Dear alumni and friends

Welcome back to another edition of Accord. As you know, the Faculty prides itself on a tradition of research and teaching excellence. I am always gratified when the work of my colleagues is recognised in significant ways and I am delighted to pass on the news that once again, the Faculty has been ranked among the very best of its kind in recent world university rankings.

The highly respected Times Higher Education university rankings for 2012 place us among the top 21 Faculties in the world for Arts and Humanities, and among the top 40 for Social Sciences. This is a remarkable achievement and demonstrates the extraordinary high regard in which our Faculty is held amongst our peers and industry leaders around the world. We were also ranked in the top 25 faculties of our kind in the recent QS World University Rankings.

Although we also need to treat these rankings with care, the fact that we are consistently ranked so highly is a huge tribute to the work we have been doing.

We also continue to attract extraordinary students to our Faculty. Your generosity in funding a series of new scholarships through our newly established ‘Dean’s Scholarship Fund’ is already making an enormous difference. We want to introduce you to more of these students over the coming weeks, so please look out for new profiles that will be appearing on our website soon.

As always, I am delighted to hear from you about any aspect of the work of the Faculty. Please do get in touch.

Best wishes

Professor Duncan Ivison 
Dean | Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Congratulations to the 32 students, alumni and other members of the University of Sydney community who competed in the 2012 London Olympics and Paralympics. Eight of our talented athletes won Olympic medals and four won a combined haul of seven Paralympics medals.

The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences takes great pride in the alumna and four students who participated in the Games. Olivia Price and Jess Fox both brought home silver medals in sailing, Matthew Mitcham and Loudy Wiggins competed in diving and Jennifer Blow competed in Paralympics goalball.

Read the full progress report here.

By Michael Visontay

"Reputation is not just important. It is central to success in business." That was the key message from Cameron Clyne, the head of National Australia Bank in a speech to alumni at the Sydney Connections breakfast at the Four Seasons Hotel on September 6.

Clyne, who graduated with an arts degree from Sydney in 1989, took over as the CEO of NAB in 2008, leading a workforce of 44,000 staff and an institution at the time ranked fourth in customer satisfaction (out of the big four banks) and saddled with overseas investments that had turned problematic. Four years later, he told a packed room of alumni, NAB was ranked number one in that metric and had divested itself of those international problems.

In an address titled 'Leadership in challenging times', Clyne said reputation is "based on leadership strategy and building a culture around that," and that strategy is based on three factors- making leadership visible, making it authentic and making it stand for something.

Elaborating on the three factors underpinning success, Clyne said visible leadership meant making sure that staff knew who you were, had access to you and could see them in the office. That visibility extended to the physical office. "We have a philosophy of no offices or assigned desks," he said. "We want everyone to be accessible, from the bottom right up to the top." Find out more

By Emily Jones

From humble beginnings as a low budget Sydney University Drama Society play, MARLA has burst from the Cellar Theatre to the world stage at the Venice International Film Festival.

Written and directed by Media and Communications alumnus Nick King, and co-produced with his former classmate Sophie Wiesner, the short film premiered in the Orizzonti category of the 69th Venice Film Festival this September.

Touted by production team Storehouse Films as 'the strangest love story you've seen', MARLA delves into a confronting narrative direction quite suddenly – as Wiesner acknowledges, "things get a bit weird" in the film. As a genre-defying, twisted take on the classic boy-meets-girl love story, King describes his script as "a romantic drama with elements of medical horror mixed in".

King and Wiesner, who were both part of the first cohort of students to graduate with a Bachelor of Arts (Media and Communications) degree, shared the life-changing experience of attending the premiere of MARLA at the world's oldest film festival. 

Even after their profound success, the remarkable pair show no signs of slowing down. King is currently in Los Angeles working to adapt MARLA into a feature-length film entitled DONORS. Wiesner, who will stay on as the feature film's producer, maintains that though the script and treatment for the film are underway, it's still "very early days" for their newest project. Find out more or view the MARLA trailer here.

After nearly four decades on the shelf, the collection of pioneering University of Sydney archaeology student Maureen Byrne has finally been analysed, opening an extraordinary window into the daily lives of Australia's most hardened convicts.

Byrne unearthed the rare artefacts from Australia's first prisoners' barracks at Port Arthur 35 years ago, but her untimely death at the age of 24 from a severe asthma attack left her findings unexamined in storage.

Now, following a new collaboration between the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority (PAHSMA) and the Department of Archaeology, eight current University of Sydney students recently analysed Byrne's collection at the Port Arthur Historic site.

Through meticulously re-bagging and cataloguing Byrne's artefacts, an unprecedented insight into the lives of Australia's convict forebears emerged, with surprisingly incongruous items like lace-making bobbins and dolly's tea sets appearing in the collection.

Researchers were able to conclude that the infamous Port Arthur site may have been the unlikely home of some of the region's first military families. Read more or view a Facebook photo album here.

Image credit: PASHMA

Torture, like so many of the more gruesome of human rights violations, is imbued with the dark mystery of horror and violence without retribution.

For many, torture is understood as something that happens behind the closed doors of such notorious prisons as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, something almost too awful to contemplate and a problem so deeply entrenched in conflict that it seems unsolvable.

Last year, Associate Professor Celermajer was awarded a €1.5 million grant by the European Commission to conduct a three-year project researching the practice of torture within the police and military in Sri Lanka and Nepal. Working with two research teams and with Research Manager Dr Kiran Grewal from the Department of Sociology and Social Policy, this project is set to create a new interregional and interdisciplinary space for rethinking one of the world’s most significant human rights problems.

Associate Professor Celermajer told The Sun Herald earlier this year, "Human rights advocates usually ask us to imagine the worlds of the victims, but in this case it’s the other way around – we’re attempting to understand … the perpetrators."

