Announcements

Pasifika Australia is an ongoing initiative of the Australian National University, designed to celebrate, engage with, and foster a deeper understanding of Pacific Islander communities in Australia.

Pasifika Australia is organised by ANU students and staff.

The program is supported by an ANU Equity Grant, the ANU Learning Communities project, Bruce Hall, the Pacific Studies Program in the Faculty of Asian Studies, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, and the ANU Students' Association.

More information at the new Pasifika Australia website.

Professor Robin Jeffrey, Dean of the ANU College of Asia & the Pacific writes:

George Quinn, a doyen of Australia's teachers of Indonesian language, received the Vice-Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching at the CAP graduation ceremony last week.

It's a delight to be able to congratulate George for his immense contribution to the ANU's reputation for imaginative, dedicated teaching and to Australia's capacity to work with our nearest neighbour.

After many months of deliberating proposals from across the world, the Korean Film Council (KOFIC) has decided to award their annual overseas research grant (± US$ 15,000) to Dr Maliangkay, [right] Senior Lecturer in Korean Studies, in support of his Watching Images in the Dark: Cinematic Experience in Korea during the silent Era project.

The project aims to take a holistic view of the first years of Korean cinema history, carefully describing what it was like for Koreans (and a handful of foreigners) to go to the cinema during the early days of the twentieth century.

Questions he will focus on include, "what was performed on stage during the intermission or the changing of reels", and "how did the separate seating arrangement of genders affect the experience" and "how did people acquire tickets" etc.

For more information on the Council's activities, see: http://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/index.jsp

A seminar given by: Dr Roald Maliangkay

When: 1 May, 1-2 p.m.

Where: 1.07 Baldessin Precinct Building

For Koreans, the colonial period and the ensuing Korean War were enormous tragedies that caused the disruption of many family-lines, as well as that of Korean traditions, and the oppression of political aspirations. I assume mostly out of respect for the generations who suffered during this time, Korean academics have been reluctant to explore the many untraditional cultural activities between the early 1940s and late 1950s. And yet, from the end of the colonial period, modern pop culture became a major source of inspiration that apart from introducing new performing styles connoted a new way of life that virtually threw out the stylistic concepts of old. It opened an entirely new and exciting world to Koreans eager to connect directly and actively with the fads and ideals of the West. The lack of secondary sources on Korean entertainment during the period poses several problems, however, self- Orientalism being one of them. Considering some of the most successful Korean artists during this time practised a form of self-Orientalism, I wonder how I can do justice to their important entrepreneurship without becoming their academic representative: how does one approach a topic that constitutes new territory and involves many female starlets whose work is exotic in terms of their performing styles and song repertories, without becoming its main spokesman? Or do my concerns in this matter in fact reflect a disguised self-Occidentalism? In my talk I will seek help from the audience in trying to tackle these questions in order to pursue my enquiry in this field as fairly as possible.

Former La Trobe University lecturer Peter Friedlander has taken up a post with the National University of Singapore, leaving just the Australian National University and the University of Sydney as significant presences in the field. La Trobe, through Open Universities Australia, is the only provider of Hindi as a distance subject.

Commenting on the loss, Dr McComas Taylor, [pictured, left] Head of the South Asia Centre in the Faculty of Asian Studies, said:

... Dr Friedlander's departure left the study of Hindi in the nation in trouble.

"We labour under the misapprehension that to do business with India you don't have to speak their language, that all Indians speak English, but 98 per cent of the population does not speak English.

[Full report in the Australian Higher Education Supplement]

With 998 other prominent Australians, Professor Kent Anderson, Director of the Faculty of Asian Studies in the ANU College of Asia & the Pacific, and Dr George Quinn, Head of the Faculty's Southeast Asia Centre, have been invited to join the Australia 2020 Summit. The Summit, (in the words of the Prime Minister, Mr Kevin Rudd, himself a Faculty graduate) is:

...an important initiative to harness the best ideas for building a modern Australia that is ready for the challenges of the 21 st century.

With the complex challenges that Australia is facing, we need to get the best ideas we can from all Australians – business people, experts, community leaders – and just ordinary Australians.

