campusreview. com. au
ON CAMPUS
“
What is a university if it’ s not a cultural collision?” That’ s Jonathan Mills, eight-time director of the
Edinburgh International Festival and a University of Melbourne vice-chancellor’ s fellow. Mills recently turned the University of Melbourne’ s Parkville campus into a precinct of the Melbourne Festival.
He calls the project‘ Cultural Collisions’. It’ s been in the works since Mills left the Edinburgh International Festival in 2014.
“ I was given a vice-chancellor’ s fellowship some time ago,” Mills explains.“ It was interrupted by my tenure as artistic director of the Edinburgh International Festival. I said to [ University of Melbourne vicechancellor ] Glyn Davis that I would certainly return to the university and conclude that fellowship. I went to him when I finished at the festival, and [ asked him ],‘ How about resuming this?’ He said,‘ Good idea.’ We got talking and what we evolved together was this idea of a public program that would put on display, and [ broaden notoriety for ], the treasure trove that is Melbourne University, Cultural Collisions and the Melbourne Festival.” With the project having recently completed its first exhibition run, Campus Review speaks to Mills to learn more about the aims of Cultural Collisions and the opportunities he believes exist for the vast collection of culturally relevant artefacts and knowledge held by universities to be shared for community benefit.
CR: Tell us about Cultural Collisions.
JM: A university is an extraordinary amalgam of disparate, sometimes competing, sometimes conflicting, often irreconcilable, but always energising, paths. When we think about the University of Melbourne, we think of great teaching, great scholarship. I would like to suggest there’ s another element to the university that’ s equally important and that is its engagement with its community. The University of Melbourne is an important witness to the evolution of this city of Melbourne over 150, 160 years. That witness, that evolution, is demonstrated by its collection, its archives, its books, its paintings.
It’ s the sum of everyone who’ s been there, and who wishes to offer a trace of what they’ ve done as part of this incredible and diverse journey. There are no better journeys that have been undertaken on behalf of the university than those of Percy Grainger, a Melbourne-born pianist, international superstar, folk musician, folk collector and inventor, and Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion Mahony, the American architects who in 1911 won an international competition to design and build a new capital, Canberra, for their new nation. They arrive. They are brim-full of enthusiasm and ideas, the most up-to-date ideas, and they never quite get to make the Canberra of their dreams, or the Canberra of our dreams.
Instead, and because the capital of Australia at that stage was Melbourne, they have to stay in Melbourne and make a professional life for themselves. In doing so, they make a remarkable contribution to the university, through Newman College, arguably the most important public building that the Griffins built in Australia, and certainly evidence of the kind of public building that they would have made had they been able to design and build more in Canberra. If we had a [ Griffin-designed ] capital building in Canberra, the chances are that we [ could ] look at Newman College dining hall to see [ echoes of its ] design and shape.
These are three examples of lively minds, but I wanted to bring to a broader community and understanding, through the association that the university has with the Melbourne Festival during this inaugural season, called Cultural Collisions. At the heart of the Cultural Collision is also the role and the responsibility of the university for the broader community of this city of Melbourne. Its location is ideal. Its provenance is impeccable and there’ s an enthusiasm to collaborate on these projects with academic staff and students, which is exciting and palpable. This is what Cultural Collisions is about. It’ s about the role of a university within a city and the enthusiasm that a university can bring to a city and the transformation it can make.
How did you want Cultural Collisions to showcase the University of Melbourne to the public? Cultural Collisions had 10 components to it, spread across the campus, from Newman College dining hall, the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the Dulux Gallery at the Melbourne School of Design, the Grainger museum, the underground car park, the Old Quad, and Melba hall and Arts West. All of these different buildings, from the brand new Arts West to the oldest of them all, the Old Quad, are a kind of excavation of the wonderful and intriguing spaces that have been developed on campus in Parkville.
Each one of them, sings – not speaks, sings – a distinctive melody about the role of Grainger and the role of Griffin and Mahony, in shaping the ideas and the creativity on campus. I chose those three because in addition to be being intriguing and exciting creative minds, they have ever-presence on campus through their important buildings. For example, the Grainger Museum being the repository and archive of the life’ s work of Percy Grainger.
He worked as a virtuoso pianist, he worked as a folk music arranger and composer and preserver, and his worked through the free music machine as an inventor with real foresight. The free music machines are precursors to the synthesiser, which is so wide-spread that every rock-and-roll group in the world will use one. Griffin and Mahony, in building Newman College dining hall, crafted a new idea of architecture, not just a new building. When you think about the sustainability of architecture, and architecture that is sensitive to its environment, those are important current trends in any discussion of urban planning or architecture or design. Griffin and Mahony were [ focusing on ] that in the 1910s, so the university has an enormous, exciting opportunity to offer to the city of Melbourne, through the physical spaces and the intellectual provenance of those spaces to the city. I’ m delighted that students particularly, from five or six faculties, have collaborated so well and so ambitiously in bringing these many programs together under the banner to Cultural Collisions during the Melbourne festivals.
Given the connotations of conflict,‘ collision’ is an interesting theme. Why was it chosen? Collision can be conflicting or it can also be energising. I’ m suggesting it is energising. A collision is not necessarily conflict, a collision is a combustion that can make something better. You can collide with a new idea and it can improve the old idea that you have. Collision is a perfect kind of creative disruption, in the way that Grainger, Griffin and Marion would have liked.
More than that, it is germane to the way in which the university is talking about itself at the moment. There are all sorts of collisions happening between faculties. You only have to walk around the campus to see any number of posters that are about the way in which different faculties collide, to understand that this is at the heart of what Melbourne University is attempting to discuss at the moment, in terms of its role with the city and the community. ■
21