This is a copy of the 28th Sir Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop Asialink Lecture, delivered by University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Professor Duncan Maskell on Tuesday 8 October 2024.
Thank you for inviting me to deliver the 28th Weary Dunlop Lecture.
I am pleased that this, one of my last public lectures as Vice Chancellor of the University of Melbourne, is in honour of one of this University’s most distinguished alumni, Sir Ernest Edward “Weary” Dunlop.
Weary Dunlop graduated from Melbourne Medical School with first class Honours in 1934, and in 1937 he earned his Master’s in Surgery from the same institution.
The University of Melbourne was a transformative and shaping influence on Weary Dunlop, as it has been for many thousands of its students over many generations.
It was here at the University that Weary Dunlop decided to dedicate his life to public service and the health and wellbeing of his fellow human beings.
As a student at Ormond College, he gained his nickname: “Weary”, a somewhat strained allusion to Dunlop tyres. According to one version of the story, he was given the nickname ‘weary’ as a play on words from tyre, to tire, to weary.
In life he was anything but tired, having a reputation for frenetic energy, enthusiasm, and dedication to others, even – or should I say especially – while enduring the horrors of the Thai-Burma railway as a prisoner of war.
It was at this University that he abandoned Australian Rules football for my favourite sport – rugby union, and went on to be selected for the Wallabies, helping them win the Bledisloe Cup for the first time in 1934 where he was the first Victorian to represent Australia.
And it was at the University of Melbourne that he first came into contact with overseas students, some of them from the societies of Asia.
What we know from the record of Weary Dunlop’s life is that he had a burning belief in the transformative power of education, and in particular in the power of education to build deep and enduring friendship between peoples of very different cultures.
This was no doubt strongly influenced by his experience in the war years. As someone who witnessed much suffering as a POW, he came to a deep understanding that putting conflict and hatred behind us, and working to achieve international friendship and cooperation was vital for everyone in the region.
From the 1950s, he became deeply involved in providing medical training in Thailand, Ceylon and India, and in facilitating the arrival of Colombo Plan students to study medicine in Australia.
In 1987 he established a Fellowship to bring Thai surgeons to Australia for further training.
His experiences during the war convinced him, in his words, that “friendship between Asians and Australians is the key to lasting peace.”
Of his efforts to facilitate Indian students studying in Australia, he was later to write that the “little bread” he was able to cast out “came back as currant loaves.”
As the President of the Australian-Asian Association of Victoria, Weary Dunlop was a prominent member of a growing body of opinion that Australia must be active in establishing positive and lasting links with its newly independent neighbours.
As we reflect on the legacy of Weary Dunlop tonight, I want to spend some time talking about one of his deepest convictions – a belief in the positive power of international education to transform societies, and forge enduring links across cultures.
In the midst of the recent fraught and often ill-informed debate about international students in Australia, we default too easily to discussing numbers alone. How many students do we want? What proportion of our student body should be international? Have we too many or not enough of one nationality or another? And of course, what are the dollar benefits and costs of international education?
What I would add to these are deeper questions about how have we become so tediously mercenary?
How have we lost interest in aiming for a higher degree of idealism as exemplified by Weary Dunlop’s ideas about the power of education as a force for good?
What easily gets lost in this discussion is the human face and the human value of international education. Those of us who work in Australian universities know that when we educate, we invest in potential, and we invest in hope for the future.
We say to the prospective student, ‘Come to Australia because we can help you to develop your potential, and to chase your dreams while staying with us.’
We of course offer all students, international and Australian, the skills that are relevant to professional pursuits. But importantly, and I would argue much more importantly, we offer the chance to every student to discover who and what they are. This is because we know that higher education is ultimately about formation of the person as well as giving that person the knowledge and the tools to think clearly and apply knowledge rigorously.
That Australia has the capacity and the willingness to offer this to people who are not its citizens as well as to its own students is something of which all Australians should be proud.
At the same time, we must acknowledge that making this offer to people from Asia has a strong element of self-interest for us.
Again, this is far from being only about numbers and financial statistics. The American pragmatist philosopher and educational theorist, John Dewey, wrote, “In educating its youth, society creates its future self.”
By the same logic, through educating the young people of its neighbouring societies, Australia has had an ongoing opportunity to shape the future development of those societies.