I know from travelling around the nation that many of the most creative solutions to our big future challenges are in the minds of Australians whose voices normally aren’t heard in our national Parliament.

The Summit will help us shape a long term strategy for the nation’s future – covering the economy, the nation’s infrastructure, our environment, our farmers, health care, indigenous Australians, the arts, national security, how we improve our system of government, and how we strengthen our communities and ensure nobody is left out of Australia’s future..

[Further information at: http://www.australia2020.gov.au/index.cfm]

Advanced ACT college students will be able to study Japanese and biology at the Australian National University Secondary College under an expanded curriculum to be taught this year.

The college, launched in May 2006, is a partnership between the ACT Government and the ANU. It allows Canberra's most academically able Year 11 and 12 students to take courses that can count towards their future university qualifications..

Professor Kent Anderson, [pictured with the ACT Minister for Education, Andrew Barr] Director of the Faculty of Asian Studies, said studying Japanese at such an advanced level was a brilliant opportunity for ACT students.

[Full story in the Canberra Times 26 February 2008]

Dr Shunichi Ishihara [right], of the Faculty's Japan Centre, has been awarded a research grant from the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics for a project called Towards Greater Realism in Testing Forensic Speaker Recognition.

This is an interdisciplinary and collaborative project with Dr Phil Rose, ANU and Dr Yuko Kinoshita, University of Canberra.

This project is an extension of the forensic speaker recognition project that Dr Ishihara and his collaborators have been working on since the beginning of 2007.

The paper reporting the results up until now (title: Beyond the Long-term Mean: Exploring the Potential of F0 Distribution Parameters in Traditional Forensic Speaker Recognition) was presented at a prestigious conference of speaker recognition Odyssey 2008, in South Africa, January 2008.

The October 2007 edition of the newsletter Bhinneka has appeared with news and short features from the Southeast Asia Centre and the South Asia Centre in the Faculty of Asian Studies, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. Among its reports:

• Anne O'Keefe reports on her work placement experience with the Percik Institute in Salatiga, Indonesia
• A reinvigorated South Asia Centre gets launched
• Thai democracy and the situation in southern Thailand spotlighted at this year's Thai Update: Sarah Bishop sums up
• Tim Hassall explores the verbal tools for asking what you want in Indonesian
• As India booms, south Asian language skills will be needed, says McComas Taylor
• Kim Williamson reports on the three different in-country courses she took in Thailand

And more...


Bhinneka 7 is available, as a pdf file, at:

http://www.anu.edu.au/asianstudies/bhinneka/bhinneka7-1007.pdf

A new South Asia Centre has been established in the College of Asia and the Pacific, based in the Faculty of Asian Studies. The centre sits alongside the Faculty’s China and Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asian Centres and the Centre for Asian Societies and Histories. Its work will complement the economics and development research carried out at a high level by the Australia South Asia Research Centre (ASARC), based in RSPAS..

The South Asia Centre is a concrete expression of the ANU's growing interest in South Asia, and of the growing national and international recognition of the significance of South Asian nations. Now emerging as a geo-political powerhouse, for three millennia South Asia has been one of the world’s great intellectual powerhouses as home of three world religions and a vast range of cultures, languages, literatures, art, architecture, dance and philosophy.

The new Centre will serve as a focal point for teaching and learning at undergraduate level, and research at postgraduate level. Undergraduate teaching will include languages (Hindi, Urdu and Sanskrit) and area-related subjects in the fields of history, politics, religion and security studies. Our research topics include Hindi and Urdu devotional poetics, masculinity and Buddhism, gender and security, and Hinduism.

The Centre is already delivering language classes remotely to University of Sydney and is proposing to run intensive community courses in Hindi in Melbourne. The new South Asia Centre is an exciting initiative that will enable the ANU to meet more successfully the challenges and opportunities presented by the emergence of South Asia.

