Slow boat to culture

Abstract

A university should nurture faith in the critical and the creative. Along the grand boulevard of North Terrace in Adelaide, where I teach at the university, institutions abound: the art gallery, the museum, the state library, the hospital. Books are gleaned and swallowed quickly, as though time were in short supply; as though culture, which was once seen to be holding back anarchy, had been shipped to a side pocket as one more option for multi-tasking.