Lumen Winter 2014 - Flipbook - Page 14
1950s Alumni Voice
Meredith Hooper
Emerging from the shadows of war
Former Australian Antarctic Arts Fellow Meredith
Hooper is a leading writer, lecturer and broadcaster
who was recently named Australian of the Year in the
UK. A Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge,
Ms Hooper graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from
the University of Adelaide in 1961.
We, late 1950s University of
Adelaide students, were war
babies. The radio delivering
nightly battle bulletins. Around us as we
grew, inserts of new kinds of people—
displaced persons, ‘foreign’ teachers at
school grappling with unfamiliar English.
‘Europeans’ who showed us descendants
of northern latitudes’ emigrants how
Adelaide was a Mediterranean climate.
Olives dropping from trees in the Parklands
could be eaten rather than stamped on.
Icecream turned into a revelation.
As teenagers we lived under the fear of the
Bomb. Would we even have a future? But
we got to 17. Espresso coffee, exotically
drunk at little tables in the City Arcade. And
for those who—by definition in our home
city—went to The University of Adelaide
in leafy North Terrace, the good fortune of
lecturers from other worlds.
For us historians, Peter Phillips, escaped
multiple times from prisoner of war camps.
George Rudé, urbane, scholar of the
French Revolution. An actual American—
Hector Kinloch. Joining Hugh Stretton,
gentle, amused aura of Balliol, Oxford and
his time as Dean. Douglas Pike, seamed
with his Chinese childhood. Ken Inglis, at
26, seriously grown-up.
We students worked hard. That wasn’t at
issue. Holidays spent earning.
For most of my girls’ school
contemporaries leaving school meant
some minimal job and early marriage.
Almost unquestioned. But The University
of Adelaide gave me—ignorant even of
its existence—the Overseas Scholarship
in Arts and Economics. Someone read it
out loud from the newspaper one summer
midnight as we waited by the Advertiser
offices for our finals results. The History
Department appointed me tutor. Seven
months of happy academic career then on
board the P&O Oriana with one and a half
suitcases, a trunk, and the companionship
of 18 young scholarship-holding Australians
from every state heading for UK universities.
I’d never been away from home for more
than two weeks. It mattered not a jot. Four
weeks at sea and I’d climbed up the world.
21 years old. The adventure of England.
Oxford. New friends to make. My only
contact a family we’d sent food parcels
to in the war. A desperately crowded
landscape. I thought if I took five big strides
I’d be out the other side. Conventional,
tight, still war-caught but—in 1961—
beginning to sprout shoots.
My mother, as I left, grieved: you’ll marry an
Englishman. I did. No longer available for a
University post. Married, my tutors offered
me a role as their researcher. I had been
elected the only woman in my year out of
20 to a Nuffield College Studentship. Won
the Beit Prize, the Walter
Frewin Lord Prize: But.
Meredith Hooper (far right) at her graduation in 1961
committed London life, time in Australia. As
opportunity allowed, visiting scholarships,
board memberships bedding in.
Until my second great chance: an invitation
to Antarctica as a writer with the Australian
Antarctic Division. To uncover, instant,
unexpected, a passionate commitment to
that massive continent clasping the bottom
of the world. And go back, and back, to
work and research. To spend real time.
Then, and ever since, with as many means
as I can: to share my sense of and belief in
this critically important one-tenth
of Earth’s land surface. Antarctica.
By Meredith Hooper
I went to the US with my
husband. Discovered I
liked writing books for a
wide audience; and never
stopped. Still passionately
an historian, but writing
about science, technology,
aviation, space, Egyptology,
Australia; fiction, non fiction;
lecturing, broadcasting.
Whatever fitted my
reality: three children,
ever busier husband,
Meredith Hooper, Sir Douglas Mawson bust, North Terrace campus
12 Lumen | Winter 2014
