3 September 2017, Perth, Western Australia, Australia
Wow, thank you. I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered on Aboriginal land and recognise the strength, resilience, and capacity of the Noongar people in this land. We pay our respects to them, and their cultures, and to elders both past and present.
Good afternoon, Vice-Chancellor Professor Deborah Terry, Acting Chancellor Ms. Sue Wilson, members of the University Council, distinguished guests, faculty members, graduates, and your friends and families, my mom, Glynnis, my sister, Tegan, and dads. Happy Father's Day.
It's an absolute joy to be here today to celebrate alongside you the end of one adventure and the beginning of another. It is also a great privilege to have been awarded the Honorary Doctorate of Letters by the Council of Curtin University of Technology as the university celebrates its 50th year of innovation.
So congratulations on making it this far, fellow humanists. As humanities graduates, you are the documenteers of the human experience. You are the observers, the scribes, the historians, the educators, the performers, the critics, the architects of culture, communication, and community. Without humanists, there is no humanity, and we are at a time where we need more than ever to question what it is to be a human being, what we are human doing, if you will. We need empathy, emotional intelligence, rigorous self-questioning, awareness of our own privileges, and powerlessness. But more than anything, as human beings and humans doing, we need our imaginations. You, sitting here today, have that in spades.
Now, when I talk about imagination, I'm not talking about fairy tales, or John Lennon lyrics, or glittery wall hangings with "Imagination" printed on them that have been ironically mass-produced in a sweatshop somewhere. I'm talking about our ability as humans to form new ideas and concepts that challenge our own senses and expectations. Imagination is a gift that tends to be scoffed at, at this day and age, dampened and diminished.
The word "imagination" is often mistaken for ambition which it's not, dreams which it's not, infantile which it's not, intangible which it's not. Imagination is an ever-unfurling, ever-developing, ever-challenging, ever-available human trait, and I'm here today to encourage you, as you leave your studies, to embrace your education, your experience, and your ambition, but to always remember the imagination that you have at your beck and call wherever you are, whoever you are, no matter what human you're being, no matter what kind of human you are doing.
I was taught from a very early age the importance of imagination. My country town of Geraldton was a glorious community of cultures. Noongar, Greek, Vietnamese, African, Indian all made up my English-Irish dad's original Sicilian soccer team. The stories, accents, and ideas that would fly around that team and their families were hilarious and heartbreaking. They challenged the way I saw my small town community and my place within it, and therefore my place within the world.
Later, as you've heard, I spent a large portion of my childhood battling cancer inherited from my dad's exposure to Agent Orange in the Vietnam War. In a stark Perth hospital ward in the early 1980s, there were no video games or Netflix, no Channel 7 Telethon hosted by Basil Zempilas to tell the outside world that we were there, no Make-A-Wish Foundations to whisk us away to Disneyland. All we had in that ward were each other, families surviving together.
A hospital ward, like a good soccer team or a good university, also knows no cultural boundaries. It is a microcosm of the world around us, and it too is a melting pot of cultures and faiths, hopes and ruminations, stories and storytellers. It was a ward of human beings doing all they could to get by, and the tales I heard in there from my hospital bed were courageous and compelling, and an incredible escape from my family's own predicament.
So whether I was at home in Geraldton or in my ward at Princess Margaret Hospital, I learned from these storytellers, and what I learned most was to listen. Listen to the histories, the fables, the truths, the lessons offered by the people around me. A Sicilian grandfather chewing on an olive could take me to his homeland with a wave of his hand. A Noongar elder could whisper in her ancient language and compel me to know more about this country, its people, my part in their history, and their part in mine. My own father would polish his work shoes, and I would see the conscripted Vietnam veteran in him.
But most of all, my childhood taught me that imagination is not a plaything, although it can be, of course. But it's not about fairytales and mythologies. Imagination can take you to wonderful places. Your imagination can relieve your pain. Your imagination can help you work out things about the world that you may not necessarily understand and change the things that you feel are wrong. Your imagination helps you find new ways in and if you need it, new ways out. It is a deep, extensive, playful, truthful thought process. When I returned to Perth in 1994 from Geraldton and started my studies at Curtin University, I learned that my imagination could also find me the best friends I've ever had and a career I could only dream of.
When I was a student at Curtin University majoring in Theatre and Scriptwriting, my fellow students and I had a theory that we'd never have to pay off our HECS debt because no one would ever employ us anyway. Yet, we said this as we worked up to 18 hours a day writing scripts, directing shows, performing in everything from pinter to pantomimes, building sets, ripping sets down, bumping in shows, bumping out shows, literally watching paint dry, sewing together costumes, rigging lighting, rewiring sound boards, and telling the great stories from the masterful chroniclers of human history, William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, Dorothy Hewett, whilst trying so hard at the same time to realise our own.
