The “living humanities”: Creative arts and academic humanities in tension

Abstract

When the Australian Academy of the Humanities (AAH) was established in 1969, poet Judith Wright was elected as a founding fellow. Scholar and fellow poet A. D. Hope saw her inclusion as boding well for the Academy’s purpose to foster and promote the humanities. Six years later, Wright complained about a lack of opportunities for creative practitioners and claimed that she was being excluded from Academy life. While some fellows supported Wright, the majority disagreed that creative practitioners belonged in the fellowship. This incident is representative of a broader “unclear connection” between the “living humanities” – as H. C. Coombs described the creative arts – and what Simon During terms the “academic humanities”. Focusing on the AAH’s first three decades, this article traces different ideas held by leading humanities scholars towards the creative arts and shows how the AAH maintained boundaries and created exclusions. A major shift occurred with the John Dawkins reforms to higher education. Key figures at the AAH played leading roles in seeking solutions to alarmingly low levels of Australian Research Council (ARC) funding for “creative arts research”. Despite such efforts, the AAH continued to elect very few creative arts practitioners into its core fellowship throughout the 1990s and ARC data shows that funding inequities for creative arts research remain an intractable problem.