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It is an honour and a sadness to be invited to deliver the inaugural Robert Madgwick Lecture in this University, under the auspices of the Faculty of Arts: an honour to be accorded the opportunity in an institution and an area bearing very much the mark of his life and work ; and a sadness, that this friend of the years is lost awhile, I thereby feeling like a lone tree in a thinning forest. At the outset I would express my appreciation and support for the work undertaken by Associate Professor Ryan, aiming to assemble some of the details of the late Sir Robert's varied life. I express the hope that this might flower into a full-scale biography. It is an oddity in Australian universities that Vice-Chancellors have only rarely attracted biographies. Disposing, as they most certainly do not, of a cornucopia of resources, and their central role being involvement in the decisions upon the allocation of what is available, maybe they are all fated in life to earn but two cheers. |
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