A few words

Here is the remembered and improved version of what I said at my graduation party yesterday afternoon.  Like all off-the-cuff speeches, there was a lot of inelegance and unfinished thoughts, so the themes are in the same order but the tying up at the end has been fixed into a more satisfactory knot.

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I think it's true to say that we can trace our journeys -- be they educational, personal or spiritual -- by evoking the memories and calling the names of people who have taken an interest in us along the way.  These are the people who say the right thing at the right moment, or who push one harder, pick you up and dust you off before sending you back into battle, and those who know when to stand back.  I would like to reflect for a few minutes on some of these relationships that I consider as key markers along the way, and what sort of qualities these represent.

As many of you here would know, I grew up in a small place in north-eastern Victoria called Violet Town.  One of the charms of this town is that, with one exception, all the streets are named for flowers.  Thus, I grew up in a house on the corner of Hyacinth Street and Tulip Street.  Among our near-neighbours was Mavis Errey, one of the matriarchs of the town who functioned as the organist for the local Uniting Church.  Mrs Errey's house was something of a salon, where higher cultural aspirations were carried out in the form of painting, embroidery, floral arrangement and music.  One of Mrs Errey's finest hours was the acquisition of a grand piano, a felicitous event which occurred while I was quite young.  I was fortunate that Mrs Errey's door was almost always open, and that she allowed me to explore the possibilities of her fine instrument -- even if this was composed mostly of disorganized thrashing in search of music-making.

Mrs Errey's special gift was one of encouragement, or perhaps to put it more accurately, of not being actively discouraging.  I think this embodies one of the first marks of a good mentor: to allow one to explore the potential of what lies around without the imposition of frivolous rules and limitations.  My early attempts at music-making may have been tiresome to endure, but without the encouragement which flowed from this, one can only speculate how things might have turned out.

Moving on a few years, the second relationship I would like to evoke here is another music teacher, Jean Starling.  My first meeting with Jean occurred when I was eleven years of age, and took my first piano exam with the AMEB in Shepparton.  I recall Jean as a very stern presence in the examination room, and came away wondering what she must be like as a teacher.  Roll on a few years more, and I discovered the answer to this question when I came to Jean as a student.  It's fair to say that I owe a great deal of what I am now able to do to her rather dramatic intervention in my technical development: at the first lesson she thrust a buff-covered book into my hands with the offhand remark that this was Dohnanyi and I would get used to him.  My mother once attended a lesson where we worked on Beethoven's c#-minor sonata (commonly known as the Moonlight).  Mum came away after two hours in Jean's company feeling horsewhipped -- and she had simply sat in the background.

Jean's particular way of pushing her students in the quality which defines this relationship, and I think this is an important one.  Mentors certainly give encouragement, but sometimes they have to dish up the challenges spiced with an exhortation to stretch one's self.  Pushing one to look higher, and work harder.  Picking one up out of the mud, dusting one off and sending you on your way.  That is a very important quality which Jean embodied powerfully in so many ways.

I think it would be churlish to exclude more recent mentoring relationships, of which I can number quite a few among the people in this room.  Rather risking excluding anyone present, I would like to reflect on my relationships with academic supervisors over the last seven years or so, as these are the relationships which have brought me to this stage.

I was fortunate to have a very strong supervisor in my masters project in Trish Shaw, who is now in the UK.  In so many ways, Trish's very active style of supervision consolidated the ways in which I have proceeded in my doctoral studies.

My doctoral supervisors -- Warren Bebbington and Kate Darian-Smith -- presented a slightly more liberal approach.  They were happy as long as I was writing.

Of course, doctoral supervisors can't do everything.  Here we have the company of three of the proof-readers who helped get the thesis to its final stages, and I think they deserve a round of applause in appreciation for putting up with a document that must have been quite a challenge on first encounter.

Among these relationships, there is a further quality which is probably the most important in a mentor.  This is the ability to hold faith with your capacity to pick yourself up and keep going.  A doctorate is a very long project, and many people do fall by the wayside.  Self-doubt is a very real part of the process precisely because what one does is an original project, a thought no-one else has explored in a particular way.  But only one person can do it.  Faith is part of the sustenance of a long project, and this comes from many sources.  Many of you here today have held faith with me, or at least watched with a combination of confidence and restrained bafflement, as things have unfolded over the last few years.

It's about ten days short of twelve months since I submitted the dissertation last year.  I'd like to conclude by answering the question that's been asked so many times over that time: what now?  Well, until recently the answer was simply: panic.  Now it's coming closer to breaking out in a cold sweat, although I intend to enjoy the rest of the afternoon with you before succumbing to threshold anxiety!  As many of you have remarked today, this is both an ending and a beginning.  I am closer to thinking about this as a staging point on the longer pilgrimage: the voyage across the sea has been accomplished, and now comes the trek to the first inn on the road.