Occasional Address
Graduation Ceremony for Graduates of the Faculty of Law and
Management
Wednesday
19 October 2011
Deputy Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, Dean and staff
of the Faculty of Law and Management, distinguished guests, parents, family, friends,
and especially graduands -
Today marks the successful completion of a fine
education. Congratulations on reaching this milestone. All those lectures,
tutorials, hours in the library, exams, essays, and no doubt a few all nighters
- to say nothing of many gallons of coffee. The taste for coffee I acquired as
an undergraduate has served me well in the years that followed.
It is only right that your family and friends
have come today. They have had a share in bringing you to this point, and it is
fitting to mark the investment your family and your community have made into
your future – and ours.
Today also marks the start of your next phase in
life as you embark on your careers. Education expresses a commitment to entrust
the world to the next generation – to you.
Some of you will be going through the
uncertainty of looking for employment in your chosen field. Some will already
be looking forward to well-paid professional life.
The law and management are particularly
important disciplines for our future – concerning as they do both justice and
the sharing of scarce resources.
The world in which we live offers so much to us.
It is a place full of wonder, and you will have great fulfilment making your
contribution to it. For those of us a generation ahead, we could hold our heads
higher if we were passing onto you a world in better shape.
But as you well know, not only are you moving
into a world with all the challenges of building a career and making your mark
- to say nothing of building and nurturing relationships – but you face even
greater challenges of a world desperately in need of help in so many ways:
-
A world on the brink of another global
financial crisis: too much faith in unregulated markets has unleashed the
powerful and greedy in a way which has deranged our international financial
system;
-
A world already experiencing the effects
of climate change brought about by our blind adherence to a consumer lifestyle
-
A world groaning with conflicts which in
many cases could have been avoided
Here in Australia we are confronted by impoverished
political discourse, by the complacency which comes from comfort, and the need
for more inspirational vision.
Australia has in the past helped pioneer so many social
advances: the 8 hour day, free universal education, women’s suffrage, and the
basic wage. In 1948 it was an Australian statesman, Dr Evatt, who presided over
the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the United Nations.
And yet we have now fallen far behind.
Australia, alone of all western nations, has not enshrined internationally
recognised human rights as part of our law, and routinely flouts these
international human rights standards.
We are a comparatively wealthy nation – far
wealthier than at any time in our history – but much of that wealth comes from
mining, and there has been little concern to share that wealth equitably with
the nation and with the generations yet to come.
How will you respond to these challenges? A
great deal depends on the answer, which you will fashion, one way or the other,
from the opportunities that lie in the years ahead.
When passing through
one stage of life, and emerging into another, it’s a good time for reflection.
By way of analogy, in the natural world, the butterfly passes through
well-known stages of life. The larva, or caterpillar of a butterfly hatches
from an egg, and begins to consume. Then it forms the pupa, or chrysalis, and
remains in stillness for a long period while it changes. Finally, from this chrysalis emerges
the butterfly.
Caterpillars have been called "eating
machines". As soon as they
hatch, butterfly larvae seek out food and begin to eat. They eat leaves voraciously, most species shed their
skins four or five times as their bodies grow larger. They consist of a pair of jaws or mandibles for
chewing plant matter followed by a long gut for digestion. They spend most of
their time eating and rapidly growing.
Caterpillars grow very fast. A tobacco hornworm will
increase its weight ten-thousand-fold in less than twenty days.
Once this juvenile grub phase is completed,
caterpillars weave their silken cocoons, and ensconce themselves inside, firmly
constrained as they undergo transformation, finally emerging as fully realized
adult butterflies.
Imagine if butterflies never metamorphosed, never
entered the chrysalis phase, but continued on as voracious grubs forever,
blindly consuming more and more, growing ever larger, destroying more around
them as they multiplied in size.
And yet isn’t this the very danger we face? Our
commercialized society encourages the immature grub phase for its members as if
to hold us in that juvenile stage forever. Instead of being fully realized
human beings, we are in danger of remaining blind, bloated grubs, consuming
more and more of an ailing planet.
In the city, some shops already have Christmas
decorations out – not in celebration of a spiritual festival over two months
away, but in the hope of having you buy. We live in a society in danger of
being permanently infantilized by endless consumption.
The great poet Rainer Maria Rilke said this in his
“letters to a young poet”:
Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to defend itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult is one more reason for us to do it.
Just as the larva
restricts itself in its cocoon in order to grow into a butterfly, so we will
need to impose disciplines on ourselves if we are to reach our full potential.
To reach this
point you have already overcome challenges. The reward for overcoming
challenges is to be presented with an even greater challenge. And then a
greater challenge again. And so on until we die. But if we baulk when we face a
challenge, we suffer a small death, a diminution of life, right there.
In 1844, Ralph
Waldo Emerson bought 14 acres of woods at Walden Pond, near Concord,
Massachusetts.
The following
year, his friend Henry Thoreau, just 27 years old, having been dismissed as a
teacher because he refused to administer corporal punishment, moved there and
built a small cottage to live in. He wished to engage in an experiment of
“simple living”, and he remained at Walden for 2 years.
Thoreau was a
remarkable man. Famously he went to jail rather than pay taxes which would be
used to support the war against Mexico.
He explained he
went into the woods "to suck the marrow out of life":
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
While at Walden,
Thoreau wrote several of his best-remembered works, including the first draft
of his masterpiece “Walden”.
It is the sum of all wisdom not to do desperate things. The great mass of mankind lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
You are about to be
presented to the Deputy Chancellor in recognition of your academic achievements
in the phase of your life which has come to its end. Now you will wish to make
your mark in the world, and the world awaits and needs your contribution. Do
not be timid as you think of what you might achieve. Your education prepares
you to do great things; your good fortune in living in a country like Australia
provides you with great opportunities, and at this time in history you confront
great challenges.
As Thoreau reflected
in Walden:
The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths that the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favour in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
