Foreword: “Veronica Brady, academic voices and pending hugs”

Abstract

We could hardly guess its consequence at the time, but back in November 1988, as White Australia celebrated the bicentenary of settlement and Indigenous Australians mourned two centuries of dispossession and annihilation, the cultural distance between Western Australia and northern Spain began to shrink. Not that flight connections were miraculously improved, or that our old but modest university had struck a magical jack pot of funding to spot us on the map of the already expanding academic networks. No such luck, as so many other exploits of development in this country, the reason was serendipitous and quixotic or, to update it to more fashionable jargon, the feat was made possible by a small group of strong-willed academic entrepreneurs who schemed their best to bring Oz to Asturias. History may have slipped on it, but on November 13, accompanied by two spirited interlopers from the University of Barcelona, Doireann MacDermott and Susan Ballyn, the first two academic envoys from Australia alighted from the Barcelona express; their names Bruce Bennett and Veronica Brady. Truth to tell we had also had our Cook of sorts, for a few years back Colin Roderick had paid a short visit; he had abstained from ruthlessly renaming any faculty office to suit his mood or exploratory tribulations, nor had he planted his flag in the north wing of the old conventturned-to-faculty building, but our late Head of Department, Prof. Patricia Shaw, distinctively remembered his “extravagant” hat, and he did leave us a copy of his Henry Lawson Criticism, 1894-1971 (1972), probably the first Australian critical work to make its way into our library funds.