popular stories bring universities to life — we need more of them in Australia
- Written by Catharine Coleborne, Dean of Arts/Head of School Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle
A new campus novel suggests the story of the university in Australia might be almost in vogue, if only as a backdrop for big questions about navigating human failings and representations of truth, and the topical issue of sexual consent.
Diana Reid’s new campus novel, Love and Virtue, is set in Sydney. Reid is a graduate of the University of Sydney, and the novel’s action takes place in a residential college, where the central character Michaela has a sexual encounter with a male student after a drunken night during O-Week. She must also navigate the politics of class and friendship in the way her experience is later appropriated and represented.
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Cassandra Pybus’s book Gross Moral Turpitude (1993), though not a novel, featured a legal case around sexual misconduct at the University of Tasmania. In 1996, Helen Garner published The First Stone, her controversial interpretation of the sexual harassment case at the University of Melbourne’s Ormond College.
In a lighter vein, a film set at the University of Melbourne from the mid-1990s, Love and Other Catastrophes, featured the campus and starred Alice Garner (who later wrote a memoir The Student Chronicles). The Secret Life of Us also explored the lives of university graduates in Melbourne making their way in life.
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I turned to The Secret Life of Us for warm nostalgia. Instead, I found jarring memories
Yet the overwhelming lack of a collective memory of university education and the student experience in Australia now presents a serious problem in our social, cultural and political life.
Narratives about university found in both US and British contexts highlight questions of personal journeys into education and beyond, and rites of passage. They touch, too, on issues of inclusion and exclusion and campus culture.
In Australia, we have barely even imagined these spaces in public debate, much less celebrated or critiqued them. When it comes to thinking about the value, purpose and role of universities in public life, we are so far behind that we don’t even have a common language.
Talking about universities from the student, not staff, point of view, would be a good place to start as we reflect on generations of change in higher education.
Authors: Catharine Coleborne, Dean of Arts/Head of School Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle 
