Let’s not forget the arts

THE idea put forward by Jeff Malpas to establish an arts and science museum in Hobart raises a pertinent point about any proposal to lift the profile of the University of Tasmania by bringing it into the city.

Understandably, there has been strong support to establish an inner city focus for the university’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs.

This bid to incorporate university life into the future of the city centre is a good move.

Many economic and political commentators have explained the critical importance that STEM subjects could play in Tasmania’s economic development and community welfare.

However, from the moment the plan to bring UTAS STEM subjects into the central business district was raised, I could not help but hear those persistent old academic divisions of the arts and humanities versus maths and the sciences.

This old conflict divides the “soft, creative subjectivity” of the arts and humanities from the “hard, pragmatic reality” of science and maths.

It is presented as a yin and yang, male and female, Mars and Venus dichotomy where the “hard” in us and our communities is more highly valued.

This approach is often adopted by economists, bureaucrats and politicians — despite the fact these three intellectual pursuits are largely grounded in the arts and humanities — simply because it is usually quicker and easier to monetise research done in the STEM hemisphere.

Subsequently, we end up with policies that underfund the arts and humanities while setting up lucrative sweeteners for STEM. But the empirical evidence suggests the arts and humanities can be just as valuable to the economy and our communities.

Art collector David Walsh’s internationally acclaimed Mona has drawn visitors from all quarters of the globe and underpinned an economic turnaround for Tasmania, particularly in the South.

Mona’s creativity has infiltrated local communities where worn-out approaches to all sorts of challenges have been abandoned in favour of fresh thinking.

Dark Mofo and Mona Foma have drawn hundreds of thousands. Author Richard Flanagan has attracted the gaze of the world to our island with his Booker Prize. There is a small boom in the local film industry with TV series Rosehaven made here along with The Kettering Incident and the Matthew Evans TV series Gourmet Farmer.

It is all too easy to dismiss the benefits of the arts and humanities. I find it difficult to identify any skill that I learnt while doing a Graduate Diploma of Librarianship many years ago at the University of Tasmania that I have used directly in my work life — cataloguing and like is not much help as a journalist.

However, librarianship changed my life.

Before I did the course, I often felt inferior because of my lack of general knowledge. Others seemed to know so much more than me. I was in awe of people who knew stuff.

Librarianship taught me that knowing stuff was not the important part, but rather the ability to find stuff out.

Librarianship taught me I could find out anything because libraries hold pretty well the entirety of human thought going back hundreds, even thousands, of years.

The trick was learning to find what you want among that vast database.

Having learnt this simple truth, I lost fear of my own ignorance and was almost able to shed the embarrassment of being exposed as ignorant.

Fear and embarrassment had in the past prompted in me a self-defeating stupor of “I’m stupid” doubt and lack of confidence.

Librarianship took the sting out of my ignorance and enabled me to charge on and find stuff out — the key to the craft of reporting and journalism in general.

That’s the way the arts and humanities work.

The revelations can be unexpected, serpentine and powerful.

Sadly, the University of Tasmania school of librarianship is gone. Like so many other arts and humanities subjects at universities around the country, it was starved of funding and eventually closed.

I suggest that instead of exclusively moving university STEM studies into the city that we focus on subjects that have human interaction at their core.

That will include maths and many aspects of science, but perhaps exclude subjects that need physical space, such as some engineering and technological pursuits, which would be better located at Sandy Bay or elsewhere.

Professor Malpas’s University Museum of Arts and Sciences fits this approach snugly.

Bringing people into Hobart — academics, tourists, visitors and locals — could revitalise the CBD and drive economic development with an explosion of cafes, bars, hotels, accommodation, restaurants, libraries, shops, museums, art galleries, lecture theatres, stages, performance spaces and the like.

The kernel of this idea is evident at Mona, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and the Wooden Boat Festival. Will we be wise enough to grasp it?

Librarianship taught me I could find out anything because libraries hold pretty well the entirety of human thought going back hundreds, even thousands, of years