City dreamers

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Wendy Steele

MARGO HUXLEY: I'm not sure how to separate out ‘influences' and ‘experiences' from living in cities, or life in general, and pure accident and serendipity. The work I was doing in the 1980s and 1990s was influenced by the Marxist urban theories and feminist theories of the time, and a commitment to addressing gender, economic and spatial inequalities as they intersected in urban processes and built form.

I left Australia for very personal reasons related to a series of job-related and domestic crises (including the death of my partner, Brian McLoughlin). I was born in the United Kingdom, and have a brother and family here, so that was one motivation. I also had made several attempts to study for a PhD, but always found work or domestic pressures too great to continue. When I left RMIT, I applied to a couple of Australian universities for funding to study full time, without much success, so decided to move, and ended up with a grant to study in geography at the Open University. I'm not sure this had much to do with being female, but I did want to study geography (urban, social, cultural, gender).

To be honest, I think Australians do themselves a disservice when they imagine this wonderful ‘international level' that is bigger and better than parochial little Australia. At the moment, I just happen to be working in the United Kingdom, which is just as parochial in its own way as the United States – and more so than Australia in some ways, because they don't seem to feel the need to engage with other academic contexts like India or China or Australia. England still seems to see itself as the heart of empire to which everywhere else must defer. Australian academics are perforce much more aware of the variety of research that is done around the world than are most UK academics.

So I don't see myself as having a role as an ‘international' scholar, as such. That said, however, there is something intellectually exciting about being in a much larger university system and in a place in the world where academic interchanges are made much easier through proximity. I suppose I could say that this enables me to continue being a scholar in a way which might be a bit more difficult in Australia – although it's not a bed of roses here either, what with funding cuts, increasing student numbers, research assessment and all the other joys of ‘advanced liberal' academic life.

I don't see myself working any more or less ‘internationally' here than I would be in Australia. At the moment, I'm still trying to make the kinds of local links in practice and research in Sheffield that I'd built up over years in Melbourne. My current research is historical, and draws on material from Australia and Britain, so I need access to archival resources in both countries. Part of this current project is to ‘parochialise' England and treat historical developments on the same level, rather than positioning Australia as a colonial imitation.

My personal connections with Melbourne, in particular, are strong. This keeps me more or less in touch with what's happening. It's quite depressing to see the amount of meaningless redevelopment going on – but that's no different from Sheffield, or indeed London, New York, Johannesburg, Mumbai ...

THIS IS NOT THE ESSAY I had intended to write. I had visions of cleverly weaving key themes from the four women's stories into a critical narrative that provides insights into the Australian urban condition – a tale of gendered diaspora that has left urban planning in Australia impoverished as a result. That may well be true, but what emerged were stories that were far more personal, humble and poignant. The power in the stories, the conception of identity, was firmly located in their own narratives, not mine – particularly the strong desire to be close to family. Yet the frustrations of working in Australian higher education also emerged as a key driver, magnifying the attractions of international experience.

Within these four journeys, the influence of other Australian colleagues has endured despite the distance in an imagined community of scholars with roots in one of the most urban nations on earth. While my focus started as the desire to explore why a number of established Australian female urban planning scholars have left to work overseas, many questions have emerged in relation to those women who have returned or indeed have never left. What has held them within a political and economic climate that has provided so little support for their research? This highlights another story within Australian scholarship more broadly that is still waiting to be told. ♦