services for one’s self advancement, but rather that to come here, to be part of the University was to enter a community of thought, of argument, of talk, of ideas, that was at the same time a carnival of laughter and stories, a wonderful republic of learning in which we all gave, in which we all shared, and within which we all grew together.

I must confess then to a deep affection for the University, something between familial attachment and a personal romance. Of course, the University has at various times been characterised by venality, chicanery, mediocrity, and self-interest of the highest order - but then so too has the Vatican. But when I was at my most penurious as a student, it was the ref ladies - the beautiful Barbara Worsely among them - who fed and clothed me. Lecturers such as the late Kay Daniels who took me into their homes and their lives. Who lent me books. Challenged me to think clearly. Who, like Margaret Scott, read my poor first attempts at stories and managed the nigh impossible; to be both frank and encouraging.

At its worst - and gathered here today are people whose tales of the worst excesses would fill the Morris Miller Library several times over - the University was always funny, which is more than you can say for most institutions.

How relieved I was to return to the Student Union bar earlier this year and hear once more, as perennial as the return of the mutton bird from Arctic climes, that annual call of the first year philosophy student passionately arguing, as his predecessors have since time immemorial, the ontological case against God’s existence, and his less passionate, more melancholic partner, wearing, perhaps predictably, a St Kilda beanie replying, "But if He did exist - (I thought his use of the past tense here a clever qualification) - if He did exist, could He kick equally well off either foot?"

I recall the ribald vigour of the Students Union when I first came here in 1979. A torrid union meeting of several hundred students climaxed in Black Pete Kaliniecki flour-bombing anti-Australian Union of Students activist - now Senator Eric Abetz. An enraged, befloured and now skull-white Eric turned around, shaking his fist at Black Pete, and with that gift for hyperbolic invective that has served him well in his subsequent career, the cadaverous Eric, in a voice akin to a clattering old Singer sewing machine, cried out: "Typical union terrorist tactics."

The stories and the characters of the University were for me irresistible - Maggot Butler, the Arthur Daley of the Activities Centre, working more rackets than Lleyton Hewitt; the barsitters, including the old German known only as Fritz who claimed to have been on U-Boats during the war and who the Union ended up housing because it seemed wrong not to do so; Peter Byers, the University’s one-time Business Manager, a cross between a Medici and a pit bull terrier, in whose office we once ended drinking into the morning after a student union function. At about 4am Peter, in the search for more drink, opened up the doors to his voluminous, wardrobe-like bar only to there discover Jim Gordon, the then secretary of the Student Activities Committee, now less than active, curled in an alcoholic fetal position clasping an empty Johnny Walker bottle.

It was at this university that I learnt that most precious of lessons: that not universities but people are the fount of wisdom, for as Shakespeare in Henry V, plagiarising Proverbs, wrote, "Wisdom cries out in the streets, yet no man regards it." But paradoxically I had to come to this university, spend four years here, read many, many books, in order to read that one line and know in my heart its truth, complete and utter.

I also learnt here that change happens because people speak their truth and when confronted by the threats and attacks and stones of insults refuse to lie or capitulate. Studying history, I learnt that this world of Tasmania was not a small or bad world, nor were Tasmanians a small or mean people. I learnt that we Tasmanians had as black and as convict, as migrant and as descendant suffered much and achieved much, and how this island remained still strangely blighted by its past.

Then one day, a friend who had the year before won the Rhodes Scholarship suggested I apply for it. He said it promised that most attractive of awards for a penniless student, a night of free drink, in this instance free alcohol at the official selection dinner at Government House. Get in, get drunk, and get out, my friend advised, if you win it is a definite minus. This trifecta of sorry advice saw me exiled to Oxford for three years.

When I finished there I was, as Rhodes Scholars were in those days, offered any manner of venal occupations: merchant banker in London, management consultant in Los Angeles. The Rhodes Scholar Register - a catalogue of all scholars and their achievements in which grown men and women seek to out-compete each other with the longest CVs in the world - records beneath my name only one very short entry of two words: roof painter, acknowledging the only employment I had lined up, painting my Mum and Dad’s roof in Lindisfarne on my return.

