The day that will have the biggest impact on my life so far is almost here. In three days time I will be at the board presenting myself as best I can. The last couple of days I have been busily going over my notes, talking to people, writing new notes, reading reports and more. My desk seriously looks worse now then it ever did when I was at uni.
We picked Mum up from the airport this arvo. It will be a bit of a change having her home again after three weeks away. We have fallen into a system since she has been away and as of tonight that will all be out the window and it will be back to how it was before she went away. In saying that though it very nice to have her home again and to hear all her stories about the sights she has seen out west.
There was an excellent piece of news tucked away in the Higher Education supplement of The Australian yesterday about Asian Studies or more precisely titled the return to Asian Studies not only in universities across Australia but in the school systems as well if Labor wins the upcoming election. I let out a little cheer in the tearoom at work where I was reading the paper and then proceeded to send messages out to various friends either current or former Asian Studies students telling them of the story. In particular it made me think of one of my dear friends Sam who I met in my first year Indonesian class and in a couple of weeks will complete her degree to be a secondary Indonesian teacher and the fact that if Labor wins (as they very well should) her future looks much brighter if a greater focus is made on putting Asian languages and in particular Indonesian into more schools across the country. Kevin Rudd is an Asian Studies man, he did his degree though at ANU and had first class honours to go with it. The electorate that he represents though is Griffith, the very electorate that holds the university that I went to, Griffith University and when Griffith Uni was opened in 1975, one of the four subject areas it offered was Asian Studies. It all seems quite linked together when you look at it. Here though is to the future of Asian Studies not only in Australian universities but Australian schools.
