Life and Circuses

Photo: Gordon Smith, grave of Mary Ashton, Hanging Rock.

To quote Gordon's post:

I hadn't realised that the hamlet of Hanging Rock holds a link to a well known Australian Circus. Ashton's Circus still tours the country, but here at Hanging Rock, lies the grave of Mary Ashton, the young wife of circus founder James Ashton. She died in 1852, just days after giving birth to a daughter - the baby died a few months later. At that time Hanging Rock was a hive of activity due to its gold mining activities. It must have been a sizeable place as the circus performed over a period of 14 nights.

As a child I used to dream of running away to join a circus. It was one of those silly dreams, my hand-eye coordination is dreadful and I have no feel for heights. Still, it shows the the romance of the circus.

Circuses such as Wirth's and Ashton's toured on a regular basis, playing in big towns and small. This was a world of excitement and romance. Small kids would gather around as the tent went up, thinking how to persuade their parents to take them.

There is so much more entertainment today, but the romance lingers.

University of New England's new academic structure

As part of its strategic planning process, UNE outlined a vision to achieve regional and global impact. This was followed by an academic restructuring and now UNE has advertised for no less than ten professorial heads of schools.

I will comment on the new structure in a moment. But first, a plea to the University. Please don't do what Sydney University did.

A year or so ago when Sydney moved to a new structure, the effect was to reduce student choice because it became harder for students to mix and match courses to do what they really wanted to do. Students were locked in to much more narrowly defined paths.

Sydney can get away with this. UNE cannot. Students have always had a centrality at UNE that has not existed in many other places. Academic structures exist to enhance student experience and choice, not to limit it.

So what does the new structure look like? To begin with, we now have two faculties, Arts and Science and the Faculty of the Professions.

The Faculty of the Professions is a fascinating concept. In writings on one of my professional blogs discussing the idea of a discipline of practice, I argued in part that the professions could learn from each other. The UNE structure might in fact facilitate this.

The new faculty has five schools: Education; Business, Economics and Public Policy; Law, Health; and Rural Medicine.

Education covers early childhood, primary, secondary and adult education. These are all areas where UNE has a long tradition and great strength. The inclusion of education as one of the professions is a great move.

The next school, business, economics and public policy, covers business, economics and administrative leadership. This one strikes me as a lot messier simply because I do not know at this point how things fit in. This is also an area where students need access to subjects in the other faculty, Arts and Sciences. A case in point.

Eldest was doing business studies at UTS. At the end of first year that the course was too narrow, so she decided to look elsewhere focused on Arts/Economics combinations.

She went first to Sydney because she was attracted by the extra curricular aspect of the place including SUDS, the drama society. She quickly backed off because the rigid academic structures precluded her doing the subject combinations she wanted. So now she is enrolled at UNSW in Arts/Economics.

The third school in the Faculty of the Professions is law, covering law and agricultural law. This one is pretty clear cut.

Then we have two health school, health itself (nursing, counselling, health management) and rural medicine, a course offered in conjunction with the University of Newcastle. Always good to see New England's universities cooperating. This is a potentially powerful combination of areas with significant international outreach potential.

The new Faculty of Arts and Sciences is somewhat messier. Again, the capacity for students to study across schools will be important in attracting them.

The school of arts includes english, communication studies, theatre, languages and music. Then we have behavioural, cognitive and social studies - geography, planning, linguistics, psychology and sociology. And humanities - archaeology and paleoanthropology, classics and ancient history, history, philosophy, politics and international studies, indigenous studies, peace studies.

To my mind, the interlinks between these schools will be critical to the effectiveness of the new system in practice. Students have to be allowed to mix and match across schools.

Then we have two science schools.

The first is environment and rural science - agronomy and soil science, animal science, genetics, earth science, environmental engineering, botany, ecosystems management, marine science, zoology. Not a bad combination that combines UNE's traditional interests with the new.

The second is science and technology - human biology, molecular and cellular biology, chemistry, physics and electronics, maths, stats and compute science.

This one strikes me as being rather more mixed. But I am not a scientist.

In all, I will be interested to see how it works out over time.

New England Australia - Preliminary thoughts on history of Theatre in New England

I have so far written two stories on this blog about playwrights with New England connections.

The first story followed the death of Alex Buzo and looked at his life from a personal perspective. The second story looked in part at the life of Bob Herbert.

In that story I said:

"Bob's story reminds me that there is still no history, or at least one that I am aware of, of theatre in New England. This is another significant gap in New England historiography, one that I will write about in another post to try to explain why I think it is important."

A little later I followed that post up with a story on Personal Reflections, my personal blog, celebrating the 75th birthday of Brian Barnes. Together with Harold Bennett, Brian founded the New England Theatre Centre, the first attempt that I am aware of to establish a fully professional theatre company in regional Australia.

Those who have read the story on Brian Barnes will see that I have now managed to upload one photograph, the cover of his 1968 performance of Under Milkwood in Bermuda. I had seen Brian do this earlier in Armidale.

The limited material I have seen on the history of theatre in Australia, I say limited because this is an area that I have yet to look at in any detail, has a Sydney/Melbourne focus. This is understandable simply because the relatively large population of those centres made them more attractive to performance and performers. However, it is not the end of the story.

We know that there was a thirst for entertainment, we also know that:

• circuses toured New England regularly from at least the early 1870's
• there were local theatricals (Harry Clay, for example, apparently began his theatre career with performances in the Singleton area) from fairly early times, but we do not know when or where they began, how they spread
• individual companies of players such as Clay's toured regional NSW
• there is a postive but still ill-defined relationship between the spread of schools and schooling and then later of tertiary institutions and the development of theatre in New England
• there are also almost certainly yet to be defined linkages between broader social and economic trends and changes in theatre in New England.

Just as we have found with New England writers, I suspect that there is a fascinating story here waiting to be told.