Geography in Higher Education in Australia

Abstract

This article discusses the current state of the geography discipline in higher education institutions in Australia. Geography in Australia is vulnerable—and perhaps more so than in many of the other countries covered in this special issue. Reasons for this are discussed. Amidst description of a series of struggles, this article also seeks to highlight some of the complexities and contradictions of the Australian situation. The importance of teasing out discipline-specific issues from wider problems of the tertiary education system is emphasized—as is a reading of geography not as a coherent ‘whole’ but as a series of variously situated ‘scenes’ or ‘neighbourhoods’ encompassing teaching and research (Mee, 2006). These sites of geographical praxis and knowledge have their own cultures, lives, struggles and opportunities. Vulnerabilities are not uniformly present, and amidst scenes of decline are experiences of survival, growth and diversity. Specific initiatives are much needed to improve the visibility of geography in Australia, and there is a lot to learn from experiences of restructuring. But prescriptive ‘solutions’ to vulnerabilities are unlikely to fit the needs of all geography units. Instead, a rhizomatous agenda of disciplinary strengthening is suggested as a means to both buttress discipline visibility and accommodate the diversity of geography's many identities.

Keywords:

• Geography education
• history of geography
• Australia

Acknowledgements

Thanks are offered to the following for conversations, insights and comments (whether ongoing, or merely in passing) that have helped the author shape arguments for this paper: Kay Anderson, Arthur Conacher, Lauren Costello, Michelle Duffy, Rae Dufty, Kevin Dunn, Lesley Head, Richie Howitt, Rachel Hughes, Roy Jones, Fraser MacDonald, Gerald Nanson, Mel Neave, Bruno Parolin, Elaine Stratford and Wendy Shaw. Special thanks are due to Kathy Mee, John Connell, Bruce Ryan, Gordon Waitt, Jim Walmsley, Murray Wilson, Lily Kong and the journal's anonymous reviewers for their helpful and in some cases extensive feedback on earlier versions of this paper. Responsibility for the arguments presented here is the author's.

Notes

¹ See also Holmes (2002), Fincher (2004), Johnston (2006) and various contributions to a recent symposium in Geographical Research (2006, vol. 3).

² Even worse, ever-dwindling funding for universities has been made conditional on individual institutions making changes to industrial relations systems on campuses—called ‘The Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements’—that undermine tenure, force unions off campuses, demand voluntary rather than compulsory student unionism, increase the likelihood of unregulated use of contract labour and threaten intellectual freedoms (see NTEU, 2005).

³ Statistics on undergraduate and postgraduate enrolments in Australian geography were obtained from consultation with the Heads of Geography Programs Committee. For confidentiality reasons these were made available to the author only for the purposes of general discussion, and hence numbers for individual universities cannot be disclosed in detail here.

⁴ The vice-chancellor of UNSW was subsequently given, by academic board, the task of finding a more secure home for geography. His decision was that this would entail reuniting physical and human geography in the School of Biology, Earth and Environmental Science. Geography no longer retains an identity as a separate unit of the university, and this was read by many staff as a loss. Geography has ended up somewhat swamped in numerical terms within a very large school of biological sciences at UNSW, but that school is stable and geographers are not likely to be threatened within it. The overarching point of this example is that it is possible to resist the demolition of disciplines, and that, when put to the ultimate test of academic justification, it is possible to argue a cogent case for geography. With awareness, geography is respected; it can be successfully portrayed as unique and deserving of a stable and supportive environment at universities.