What is particularly interesting about forty-year celebrations – as evident in Taking Stock – is that many of the professional lives described are still being actively lived, not just recollected. This is cultural analysis coloured by memoir and ambition, as well as by a detached eye to history. Moreover, many of the voices here still have a large say in the future of the humanities in Australia, an enterprise that was in a state of transformation when the Academy was formed and that might more fairly be described as being in a state of flux today.

These writers are not tenured radicals as imagined in the demonology of the Murdoch press. Humanities means here the study of history, literature, languages, philosophy, cultural studies, art history, and archaeology. Certainly, there is some dissent against the manifest wonders of market capitalism; how could there not be when the object of analysis – culture – is too multifaceted and human to permit simple reduction to a profit-and-loss statement? But, far from being flippantly oppositional, the dominant tenor of the collection is one of intelligent and disciplined concern for understanding and preserving Australian culture in an international context. There is some cultural critique, some feminism, and a good deal of attention to marginalised voices, but radical deconstruction of the Western Canon is no more dominant here than it is in the real life of universities across the nation.

While Academicians are not representative of the wider sector in all ways, as they tend to be the princes of the church, they are typical in their unifying interest in fundamental questions discussed here such as ‘How do disciplines change?’, ‘Do national contexts still matter?’, and ‘Have we changed the way we answer questions?’. These are serious and reflective people. And, despite what you might have heard, they write precisely and well, at least for those readers prepared to make a bit of an effort.

So why is it that, on the watch of these serious and eloquent people, the humanities have drifted from a place at the heart of the modern university enterprise to somewhere much more marginal? There are many reasons for this, and quite a few of them are as impossible to influence as the weather. In the job market of the 1960s, tertiary education was a rare commodity; having any sort of degree set you apart. In our hyper-specialised age, a general qualification does not seem enough. Government and university administrations have talked about innovation endlessly, which plays to science and technology, and even to creative industries, but misses something crucial about the recursive nature and value of the humanities. In an instrumentalist world, it is easier to come up with arguments for the quasi-pragmatic social sciences on one side and the innovative creative arts on the other, even if one is still arguing for general degrees rather than for lawyers, teachers, or tourism professionals. It is a myth that the numbers coming to the humanities have dropped in absolute terms, butthey have decreased as a proportion of the student population.

There is little point in moaning about the weather, however. What within our control as university-based humanists have we done or failed to do to improve our lot? Two aspects of this collection suggest things that we can work on.

The first is essentially a criticism. On my count (one of the advantages of electronic publication), this volume has 300 uses of ‘research’ and its cognates (more than one a page). By contrast, there are eighteen uses of ‘teach’, and several of them attach to the role of ‘school teacher’ as distinct from that of the humanities researcher. That is about seventeen to one. Scholarship and new knowledge are important, but so is the human experience of cultural analysis.

In my own line of literary criticism, I often feel torn between writing for half a dozen eighteenth-century literary scholars and writing intelligibly for undergraduates or general readers. It is hard to do both, and almost impossible when all the credit in the system, as policed by the Australian Research Council (ARC), demands science-like research, and rewards the researchers with ‘teaching relief’.

The view of this collection is particularly coloured by success in the ARC game, and so its take on the humanities is overweight on meta-critique of scholarly methods and perspectives, at the expense of cultural storytelling. The baldest way of putting this is to assert that we have lost a part of our purpose in learning to play the research game designed (and overwhelmingly rigged) for the sciences. We need to play more on the mixed territory of pathos, logos, and ethos among the several publics that have always been our home.

The second point is a call for more writing like that which appears in Taking Stock rather than in learned journals and grant applications. With few exceptions, the essays in this collection project a personal tone and an interdisciplinary scope that will, based on argumentative rigour, command the attention of an intelligent reader with a background in any of the humanities. While this collection is essentially the elders of the tribe talking among themselves, it actually illustrates how best to write without obscurity or populism. We should value this among ourselves and take it to the nation.

Dean Ashenden has argued that pre-Dawkins-eraacademics yearned to be ‘Brahmins’, respected scholars in sinecures untroubled by any demands to do a capable job unless they felt like it. Perhaps it is the sense that I was joining the Brahmans when I became a lecturer in the early 1990s that makes it hard for me not to read this volume with a sense of mourning for a world that never arrived.

To the extent that we have all become cultural researchers, answering to the inner needs of our increasingly specialised disciplines and corporatised institutions, we have gone too far down one path. Sure, we create new knowledge valuable in itself, but we also shape individuals and the cultures in which they live. By judging ourselves too dominantly by our capacity to please the ARC, we lose focus on those other fundamental reasons for what we do: our students and our wider audiences.