Sitting on that roof that long summer of my return, looking across the extraordinary Derwent and up at the blue green plenitude of the mountain beyond I recognised in Tasmania a glorious country, that was ours, and yet constantly being denied us. Everywhere I went was the terrible evidence of the soul of this land being traded for a mess of pottage, or, more precisely, a wharf of woodchips, a shocking vista of smoking ash, pine plantations that, similar to the sheep in Thomas Mores Utopia, were eating people and their homes. I saw that something was poisoning our island, some strange sickness of the soul.

I saw Edmund Rouse's fear of losing logging profit because of the election result in 1989 lead to the one known, unsuccessful attempt at buying Government. How many other successful attempts have been made remains part of a terrible unwritten history of Tasmania. I saw the Tasmanian media daily more cowardly and craven to those with power. I saw how those who spoke out were blackballed for simply caring.

Worst of all, I watched as our society crippled itself by relegating all those with passion and ideas and belief to the fringes of protest, rather than seeking to bring them into what ought have been a joyful extraordinary and shared project, the making of a new Tasmania. I watched with ever greater sadness as this, as much as the lack of jobs, drove away and continues to drive away so many young Tasmanians from the island. And, while Australia experienced the most sustained boom in its history, we went backwards, the poorest state in the Federation.

All my conscious life, I realised I had watched as here on this wondrous island one more beautiful place after another, each unique, irreplaceable, was destroyed, and in the course of those years the people of the island only grew poorer, sadder, more desperate. "We are all as doomed as the trees" I remember a log truck driver telling me out back of Swansea.

And I saw that everything that changed for the better in Tasmania changed not because of Government but in spite of it. I saw the power of the powerless, of those who refuse to be complicit in their own oppression, who believed in spite of all the lies to the contrary, that if you care enough, if you dare to stand up, you can change your own world for the better. And I came to understand that for many Tasmanians, this island was not a moribund economy or a set of bad statistics, but a dream that might yet liberate us all.

I became a writer. I made my revolt my own way as best I could: by writing books and making films and occasionally saying in public what so many say in private, that this place could be better if some things changed. My revolt was fired by love; of people, of place. I am not saying I did it particularly well, or that there wasn’t a cost, for there was and it was sometimes considerable.

But what kind of man would I have been if, presented with such examples of both good and bad, of courage and cowardice, I had chosen silence? If I denied others the possibilities that had opened to me because of this university here by saying nothing, by perpetuating the hateful oppression, the silence on issues that matter, that simpering obsequiousness to those in power that has held our island back for too long.

I have today tried to trace a long journey that begins with a man sitting on a Lindisfarne roof and ends with him standing before you today.

I make no great claims for this story other than to say that a university degree is not only a meal ticket; that it can be, if you wish it, something connecting you henceforth to ideas of freedom of expression and tolerance of difference.

And in this new dark time through which we are passing as shadows over flames, this seems a source of hope. This is a world that wishes you to recognise others not as people, but only as categories: fundamentalist, imperialist, Muslim, Western. It is a world that promotes hate, that coin of evil. It is a world in which the lies and betrayals of our national government, the sufferings of people who sew their lips together, the terrible anguish of the child in Woomera who with a knife carved into his forearm but one word, freedom, are not isolated tales at all, but fragments of a whole, and the name of the whole is Australia.

You can, if you want, prove a different Australia exists, that we are all indeed Australians living in a country still open to something larger than the self interest of the successful, that we are still open to the hopes and dreams of the lost and dispossessed.

For the guarantee of our liberties, of our freedom, of justice, will not be found in any court or parliament in this country but in the extent we all recognise dissent, discussion and debate not as a threat to our democracy, but as its fundamental precondition.

The degree or diploma you have today received is a very real achievement. But it is also an invitation to join in making our world a better, more open and more just place, an invitation to which, I hope, you will decide to say yes.

I wish to thank the University for this great honour, which has moved me, who cares little for gongs, more than I would have thought possible, perhaps because it has made me realise that I have not been as alone as I have sometimes had the vanity of thinking, that I am but one of many who think such things as I have talked about, and however ineffectively, devoted a life to, actually matter.

For that, and for listening to me here today, I thank you, and I wish you all well in your futures as wondrous, and as infinite, as the sunlight outside splintering into diamonds on the Derwent this beautiful December afternoon.

Thank you.