Head of Centre [pictured, above, at the Launch]: Dr McComas Taylor

Centre members: Dr Richard Barz, Dr John Powers, Mr Yogendra Yadav

Centre affiliate: Dr Bina D’Costa



Some thoughts to mark the launch of South Asia Centre on 20 August 2007

Uranium sales to India; social meltdown in Pakistan; the army patrolling the streets in Bangladesh: South Asia was very much in the news last week. We will be seeing much more of South Asia on the front page from now on.

With India as a world power and global economic giant, we are moving into uncharted waters, right? Wrong, according to popular historian William Dalrymple. Since at least the time of the Romans until the dawning of the Age of Imperialism, India, along with China, was the richest and most powerful country on earth. In the year 1600, Dalrymple estimates that India produced 22% of global wealth. The great north Indian city of Lahore outshone Constantinople, and with a population of two million was bigger than London and Paris. Wealth flowed from West to East as Europe imported luxuries including spices, minerals and textiles. It was only with arrival of European swords and muskets that the direction of the flow was reversed. Imperialism built the great edifices of Britain, but impoverished South Asia.

At current rates of growth China is set to overtake the US in 2030, with India is not far behind. If such breakneck development does not lead to total social and environmental collapse first, then as Dalrymple points out, a world economy dominated by the Asian giants is not something new, rather, it is a return to the historical norm.

How is Australia to position itself to take advantage of the opportunities that an emergent South Asia presents? What can we do we need to do as a nation to understand and participate in India’s transition to great power status?
Increased trade is the most obvious way in which Australia can benefit from India’s return to its position of global dominance. India already buys most of our gold, and anyone with a telephone knows where the world’s telemarketers are calling from. What other avenues of trade are open to us? India’s insatiable demand for energy has naturally attracted the interest of the Howard government and Australia’s uranium miners. But we are also world leaders in alternative green energy solutions including photovoltaic (solar), wind and geothermal technologies. India needs energy, but more than that, it needs clean, green and sustainable energy, and we are in a position to supply it. Australia’s third richest man, Zhengrong Shi, has already made $2billion selling photovoltaic technology in China. Surely someone can do the same in India. And no one can make a bomb out of a solar panel.

A second area of great potential growth is in the tertiary sector. Our universities already host 30000 Indian students, but the great majority of these are at postgraduate level. Australian universities should be lobbying hard for fee-paying Indian undergraduate students. Their excellent levels of English and their familiarity with a British-derived educational system would enable them to slip easily into our tertiary system. Australian universities have a distinct cost advantage over our competitors in the UK and USA. We should be aiming to attract 100000 Indian undergraduates to Australian universities within a decade.

How else can Australia contribute and benefit from India’s growth? Everyone likes to complain about Australian bureaucracy, but in general our public administration and service delivery is streets ahead of its Indian counterpart. I have seen grown men quiver at the thought of trying to mail a parcel from an India post-office. Public administration, streamlining and automation of govenermental processes are areas in which Australia has excelled. I would like to see Australia actively supporting, contributing to, and indeed benefiting from reform in these areas in India.

India often boasts of its independent judiciary and fine tradition of rule of law. But delays in the Indian legal system are the stuff of legend, and justice delayed is justice denied. It can take decades for cases to be resolved, and litigants often die before their day in court. There are something like 30 million cases pending in India. At current rates it is estimated that it will take 300 years to clear the backlog. We have a relatively brisk and efficient legal system. Australia should be able to export our advanced legal technologies and management systems to support much needed reforms to India’s grinding courts.

All of these initiatives demand sensitive and well-informed policy, and a cadre of specialists with South Asian expertise in the areas of language, politics, religion and culture. We need this to successfully negotiate and facilitate the emergence of South Asia, and to be able to operate sensitively in a South Asian milieu. Firstly, we need people with South Asian language skills. There is a false impression that everyone in India speaks English. In fact the figure is closer to 1-2%, plus every tourist tout. There are 400 million native speakers of Hindi – almost as many as native English speakers. Another 150 million speak Urdu and there are similar number of Bengali speakers. Hindi is a beautiful, expressive poetic language (and is particularly well adapted for seduction, I am told). I would like to see Hindi enrolments increase ten-fold in the next decade. Impossible? Chinese has grown from being a ‘small-enrolment language’ to have very substantial enrolments over a similar period. Why not the South Asian languages?

