Oz lit teaching in the spotlight

WHEN The Australian's Rosemary Neill wrote a story under the headline "Lost for words" in December 2006, saying the teaching of Australian literature was being seriously neglected, it triggered a dramatic reaction.

WHEN The Australian's Rosemary Neill wrote a story under the headline "Lost for words" in December 2006, saying the teaching of Australian literature was being seriously neglected, it triggered a dramatic reaction.

Although Australia Council for the Arts literature board chairman Imre Salusinszky (also a journalist at The Australian) hailed articles Neill wrote on the topic as "groundbreaking", academics in the field felt badly wounded.

Neill reported a decreasing commitment to Australian literature measured in professorships and the number of courses dedicated to the genre.

Now, the University of Tasmania's Philip Mead, with colleagues at the universities of Queensland and Adelaide, armed with a $100,000 Carrick Institute grant, will take his own set of measurements, auditing the teaching of Australian literature at secondary and tertiary level.

The team will also set up a database of what they find for the benefit of those teaching the subject.

"We used to teach Australian literature and think about it in terms of 'Australianness', and that we had to establish its credentials and had to do so in terms of nationalism and nationality," Dr Mead said.

Quite a lot of that establishing work had been done, he argued, with bibliographies written and some literary history.

So by the time the debate arose over the state and likely fate of Oz lit, he said, academics were already working out where it would go next and deciding the first thing to do was to establish its present position.

"Now it's time to think in different ways about what the writers are doing," he said.

"We need to find out what kinds of Australian literature teaching are going on now and in the recent past: where, what courses, what levels, whether they are stand alone or part of other subjects. Our challenge is to retrieve that information and get it into a useful form."

He will write a report on the findings for submission to the Carrick Institute by March next year, synthesising the findings. But he thinks it's already clear that better relationships are needed between the tertiary and secondary sectors, something the teachers and researchers of history have managed well.

"If we are not going to teach Australian literature, who is?" Dr Mead said.

"It's a vital aspect of our culture.

"One of the starting points is to look at it from an undergraduate's point of view: What message are we sending? At the moment it looks fragmented and noncommittal in places. I think we need to have a clear sense of the way in which we value it and are committed to it.

"One of the encouraging things is that there is a considerable interest in Australian literature among postgraduates. Some of the best and brightest are studying Australian literature.

"For all the fragmentation at undergraduate level, somehow it still produces students who have an interest at postgraduate level."