From the Vice-Chancellor

The University of Melbourne’s biennial Festival of Ideas is a gift to the people of Melbourne.

The festival sees more than 12 000 members of the University community and the public attend free lectures, forums and panel discussions over six days.

By facilitating discussion about big issues or problems confronting our society, we aim to build a bridge between the exciting world of ideas that exists on a campus and the wider community.

For each festival, we choose an issue that is broad enough to be viewed through many different lenses and is compelling for a large audience, but is also challenging enough to demand the input of brilliant people from many specialisations within the humanities and the sciences.

At the inaugural event in 2009, the theme was Climate Change, Cultural Change. Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty and leading climate scientist Professor David Karoly, writer Kate Grenville, architects, lawyers, curators, climate activists and students all explored the theme through their research, experience and professional practice.

The theme for the 2011 Festival of Ideas is The Pursuit of Identity: Landscape, History and Genetics.

As the Festival Director Patrick McCaughey so aptly put it, “It’s a widely shared belief that the pursuit of identity has been a very profitable and productive motor in the boat of Australian life and culture.

“At crucial moments, even as we speak now, people ask the question, what does it mean to live, to work, to think, to create, to develop an education system, to develop a foreign policy in Australia which actually belongs to this place and grows out of the conditions in which we live and work and think and create? What are the factors which contribute to this?

“What we hope to show in these five days in June is the changing nature of Australian identity.”

Professor McCaughey and the festival team have assembled a powerful international guest list to deliver keynote speeches, including science author Matthew Ridley, historians Linda Colley and Sir David Cannadine, novelist Thomas Keneally, academic and former Foreign Affairs Minister Gareth Evans and art historian Timothy J. Clark. Leading Melbourne and Australian academics and intellectuals will engage with the themes of these keynotes.

And while the festival is necessarily centred on Melbourne, it is intended to be global in its interests. It’s in the nature of universities to be global in their orientation, as is seen in the University’s student and staff population and their constant engagement with their colleagues from around the world.

I very much hope you will join the talented speakers and a lively audience at the University’s 2011 Festival of Ideas.

 http://www.ideas.unimelb.edu.au/

Glyn Davis
Vice-Chancellor