The tens of thousands of brave young people from Asia and the Pacific who have left home at a very tender age to come and study at Australia’s universities over generations have returned home to become the government officials and business leaders, the professionals – doctors, judges, architects and engineers – the business leaders and indeed, in turn, the educators who have built up new societies after the end of the colonial era, throughout the Asia Pacific region.
These alumni of our Australian universities have contributed to building prosperous and stable societies in our neighbouring countries. They have also performed us an important service by keeping in their minds a positive understanding and image of Australia – that we are no longer ‘White Australia’. That we are more than just a colonial society that was founded on hostility towards non-white people.
On so many occasions, as Vice Chancellor, I have experienced generous, positive and warm feelings towards Australia at Alumni receptions in China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore and other regional countries. Often I have found myself in rooms where the gratitude and goodwill towards the University and this country have been frankly overwhelming.
The value of having regional neighbours who are well-disposed towards us has already been of incalculable benefit to Australia. It has meant we have been able to grow prosperous in a stable neighbourhood where we are welcomed as a valued partner.
Beyond this is the substantial contribution to human wellbeing in Asia and the Pacific that has been made by Australian education. Graduates of Australia’s universities have played many important public roles throughout the Asia-Pacific, in designing and building cities and infrastructure, improving agricultural productivity, reducing child mortality, developing healthy sanitation, and combating disease.
Today, I am sad to say, it seems as though Australia has largely taken these significant educational achievements for granted – as if it were natural and inevitable that a wealthy, predominantly European society would be accepted in a region of developing, post-colonial societies.
Could it be that there is even a hint of old-fashioned white Australian arrogance in the idea that international students should feel grateful to us for “letting them in” – when in fact it is Australia that gets the better end of the relationships arising from international education?
Whatever lies behind it, as we approach the end of 2024 it is clear that continuing to take the power of Australia’s international education networks for granted would be extremely foolish indeed. This is because the world and the regions around Australia are changing fast, and not to our advantage.
Growing geopolitical competition, increasing military spending by nation states, a retreat from internationalist sentiment in many countries leading to parochialism and isolation, and the growth of Asia’s economies relative to Australia’s mean that we will need to work harder than ever to maintain positive relations with our neighbours.
We need to take stock and consider where our natural long term advantages lie. What considerations will give us the greatest possibility of shaping our regional context to our advantage?
Educating more students of great potential from countries across our region strikes me as a certain way of delivering back to Australia an enduring positive influence with our neighbours, at no financial cost, and indeed in most cases considerable financial gain to the Australian economy.
We know from experience that a few years of education in Australia for international students can easily translate into a lifetime of goodwill, trust and often admiration for this country.
It can be a connection that spreads in space and time. Down the generations, others are encouraged by alumni to study in Australia. As future generations follow in their parents’ and grandparents’ footsteps, strong international ties are built.
In 2024 Australia still has a real opportunity to make the most of the high and growing demand for international education in Asia and across the Pacific. But we must realise that this situation will not be with us forever.
New, world class universities are springing up across India, China, Southeast Asia and the Gulf. Very few international students need to come to Australia, because they have many more study options before them today, compared with decades ago.
In coming decades, these competitor universities in other countries will exert a powerful pull on all students as their reputation and quality rise, especially if they are able to offer less expensive study options than Australian institutions.
Already, Australia is not always the preferred option for international students from the region. For example, in a recent survey of Southeast Asians’ perceptions, a question was asked of respondents in five professional categories about their preferred destination if given a university scholarship. 25.6% opted for the United States, 20.8% for the UK, and 9.9% for Australia.
Of course, Australian universities, particularly those with established world class reputations, will probably remain regionally competitive. But the reality is that all Australian universities will need to compete much harder than ever before.
Australia has built up a substantial population of international student alumni during the past two decades. Between 2005 and 2023, 3,727,116 [3.7 million] international students studied in Australia.
Among these are many who live in Asia and the Pacific. But the fact that we have these fantastic alumni living across Asia and the Pacific has come about more by accident than by design.
Nevertheless, we would be foolish now to waste this asset by failing to plan for its maintenance as a deliberate focus of policy.
