By Roy Hay
One of the benefits of a retired old age is the freedom to read with no more purpose than to enjoy the contents of a book or at least find out what it is about. Sometimes it is one that I read years ago for work when I was a paid academic. Occasionally it is something I came across in a bookshop, though I am under pressure not to add to the overflowing bookshelves in our small old folks’ home that we had built for us in Bannockburn. We’ve already had to deposit most of the sports-related books I had accumulated in the MCC Library in 2010 when we downsized to our present abode. So the pair of us are revisiting books we read decades ago, in my case recently the heavyweight volumes of the Oxford History of England published from the 1930s to the 1960s. They start with Roman Britain and conclude in the twentieth century.
Not surprisingly this is largely old-fashioned political history, though I am finding that there is a fair amount of narrative social and economic history in the volumes I’ve tackled so far. There is a complete absence of explicit theory, which I find refreshing. The magisterial authors would, I am sure, have been taken aback by what happened to their discipline in the heady days of post-modernism and its successors.
I’m just starting on J. Steven Watson’s account of the reign of George III, a blockbuster of 637 pages covering the loss of the American colonies and the Napoleonic Wars, while the industrial revolution was taking off. This George had severe mental issues and the United Kingdom was governed for a period by one of his sons as regent. One of my brightest former students has made the regency period the centrepiece of her research and writing, inspired by the work of Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer.
Luckily I never read in bed, because it would be impossible to do so while holding up this one.
Melbourne folks of my acquaintance are lucky to have The Almanac and its monthly lunches to catch up with a stimulating bunch of football devotees who nearly all have other strings to their bows. Very occasionally an offshoot will gather in Geelong but that tends to be rarer than blue moons. The last one I attended was dominated by one who delivered a not very dramatic monologue for all the time I was present.
In Geelong we have our own lunch on the last Tuesday of each month. They are called ‘Thommo’s lunches’ in memory of Graham Thompson who instigated them with colleagues at the Gordon Technical College, part of the group of local institutions that helped form Deakin University in 1977. We meet at the Great Western Hotel on the corner of Aberdeen Street and Shannon Avenue. Numbers tend to be on the decline as people drop out for good and bad reasons. A few are off on cruises or other holidays, but death or serious illness claims some more unfortunately. The survivors keep up the tradition and from my point of view it is a great chance to find out what my contemporaries are doing, not only those who attend, but their news of their ex-Deakin contacts.
With my thanks and best wishes,
Roy
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