We worked so hard in that theatre on the hill. We'd climb on the roof and watch the sunset while sharing a barbecued chook and some coleslaw that we'd scraped our money together to buy from Karawara Coles. Sometimes we'd sleep up there on that roof when we weren't working a couple of part-time jobs to pay the rent. For the record, I sold scratchies and slick picks at the Bull Creek Shopping Centre Lotto Kiosk and also dressed head-to-toe as a bilby for the Fremantle Museum. That was when I wasn't writing, directing, and performing at Curtin's Hayman Theatre. But the point is we worked. We worked so hard on campus and off. We were human beings doing.
All of us have paid off our HECS debts, I think, just. I have never met a workforce like the ones I met at Curtin, but it was a workforce that was built on our collective imaginations. Our conversations often went like this. "So I'm going to stage an adaptation of Women of Troy. I have to use the first years as crew and equal amounts of second and third years to fill a cast of 20. I want it to be set in a futuristic underground cabaret lounge with an electro metal band I saw playing at the Rosemount a few weeks ago. We have to do it in the style of Bertolt Brecht to earn credit points. We'll rehearse it for four weeks, and it will run for two weeks in the small theatre at lunch times and on Sundays, and we have an $80 budget. Who can help me?"
"Well, I've got Barbara Dennis this afternoon for theatre history. I can see if she has access to any Greek translations." "My mom's got an awesome outdoor setting we can use. She's in Bali. She won't even know it's gone." "I can be a reader at auditions, if you like. I need the practise." "Oh, I play electro metal. I'll be happy to play for you. I just have to get Sunday off work." "I'm not sure about the idea. Maybe it shouldn't be Women of Troy. Maybe you should try writing something yourself. Remember that story you told us about your grandma from Saigon?" So on and so forth. The sun would set, the paint would dry. The sets would go up, the sets would come down. The audiences were tiny, sometimes just small. The plays got better, I promise, because our imaginations were allowed to expand, and shift, and develop as we challenged ourselves and one another.
Now, my job is no different. I am a proud professional imaginer. Every day, I get to sit down and let my mind run wild with the stories I want to tell, the things I want to say, the dialogue I want to have with an audience and therefore the world. I started imagining as a little girl, and I learned to hone it at Curtin. There is not a day that goes by that I don't use something that I learned at Curtin in my work.
Here, today, we have graduates from culture and creative arts, design, education, and built environment. You are the innovators of this country's future. Not of tomorrow anymore, but today, and I'm so, so thrilled for you all. You are going to create, and change, and conceive, and hatch all manner of enterprises. But while that's all happening, you're going to fail. You'll be afraid. You'll change your mind. You'll be broke. You'll be broken, You will be uninspired, and you will lose heart, but don't be scared. You're prepared. You have the toolkit right here, right now, inside and all around you. I promise, and it all starts with taking a really deep breath and saying to yourself those magic words, "Imagine if I... Imagine if we..."
As you leave today, please take the time to say thank you to the educators that encouraged you, the classmates that inspired you, the family and friends that supported you. This is important because your imagination can sweep you away, but so can life itself. So make sure you take the time to take the time. Just so you don't think I'm some strange Willy-Wonka-style woman standing up here extolling a world of pure imagination theme, as all you need to get through, I'm going to borrow from the great imaginative thinkers who might better pertain to you to back up what I've said.
For the architects, and builders, and shapers of our environment out there, I offer you this from Frank Lloyd Wright, "Architecture is the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man into possession of his own earth."
For the designers amongst you, from Mark Twain, "You cannot depend on your eyes if your imagination is out of focus."
For the educators among you, and I'm particularly in awe of you because my mom was a teacher for 45 years, and I saw firsthand the changes she made to lives, I'm going to quote from that other wonderful teacher, Elizabeth Jolley. You might have heard of her. "I want you to imagine how marvellously, malevolently mischievous you can be in order to tell me your story." For the performers out there, from anonymous, "If you get scared, just imagine your audience naked."
For the writers among you, from Shakespeare, my personal favourite, "The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven, and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination."
For all of us here, no matter who you are, "Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will get you everywhere." Albert Einstein. Congratulations all, chookers, as we say in the theatre. Go out there and be human beings doing. Never stop learning. Never stop listening. I wish you the best in life, but I imagine you'll have even more. Thank you.