To build our relationship with South Asia, we need expertise. To build our expertise we need more support for South Asian studies at tertiary level. The ANU’s decision to establish a new South Asia Centre in the College of Asia and the Pacific is a welcome step in the right direction. The new centre provides a new dedicated focus for undergraduate and postgraduate teaching in this area.

To attract students to South Asian studies we also need to develop South Asia in secondary schools. Some excellent work is already being done in this direction. But I still have the feeling that secondary teachers think that Asia equals China, Japan plus Indonesia. South Asia is still a distant blip on the radar screen for many. There also remains the challenge of positioning South Asia in a ‘post area-studies’ curriculum.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Australia invested wisely in developing China expertise, with the result that we have been well positioned to benefit from the growth of China in the decades that followed. For Australia to successfully negotiate the re-emergence of India as a great power, we need to think creatively and critically, and we need to develop capacity in this area. Now is the time for the Australian government to invest in developing South Asian expertise. This investment will pay very good dividends in the long run.

- McComas Taylor

On Friday 1 September and Saturday 2 September the Japan Centre, Faculty of Asian Studies, College of Asia and the Pacific, ANU and the Embassy of Japan jointly held the 30th Annual Japanese Evening, featuring a performance of Kabuki.

Program

• Rakugo by Narrabundah College students (10 minutes)
  
• Kendo introduction and demonstration by ANU Kendo Club (10 minutes) -- to be confirmed
  
• Kabuki by Za Kabuki students (90 minutes with an
  intermission): "Kanadehon Chuushingura - Shichidan-me 'Gion-machi
  Ichiriki no ba'" ("Chushingura: The Treasury of Loyal Retainers" - Act
  VII 'At Ichiriki Tea House in the Gion district')
  

The evening was supported by the ANU Student Association and the Australia-Japan Society (ACT), Inc.

Jennifer Kate Robinson, Bachelor of Asian Studies (Specialist - Indonesian) / Bachelor of Laws (First Class Honours), has been awarded a 2006 Rhodes Scholarship in the category 'Australia-At-Large Rhodes Scholars'. Jennifer's success follows the success in the same category of Nicholas Farrelly in 2005. Jennifer's award entitles her to two years of scholarship funded study at Oxford with a third year possible on application.

Gordon R. Hill, AM
Faculty Executive Officer

Upcoming professionals with developing expertise in Asia and the Pacific will meet at the Australian National University in Canberra on 29 January – 2 February, 2006. To be held at the ANU campus in Canberra, the Asia Pacific Week summer school will feature a program of collaborative events, intensive courses and workshops that will bring together more than 300 scholars from Australia, the region, Europe and North America.

An expected 200 honours students and postgraduate researchers will joint prominent academics to undertake a week-long program designed to make available the considerable national research and teaching resources in Canberra. The combined holdings of the National Library of Australia and the ANU represent one of the world's major resources for the study of Asia and the Pacific and over 70 per cent of Australia's Asia-Pacific resource material. The depth of academic support in Asia Pacific Studies in the capital is unequalled in Australia.

Participants in Asia-Pacific Week will gain practical advice on enhancing research skills from senior scholars in the fields of Asian and Pacific Studies. Scholarships have been provided for Australia-based honours and postgraduate students.

Co-ordinated by the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, a rich program of activities and events has been organised for the week including keynote speeches, seminars and workshops, library sessions, film screenings, book launches, cultural performances and social events in the following 10 programs: China, East Timor, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Pacific Islands, South Asia, Cambodia/Laos/Myanmar/Thailand, Vietnam, and Asia Pacific Heritage.

The ANU College of Asia and the Pacific is managing Asia-Pacific Week 2006 with financial support from the International Centre of Excellence in Asia-Pacific Studies (ICEAPS), the National Institute for Asia and the Pacific (NIAP), the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS); the Australian Research Council (ARC) Asia Pacific Futures Research Network and the Korea Foundation.

Further information at: http://rspas.anu.edu.au/asiapacificweek/