Last night Raewyn Connell gave the first lecture of the Southern Perspectives series at the Institute of Postcolonial Studies. ‘Thinking South: Re-Locating Australian Intellectual Culture’ covered many points about the relation between Australia and the metropolitan centres of the North:

• Paulin Hountondji’s concept of extraversion and the construction of local disciplines as ‘data mines’ for the North
• The establishment of humanities in Australia was a bastion of classical languages
• The new ‘audit culture’ in academics that focuses on the top ranking journals of the North
• The career of Australian pre-historian Gordon Childe
• The condition of Australians who go North to conquer the metropole, such as the pre-historian Gordon Childe and Germaine Greer
• Those who travel in the opposite direction such as those studying Indigenous knowledges
• Those who work in between the centre and periphery such as Patrick White
• The emotional attachment to the northern metropole, such as that ‘smoky pub in Oxford’
• By contrast to Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, a pond of small boats

It was a full house for her talk, and there were many questions:

• Impediments for people living in countries like East Timor to access academic journals
• The role of Australia as a hegemonic power in the Pacific
• The difficulty of confronting emotional attachments to intellectual authorities

Here she gives a quick summary of her talk, and reflects on the discussion afterwards.