Greg Dening (1931-2008)

Abstract

At a Requiem Mass celebrating the life of the historian Greg Dening in Newman College Chapel, Melbourne, on 19 March 2008, a first edition of Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises was placed on the coffin, its pages open. Greg first did the full thirty days of the Spiritual Exercises when he was seventeen. In his retirement, Dening offered a remarkable version of those exercises to doctoral students from around Australia and overseas. Well into his seventies, he was doing what he liked to call his ‘academic grand-parenting’ by running ten-day intensive workshops at the Australian National University. He saw them as ‘a secular academic retreat, a sort of intellectual spiritual exercises’, a way of renewing one's ‘fervour’. Greg was not only a wonderful historian but also a gifted teacher, and he believed that immersion scholarship could be transformative – of oneself, and also of the world.1 Greg Dening was born in 1931 beside the Pacific surf at Newcastle, New South Wales. His family moved to Perth, Western Australia, on the Indian Ocean, and then to Melbourne, Victoria, on the edge of Bass Strait. The son of a sailor who talked him to sleep with stories of the sea, Greg became a scholar of the Pacific and his intellectual metaphors were drawn from the ocean. ‘There is no greater joy for me than to walk a beach’, he later confessed, and he was referring to cultural as well as to sandy ones.2 Dening was educated at the Jesuit School, St Louis, in Perth and then at Xavier College, Melbourne. In 1948, at the age of sixteen, he entered the Society of Jesus. After following the course of studies for novices and scholastics, he completed a Master of Arts degree at Melbourne University and later a PhD in anthropology from Harvard University.