[csaa-forum] "Dusting off a thesis to create a classic"

[Danny Butt]

No flies on Cassi Plate or her admirable work :), but gee it'd be nice to
read more press articles on academic practice which discussed a) the reasons
*why* there "has been no generational handover of the 'public intellectual'
mantle" (hint: it's not because people stopped writing, thinking, or being
interested in public affairs for a generation) and/or b) academic theory as
something other than a BDSM fetish.

[apologies to those on the list who do write good articles for the press,
you know who you are!]

anyway, lots to think about in this one:
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http://www.smh.com.au/news/Books/Dusting-off-a-thesis-to-create-a-classic/20
04/11/26/1101219751782.html

Dusting off a thesis to create a classic
By Malcolm Knox, Literary Editor
November 27, 2004

Adolf Gustav Plate, a German seaman, spent New Year's Eve of 1900 on the
Fijian island of Rotuma. He took a photograph of women lying around on piles
of coconuts and laughing - a mood at odds with the more common shots taken
by Europeans of Pacific islanders sullenly awaiting their extinction.

A century later, those women's laughter sparked a fascination in Plate's
granddaughter, who has turned the artist's story into a book that will
create what its publisher says is a world first.

Cassi Plate, 50, will be the first author published in a project to
transform the most interesting Australian university theses into books for
the public. Behind the project is the editor and best-selling author
Drusilla Modjeska, who read Plate's PhD thesis on her grandfather two years
ago and chose it as the pilot for her "From Thesis to Book" idea.

Modjeska's three-year project has received $660,000 from the Australian
Research Council, Pan Macmillan and the University of Sydney. It is the
first such partnership in Australia, and, says Pan Macmillan, the world.

Moreover, it will rekindle debate over the place of academic thinkers in the
public domain.

"For over a decade in Australia there has been no generational handover of
the 'public intellectual' mantle," Modjeska said. "This project will create
a prominent outlet for intelligent, critical voices from Generation X and
beyond."

Plate, a former ABC radio broadcaster, believes her study had wide appeal
because it was not motivated by academic theory or, on her part, university
career aspirations.

"[Samoan writer] Albert Wendt said he writes stories to overcome the
tragedies of the past. My grandfather was travelling around the Pacific,
painting and taking photographs, while Germany had colonies there. His art
didn't stand outside history; it was part of it. I think this book is my way
of working out where I belong, by taking responsibility for the past."

Adolf Plate died of throat cancer in 1914. His pioneering photographs -
there are about 1000 of them - sat in a trunk for decades, and some hundreds
of his paintings were only shown once, in the 1930s, before being donated to
the Penrith Regional Art Gallery in the 1990s.

Cassi Plate began digging through these archives and became inspired to
reconstruct life in the Pacific a century ago, "with my grandfather hovering
at my shoulder".

Modjeska mentored Plate, "unshackling my writing from academic strictures",
and the book, Restless Spirits, will be published by Picador in May.

University presses around the country are striving to bring intellectual
work into the broader trade. The Australian National University's Pandanus
Press and Melbourne University Press, among others, as well as local
divisions of Cambridge and Oxford University presses, have been exploring
new publishing schemes, including works of fiction.

Most recently, Melbourne University Press launched catalogues of both POD
(print-on-demand) books and ebooks, including titles by Garry Woodard,
Marcia Langton and the late Richard McGarvie.

That commercial publishers are now seizing on university writing seems
logical to Picador publisher Nikki Christer, who said the "From Thesis to
Book" project "enable[s] us to tap into a wealth of talent, and find new
voices that we otherwise wouldn't have had access to".