While the horror and violence of torture may never abate entirely, this project is paving the way for the social sciences to take the lead in understanding the problem and finding an effective solution. Find out more.

By Amelia Kelly

The histories of modern art in South-East Asia will be supported by a new partnership with the Getty Foundation in an exciting new initiative.

Over the past six months Professor Mark Ledbury, Professor John Clark and Dr Thomas Berghuis from the Department of Art History and Film Studies, Professor Adrian Vickers from the Asian Studies Program, together with partners in the South-East Asian region, have been working to create an exciting project which will examine the histories of modern and contemporary art in South-East Asia.

The Getty Foundation has announced that it will fund the planning of this major collaboration under its Collecting Art Histories initiative. Provided that this process progresses well, the Department will then be able to apply for substantial recurring support for new partnerships, including doctoral and post-doctoral opportunities, publishing projects and other constructive institutional tie-ups.

This will lead to new understanding of the direction of modern and contemporary art in South-East Asia, focusing on where it is taught, how it is carried out and how it links with global, regional and national histories of art. The planning grant will enable meetings in Indonesia, Australia and Singapore so that we can bring together partners and plan our long-term project. Find out more.

David Handley (BA ’87 LLB ‘89) loved university. He loved it so much that he just couldn’t face the ‘real world’ after graduating, so he decided to walk his own career path.  

He dreamed of starting a major free to the public arts event for Sydney, and in 1997, Sculpture by the Sea was born.

Although David is better known for bringing this event to the Sydney coast, he has also overseen the introduction of Fiji Swims, inspired by the popularity of ocean swimming in Australia.

In addition, last year he launched a website called What Degree? Which University?, the go-to website to assist school leavers in making informed university choices, written by current or recently graduated university students.

David has recently been presented with an Alumni Award from the University for Community Achievement through his founding and leadership of Sculpture by the Sea.

He shares his career experiences and passions with us.

What are your happiest memories about your time here as a student? My single happiest memory would have to be playing in my band ‘Boiled Lolly Seduction’ at uni for the Manning band comps. I was a mediocre singer but it was great fun.

Who was your favourite professor while you were a student at the University and why? I felt the Department of History was world class – the academics were fantastic, inspiring, passionate and knowledgeable in their fields of study. My favourite professor was Robert Dreher (now retired), who introduced me to the intellectual thinking of Europe in the 19th Century and did it in a really fun way. But not just light-hearted fun – he made it engaging by taking us back to that time and to see how the world today exists as a result.

Understanding history inspired me to want to create something that might make the world a slightly better place.

What is your proudest achievement? To date, it would have to be Sculpture by the Sea. I remember back in 1997, on the first afternoon of Sculpture by the Sea, I sat back and thought that after a decade of contemplating what I wanted to do, I felt I had now achieved something that was worthy.

Why did you decide to take Sculpture by the Sea overseas to Aarhus, Denmark? Their Royal Highnesses Crown Prince Frederik and Crown Princess Mary actually had their first date at Sculpture by the Sea in 2000, and the Crown Prince has said to the people of Denmark that as he was taking his first steps around Sculpture by the Sea, he was taking the first step in his relationship with Crown Princess Mary.

While he was there, he immediately thought of a location that he’d like the exhibition to be held in Denmark, and I worked with them to make it a reality.

Who inspires you? Nelson Mandela, Winston Churchill, Mikhail Gorbachev – all the great historical figures. And novelists – all the great novels are like holding a mirror up to my face telling me to try and come up with something to make my life worthwhile. 

I also find many of the artists in Sculpture by the Sea inspiring because it’s so hard to be a sculptor. It’s such an expensive art form to practice and there’s a real lack of financial support for this art form in Australia.

What is the mantra you live by? To do fun things that add to the world and don’t hurt people.

What are your plans for the future? My dream at the moment would be to find the time to take a month or two off! I’d like to keep Sculpture by the Sea going and have it on firmer financial footing in Australia, while taking the exhibition in Sydney and Perth to the next level. Looking further afield, I hope to be able to set up at least two additional overseas exhibitions.

I’d also really like to see What Degree? Which University? succeed as a business model so that it can keep providing a free service to students. We had nearly 100,000 visitors in our first year and now have over 10,000 students a month visiting from across the world. It feels great knowing that there are many people benefitting from this service.
 
What advice would you give to students graduating from the University of Sydney? Look inside yourself to see what you want to do, and go out and do it. Just be honest with yourself.

Sculpture by the Sea Bondi is currently running until Sunday 4 November.

The Dean’s Scholarship Fund is providing critical assistance to committed and promising students. It has been established in response to encouragement received from alumni for the Faculty’s efforts to help its best and brightest students by providing:

• Small grants for undergraduates to attend conferences and community activities – from the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples to an archaeological dig
• International exchange scholarships, enabling students to spend a semester at an overseas university learning skills and languages
• Support for postgraduate research, which assists young researchers to visit conferences and important archives

Students benefit directly. In June, International and Global Studies student Daniel Barabas represented the University at Golden Key’s International Scholar Laureate Program on Diplomacy and International Relations.

Over two weeks in Beijing, Xi’an and Shanghai, he discussed democracy and foreign affairs with diplomats, students and academics from China and around the world. A cultural program enabled him to visit historical landmarks such as Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City and the Terracotta Warriors.

Gifts have also helped our students present research at the Kule Institute for Advanced Studies Undergraduate Conference at the University of Alberta, Canada, and participate in the 180 Degrees International Project and The UN Youth National Conference.

Extending students’ learning beyond the classroom enormously enriches their education. The upcoming Spring Appeal will provide another opportunity to help students achieve their goals and ambitions. Find out more.