The government has been taking small steps towards making alumni relations a part of the core business of our Embassies and High Commissions across Asia and the Pacific. In relation to this, I am very grateful to those Australian diplomatic missions that have given us excellent service while hosting University of Melbourne alumni events while I have been travelling in the region.
But much more can be done to build a concerted Australian alumni policy, and to integrate it with the objectives and techniques of Australian statecraft.
From Australia’s point of view, there is great untapped human potential in our alumni across the region. Alumni of Australian universities can become directly engaged on a range of country-specific foreign policy initiatives, from trade and investment to environmental initiatives, to cultural outreach. This is a direction that many other countries are pursuing, with great effect.
Alumni can also be the catalyst for deepening the international links of our universities, which can serve global needs as well as Australian interests. As a Professor of Microbiology, I have repeatedly experienced the way in which my former students and colleagues, from countries as diverse as China and Uruguay, have played a catalytic role in helping develop international research partnerships in different countries.
Pandemic research, so much in the global spotlight since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, is one obvious example of the prime importance of strong international research links. Pre-existing research networks built on trust are essential to fighting such pandemics, of which COVID-19 was not the first and certainly will not be the last.
Though Australia is particularly strong in the area of health research, we also have great depth in, amongst many others, agriculture and water management. These are critical subjects of inquiry across the Asia- Pacific. As Australia looks to build higher education and research partnerships with countries such as India, Indonesia and Vietnam, we should also be looking to leverage our alumni in those countries as the anchors of those research partnerships.
Australia can also look to other regions, such as Europe, for ideas on how to build a more integrated, regional higher education system. Schemes such as Europe’s Erasmus student mobility framework, and the Horizon Europe research funding scheme, should be seriously examined by Australia as we move towards a better strategy for building mutually beneficial relations with our neighbours.
Distinguished Australian diplomat John McCarthy – who is also an Asialink advisor and recently served a term as a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Melbourne – has argued in an interesting recent paper that the Australian government should merge its various country-specific Councils and Foundations into an institution somewhat akin to the highly successful British Council. This new body could be charged with raising the cultural profile of Australia internationally.
It could be a body that is ideally placed to connect Australian alumni with broad national objectives – to integrate international education into the conduct of foreign policy. It could also make the case for Australia’s international activities successes – including education – to the Australian community as a vital national interest.
Such an approach would be vastly superior to the current non-debate over international education, in which, currently, one of our great national assets is being problematised in a highly irrational manner – as though international students are presented as a threat, not the great asset that they are. Both sides of politics are engaging in a race to the bottom with a simplistic narrative not supported by any facts or data. How “weary” this damaging irrationality makes me!
International education offers Australia so many advantages in an increasingly uncertain world. And yet we have allowed international education to be defined by misplaced anxieties – as a problem putting upward pressure on accommodation and cost of living – to the extent that cheap populist politics and venal economic thinking could end up destroying this great national asset.
The people in this room can and I hope will play a crucial role in changing the national conversation on international education, in the months and years ahead. I suggest we must continue to remind people, amid all the media and parliamentary hyperbole, that international education is about entirely positive things – people-to-people relationships, human aspirations, and the aspiration to see better times, both in the Australian community and in the communities of our neighbours.
As somebody who has long worked in higher education, this positive story seems so obviously true that it should not need repeating. But it does need saying, urgently and repeatedly, in the political climate that we now have.
Going back many centuries, universities have always had an inherently international character. In the past 70 years, since the first Colombo Plan, international students at Australian universities have played a key role in helping the nation flourish in new ways.
Today that flourishing brought about by international education is very evident on a campus like ours, and in a city like Melbourne.
International students bring vibrancy and dynamism to communities and towns across Australia, right now, in addition to great economic benefit. And over the long term, they offer a trustworthy path to building and maintaining better relations with other countries. In these volatile times we surely need to work much harder on building these kinds of connection.
I am an idealist at heart and my greatest hope is that we will, eventually, develop as a species to the point that we marginalise and make irrelevant those who think that the answer to disagreement is violence and armed conflict. Allowing young people from diverse backgrounds and cultures to come together to acquire an education is surely a key element of this pathway of development to a better world. I would like to think that Weary Dunlop would be right behind this sentiment.
The 28th Sir Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop Asialink Lecture, delivered by University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Professor Duncan Maskell on Tuesday 8 October 2024.
