Looking to the future

Professor David Walker’s appointment as “Distinguished Visiting Chair in Australian Studies” at the University of Copenhagen doesn’t just re-affirm his standing as a leading cultural historian with a particular interest in Australia’s relations with Asia.

It confirms that his impressive career will continue despite the setback of macular degeneration that led to him being declared “legally blind”.

“When I suffered this trauma my first thought was that it was game over,” Professor Walker said.

“I didn’t imagine that being legally blind would be any kind of help to my academic life. And it wasn’t.

“It took me time to work out what I could still do and how to do it.

“The Copenhagen appointment is a very powerful affirmation at a personal level and it does remind me that I have got a future.

“One of the real difficulties when you have a disability is finding the will and the confidence to continue. A lot of people have helped me do that.

“I did mention in my application to the University of Copenhagen that I was legally blind and all they said was ‘tell us what you need and we will sort it out’.

“So it’s been a wonderfully re-assuring thing for me personally as well as professionally, and it’s also great recognition for Deakin University, something else I am very pleased about.”

Professor Walker will be in Denmark from February next year for five months during the spring semester.

He says that academic interest in things Australian began as far back as the 1960s when Professor Bruce Clunies-Ross, an expatriate living in Denmark, offered a course in Australian literature there.

“That was willingly accepted and interest, with Princess Mary’s help, has grown from there,” Professor Walker said.

He will teach a Master of Arts unit on Australia’s Asia covering the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The first half of the unit will draw upon his prize-winning and widely reviewed history, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850-1939, (UQP).

This book is a landmark work. The historian, Peter Cochrane, in reviewing Anxious Nation for Eureka Street noted that the book redefined the field and brought Asia into the mainstream of Australian history. It has since been translated into Chinese and published by Renmin University of China Press (2009).

An Indian edition published by SSS publications, New Delhi, will appear later this year.

The second half of the unit will address the growing interest in Asia from the Second World War to the present, picking up the calls for “Asia literacy” and “engagement”, subjects that are central to a research project which earned Professor Walker an Australian Research Council grant last year.

“From previous experience I know the students at the University of Copenhagen to be alert, well-read and challenging,” Professor Walker said.

“Teaching them will bring a fascinating and unusual perspective to the subject.”

Professor Walker will also be offering a master class in auto-ethnography. He has just completed a book to be published by Giramondo Press in July-August 2010 that draws together history and family memory.

“It is not a book I expected to write,” he says. “In fact, I did not think there was book in it. But the more I looked the more fascinated I became.

“War, race, eugenics, the tension between country and city, the travails and oddities of ordinary life; it was all there waiting for me to wake up to it.”

Two chapters have appeared in Heat magazine, a highly regarded journal with a reputation for publishing innovative writing.

The Copenhagen appointment continues a record of academic achievement that includes:
• Becoming a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and of the Academy of the Humanities
• Being appointed Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at Georgetown University, Washington, DC.

Professor David Walker can be assured of a very bright future.

Click here for a previous Research News story on Professor Walker that includes an interview with ABC Radio National’s Ramona Koval:
http://www.gsdm.com.au/newsletters/deakin/Dec08/notdarkyet.html

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