Emeritus Professor Clive Probyn of Mittagong on King's Birthday Honours List

On Thursday, June 8 the Southern Highland News met with the Order of Australia Medal [OAM] recipient to better understand the impact and purpose of literature to his life.

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"The sheer pleasure I got in being an 18 and 19-year-old going to a mature university in the UK and doing English. They did things such as learn Anglo Saxon, for example. They even had an Old Norse Course. Literature from the very beginning right up to DH Lawrence, who was a student at that university at Nottingham, and right up to the present day.

"It was immensely busy but we had time for things like theatre productions, plays, and trips and all that sort of stuff.

"The first year of university was a year of liberation for me, and it just got better and better."

"At the age of 16 I assumed I would go into the Sixth Form, and I did.

"At the age of 18 I wanted to become an architect. I had bought texts and some of the materials. Then I got an offer from the University of Nottingham to do English, so I did that instead.

"After three years at Nottingham I went off to America on a Fulbright Scholarship. That again, was a huge eye opener.

"The Americans have a really professional attitude towards graduate studies."

'After a year of that I went back to the UK and we got married.

"Our first home was in Nottingham, and at that stage I was kind of bitten. It was literature or nothing. The first people to offer me a job were at the University of Lancaster.

"It was a brand new operation and when I told them that Meg would be coming with me it clinched the deal, because she was a computer programmer and they were rarer than hen's teeth. So she was appointed, and I was appointed.

"In a sense it looks as though my career was entirely concerned with English literature, and that's true. But it's a question of where you did it.

"I did teach at the University of Virginia for a time. Then we went to Africa."

"It was a secondment to run an English and French Department in northern Nigeria.

"The pattern in those days was the male would go overseas and you would put the children in a fee paying boarding school. And then you get them to visit once a year.

"We didn't want that. We said: 'if we go, we all go.' And I think it made my children in a sense. They are all very sensitive about prejudice.

"The English Department had started as a language teaching department, and it had only been going for about a year when I arrived. It was only just beginning to teach second year students, and there was no literature taught.

"I designed a syllabus which was full of literature but the principle of it was if I chose an English text I also asked them to read a Nigerian text in English. English is the universal language in Nigeria and that's because there's about 250 separately identifiable languages.

"They were linguistically competent already, they just hadn't read much."

"A couple of the students came in and one of them was deputised to ask why I was asking them to read something as Godless as Waiting for Godot. They thought this was an insult to the Muslim faith.

"So I sat them down and managed to persuade them that it isn't against any particular religion. It's against all theological explanations of the meaning of life: 'We're absurd, we are truly absurd. What is the point?' [Samuel] Beckett is saying.

"I helped to set up a Law Department, but it wasn't just three years of common law, it was four years of common law and Sharia law together.

"They really wanted both law systems to be taught together in three years, but I said it was impossible. You can't do it. I thought four would be the minimum, so we did that.

"That was an important achievement because in those days we didn't even have a Law Department. We had almost an instant Law Department."

"There were very close connections between the Muslim leadership in the town in that part of northern Nigeria and the university. You couldn't avoid it. And you wouldn't claim that the university was secular, because it wasn't.

"The Nigerian staff members were wonderful. If it was difficult for me, it was difficult for them.

"There was no racism in that sense. There is a kind of lurking power struggle always in that part of Nigeria."

"In the end we had to go back for the children and their schooling."

"We do think of ourselves as being Australian, we've thought that for a long time.

"I think I'm delighted. I am as it were honoured by it. I don't know whether I think these things are important or not, but I have put my own colleagues up for honours.

"People in the humanities don't put themselves forward. If they're writers they tend to be very jealous of other writers.

"I say that because my immediate friends at Monash are all scientists. I've always been the token humanities person wherever I've been. They don't really understand what I do."

"If you consider the effect of the shift in fee paying in tertiary education now is to make humanities, which is cheap to do, the most expensive course. It's punitive.

"The result is the humanities are being run down nationally.

"In this century, and in the last five years, the value of being able to read a book quietly on your own has surely increased. You can't play on machines all day, you can't go anywhere because you have to wear a mask, you can't do anything.

"It's what happens to the mind in a sense, and the imagination that is so important, in reading books.

"And the people are still there. We still have libraries, we still have librarians, we still have people who can encourage primary school kids to get the habit of reading.

"I just think it's like breathing.

"When we first came to Melbourne I remember being impressed that when you got on a train you would see people reading books. You tended not to see that in UK. This was serious reading, serious books. I thought there must be not much wrong with Australia."

"I think you can survive perfectly happily without ever reading books - I can't imagine how you could - but in reality you can.

"Reading books is providing an access to somebody else's reality. And it is a magical thing, because no other species on this planet reads.

"Reading literature introduces you to competing realties. You think everybody lives like you do, but no they don't. I'll show you how different they are; read King Lear and that will tell you what sisters can do.

"I think every sort of human mood and state and fixation and human nastiness has been written about somewhere."

"My first book was typed on the kitchen table. You had to hit the keys twice to get a good imprint. I think that was in 1978.

"It was very exciting, and it still is.

"The last book I did was called Jonathan Swift on the Anglo-Irish Road. It was about his travelling life between London and Dublin.

"I wrote that here and I was thrilled to bits when I actually saw it eventually.

"It's because somehow your work is not going to be lost. Somebody else has published it, and disseminated it, and that means it's there somewhere.

"Frankly, it [literature] doesn't matter. We can survive without literature. But we can survive better, with literature."

Professor Probyn OAM was one of 1191 Australians on this year's King's Birthday Honours List, including awards in the Order of Australia [General and Military Divisions], meritorious awards and recognition for distinguished and conspicuous service.

The published author has been a Monash University Emeritus Professor, since 2009.

He has been the co-director of the Henry Handel Richardson Project since 1993. And he was the founder and former president of the Henry Handel Richardson Society.

In 1992, he became an Australia Academy of the Humanities fellow. And in the 1990s, he was the founding Dean of Arts and Islamic Studies at Sokoto University, Nigeria.

Professor Probyn also received a Centenary Medal in 2001.

The Southern Highland News asked the newly awarded OAM to pin-point the most pivotal moment in his career.

"That was marrying Meg," he said.

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