Patrick McCaughey
Festival Director
The Festival of Ideas on Climate Change/Cultural Change was one of the best Melbourne experiences anybody could have. It joined the brains, the knowledge and imagination of University of Melbourne academics with a broad swathe of Australian and international intellectuals and writers to address the major problems confronting Australia.
We have to change and how we shall confront and handle that change is uppermost on everybody's mind: suggestions and solutions, answers and doubts were freely expressed and put forward at the Festival. But to me the real success of the Festival lay with the engaged audience: Melbourne wanted to hear, to question and comment on the expert testimony laid before them. That dialogue made the Festival - brought it alive.
Watch this space in 2011.
The first Festival of Ideas takes the theme of Climate Change/Cultural Change at a critical moment in world history.
Australia, more than any other industrialized nation, faces severe challenges from the changes in climate now sweeping our planet. Responding to those challenges will bring transformative changes to our culture and society. They will affect our cities and suburbs, our food supply and our basic transport system, now dependent on a toxic diet of carbon rich fuels.
Other global problems loom large and they too will bring changes to Australia in the next few years. The future of the West, presently undergoing its greatest stress and strain for a generation, may not be the strength and support it has been in the past. The new economies of China and India may offer Australia a different, more promising future. China, in particular. will be the key to Australia's economy and, possibly, its security as well. Is Canberra-Beijing the 'real' special relationship?
What does the artist, the writer, the humanist do faced by a world of global and cultural change? The role of the writer, both the poet and the novelist, in such a world will form the final and climactic section of the Festival.
The Festival has assembled an array of different and distinguished voices - scientists, architects, city planners, environmentalists, social scientists, commentators and creative writers to tackle these issues and offer solutions to some of our most pressing problems.
The failure of past generations to deal with these issues places a heavy burden on the next generation. The Festival of Ideas will pay particular attention to hearing these new voices. Musical performances and readings will illuminate the Festival's themes. Keynote lectures from some of the most eminent thinkers of our time, from Nobel Laureate Professor Peter Doherty to Kate Grenville, our premiere novelist, will outline the issues in the evenings. By day, panels of leading scientists, scholars, architects, commentators and writers will discuss and debate the issues and themes of the Festival, inviting public comments and questions.
The Festival will set off a chain reaction of ideas that will stimulate, excite and offer hope to the community.
