Dear friends and colleagues,
As the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute, I am delighted to present you with our second year report on the activities of the Institute.
The Australian Studies Institute was established to be a primary driver of the University’s ‘Australia and the World’ program for global engagement and at the same time reaffirm our commitment to the University’s foundational mission: to study the great challenges facing the globe from an Australian perspective.
Between June 2019 and January 2020 we continued to develop and implement our program in line with our strategic objectives. In the report to follow you will find ample evidence of our many successes.
Our flagship First Eight Prime Minister’s lecture series was delivered to a capacity crowd at Australia House, London. It marked the beginning of a new partnership between the Institute and the British–Australia Society for the remaining lectures in the project. The lecture – on Prime Minister Andrew Fisher - was repeated at Edinburgh University. Our visit was marked by the unveiling of a refurbished cairn to Fisher in his birthplace in Crosshouse, Scotland.
Other notable events were the 2nd Annual ‘Australia and the World’ Lecture delivered by the Federal Treasurer, The Hon Josh Frydenberg MP, and the Inspiring Women Reflect series hosted by the Hon Ros Kelly AO. It was a pleasure to facilitate and participate in two tri-lateral workshops with colleagues from Japan, China, Germany and the US. Particularly rewarding for me was that the ANU delegation to the second of the workshops, hosted by NYU in January, comprised staff and PhD students from four different ANU Colleges. We also hosted another in the series of Vice Chancellor’s ‘Australia and the World’ Visiting Fellows, and have cemented a new tradition with our monthly Visiting Fellows Dinners.
Of course, our programs for January – June 2020 were severely impacted first by bushfires, then hail, and COVID-19. We’ve had to cancel or postpone in-person events during this time and recalibrate our thinking about how to best deliver upon our mission and the investment and faith placed in us by our Vice Chancellor and the Executive. I believe our team has been able to successfully pivot during lockdown, adapting to working from home, publishing news stories, greatly extending and enhancing our social media presence, recording podcasts, and launching a virtual bookcase through our regular e-bulletins, which reach an ever increasing global audience. We’ve also finalised a new book series with ANU Press, with the first book to be published before the end of the year.
We’re proud of what we were able to do in a year of two very different halves to promote the study of Australia and the world, to help build a global community and nurture the next generation of Australian Studies scholars. But there’s more to do. Even in these dark times, we remain committed to promoting national and global conversations and scholarly excellence without compromise.
As always, the invitation to join us in those conversations is still open.
Professor Paul Pickering FRHS
Director, ANU Australian Studies Institute