Connecting Locally: DPA Academics and U3A Canberra

While the Department of Pacific Affairs (DPA) spends most of its time focusing on the wider region, an important but often overlooked part of its mission is to improve Pacific literacy among Australians. The ways that DPA staff and students do this is multiple: most teach into the Bachelor and/or Master of Pacific Studies and contribute their expertise through higher degree research supervision. Some host podcasts and contribute to the national media, while others take part in the Understanding the Pacific intensive short course aimed at staff from the Department of Foreign Affairs. A growing number of DPA’s experts are also contributing their time to U3A’s Friday morning class ‘Melanesia, Micronesia & Polynesia: Our Pacific Neighbours’.       

The University of the Third Age is a worldwide education movement focused on providing activities and classes to members of the community who have reached the ‘third age’ of their lives with the minimum age for enrolment being 50. Membership within Australia extends to over 100,000 and the Canberra branch, founded in 1986, is home to about 4,000 students.  

Judith (Judy) Johnson, a former teacher, environmental scientist and international diplomat with both the United Nations and the Commonwealth Secretariat has been the leader of the Pacific course for the last 11 years. Judy is also an avid Pacific watcher and has a great eye for potential speakers and interesting Pacific-related events across Canberra’s cultural institutions. While having relied on ANU expertise for some time, in the last two years, she has drawn more heavily from DPA with Nicholas (Nick) Hoare, Theresa Meki, Amanda H A Watson, David Oakeshott, and Henrietta McNeill all speaking one or more times to the class.

Amanda spoke to the class about media freedom in Pacific Island countries just days after World Press Freedom Day in May this year. She found the comments and questions from students stimulating and was happy to return later in the year to talk about access to digital communication technologies in the Pacific.

Nick remembers first being invited by Judy as a PhD student in 2018. He was amazed Judy knew so much about his PhD topic so said yes to find out more about her. Back then, the class was taught in a conference room at University House, so it also had the bonus of a free lunch afterwards. This year he talked about Papua New Guinea’s golden jubilee and gifted a copy of the recently launched DPA publication, Fifty Years of Nation-Making: A Papua New Guinea Dictionary of Biography, Volume One. 

Judy does well to invite a range of speakers with different backgrounds, specialty areas and levels of experience. While DPA’s early and mid-career researchers tend to jump at the opportunity to test their research to a knowledgeable general audience, she also loves hearing from honorary lecturers and friends of the department such as Bryant Allen, Andrew Connelly, Chris Ballard, Mike Bourke, and Chris Chevalier - the latter she notes has been particularly helpful in sourcing speakers for her.

The snowball effect is such that the final, standout, presentation of the year was given by Florence Siba of the Women’s Development Leadership Program in Papua New Guinea. Of Siba’s talk, Judy said ‘it was invaluable to hear about the values of the village-based way of living’ in PNG, noting that ‘we only hear about the negatives and drawbacks in the Australian press!’      

These days, with University House still under construction, there is no free lunch, but Judy always makes sure to recompense her speakers with delicious Papua New Guinean coffee or Bougainville chocolate. DPA researchers also gain enormous satisfaction out of sharing their ideas with a different kind of audience and engaging in fruitful discussion with the students, many of whom have spent significant periods of their lives living in the Pacific Islands and so bring a wealth of first-hand knowledge. With popular interest in the Pacific region increasing due to recent geopolitical developments, it is encouraging to see such long-running and genuine interest in a wide range of Pacific topics by Canberra’s thriving U3A community.