Fiona Stanley
October 2013
Advocate for a healthier society; Director of the 2013 Festival of Ideas at the University of Melbourne.
There is a gift for Melburnians currently being laboriously constructed. Not a statue, edifice or highway. Being of a more ephemeral nature it is, in some ways, the very antithesis of these things.
The University of Melbourne’s third Festival of Ideas is being orchestrated from the Gatekeeper’s Cottage. Perched on the periphery of its Parkville campus it is a lovely gabled building of the type one imagines might have housed a parish priest in nineteenth century rural England. Inside it sits Professor Fiona Stanley, an inspired choice for this year’s director. As she explains it, “what the concept is… is Melbourne University’s gift to the City of Melbourne to really challenge and debate the things that are affecting us a society.” These ‘things that are affecting us’ happen to be those with which she has been tirelessly involved for several decades.
Stanley is formidable on paper: achievements in maternal child health, Indigenous health, epidemiological innovations, her over three hundred and fifty-strong publication history. In researching her life, her Australian of the Year accolade of 2003 seems perversely minor compared with the rest of her accomplishments. This is not a woman who rests upon her laurels, but neither does she have the cocksure nature that other highly proficient people sometimes acquire. A poise and graciousness exists alongside an uncompromising honesty about things that matter to her. She is, as she says, ‘deadly serious’ about the present and future of this planet. Words and phrases that have been watered down or distorted in mainstream discourse are reclaimed with potency, inquisitiveness and insight: climate change, obesity, Indigenous respect and health, the scourge of alcohol amongst our young.
She is a natural advocate. Today her skills of promotion are focused on the Festival of Ideas which is themed around projects close to her heart: science, society, self and wellbeing. The festival, which is completely gratis, distinguishes itself from the Festival of Dangerous Ideas which takes place at the Sydney Opera House and has become known for its glamorous keynote speakers flown in from overseas; think Slavoj Žižek, Germaine Greer, the late Christopher Hitchens, to name a few. It is evident that Stanley is not attracted to hype; although she is attracted to thinkers. She keeps bringing the festival back to its grass roots, referring to the team of people involved in its planning, including ‘a lot of young people’ who preferred to have a more actively involving platform rather than ‘just a talkfest’.
The festival is to be streamed online, inviting tweets which will be edited by students to then “go to a question and answer session and debate… At the end of each day we hope that there would be a set of major ideas almost like a manifesto and on the last day [the ‘Democracy Day’] these will be debated. What do these ideas mean for us? And what are we going to do about them?” From this woman of science, these seeming questions, which are actually clarion calls for public engagement and civic empowerment sans the hyperbole and mindless jargon that has become everyday currency, are utterly convincing.
It is critical to Stanley that people have a sense of their own control and potency. She believes that many people “don’t need their minds changed but what they need to do is to realise that they have the power to change things”, to realign where society seems to be headed.
“You know many of us feel paralysed and apathetic about climate change, about environmental degradation, about the workplace and how it undervalues us as parents. We feel absolutely paralysed by the fact that the financial bottom line rules everything.” She makes reference to Robert Kennedy’s profound statement regarding the GDP – ‘It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile’ – and it is an adage which might well explain her own trajectory. It has been a life spent in inquiry regarding some of the world’s ills and how they might be righted, from birth defects (she was one of the researchers responsible for discovering that folate can greatly reduce instances of spina bifida), to the gaping disparity in Aboriginal health and wellbeing compared to the rest of the population.
The seeds for this kind of life were planted in her childhood; her father was one of the world’s first virologists who worked on the polio vaccine and her mother was a classics scholar with a bent for human justice issues. Amidst this intellectual engagement with the world was an early childhood spent around La Perouse in Sydney, exploring the natural world before her family moved to Perth. In a telling 2000 interview on Radio National she termed it ‘a very exciting, wonderful magic childhood’. She attributes many of her childhood role models to introductions through much-loved books: George Washington Carver, botanist and inventor born into slavery, Nobel Prize winning scientist Marie Curie, missionary doctor Albert Schweitzer. All devoted their work to the advancement of others and interestingly, are of the same epoch.
One suspects that Stanley would think it too much to be aligned with this list of notables. But together with her determination to find the best data in the search for disease prevention, there is a deeply embedded care for others, regardless of circumstances. In conversation she is naturally solicitous and inquisitive, asking questions unrelated to her task at hand. She has said before that Sir Gustav Nossal once told her that ‘one of the most important characteristics of an institute director was generosity’ and it is a quality she espouses. She champions the role of mentor and credits others with facilitating her work.
Although married to immuno-virologist Professor Geoffrey Shellam, their two grown daughters have not followed them into the sphere of science; one is a theatre director and the other a first-contact historian. For Stanley, there is a palpable recognition of history as a vital force. She ‘adores’ the work of Inga Clendinnen, a formidable historian and thinker. This link to Australia’s foundations will be featured in the festival’s opening night through the ‘Bunjil’s Nest’ ceremony wherein foundation sticks will be laid by Wurundijeri elder Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin and University of Melbourne Chancellor, Ms Elizabeth Alexander AM. Derived from the Kulin Kulin Dreaming around Bunjil the Eagle, a nest will be created over the duration of the festival. Attendees will be invited to write messages on eucalyptus sticks which will then be sculpted by Brian McKinnon of the National Gallery of Victoria and placed permanently on the grounds of the university campus. The symbolic nest serves as both a repository of desires, messages and hopes and a tribute to the traditional landowners.
When Stanley says, “we wanted to have something a bit more controversial”, you know this is said in a spirit of genuine willingness to engage with variance in opinion. She wants to write more; she feels impelled to communicate the truths that she holds. There is an essay on Aboriginal services in the current Griffith REVIEW but she’d also like to write a piece on the overmedicalisation of childhood and current Australian rates of Caesarean sections; it’s 33 percent and, according to Stanley, “unnecessary and worrying”. She thinks it imperative that positive developments are acknowledged, like the current figures of parity for Aboriginal students in medical degrees in Australia, orchestrated by the efforts of Monash researcher Gregory Phillips, a Waanyi and Jaru man, in collaboration with universities across the nation. It is a remarkable, little known accomplishment, one which should have long-reaching effects. It also acts as evidence for Stanley’s conviction that if Aboriginal people are seriously consulted about services, much can be done, if only bureaucrats would “start funding things which work… we could turn around things pretty rapidly.” This is a very different portrait to the one we are accustomed to hearing about intractable situations and yet, one could hardly call this evidence-driven woman a Pollyanna.
She retired a couple of years ago from being Director of the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research in Perth after founding it in 1990 but is still a Patron today and is aligned to the University of Western Australia. One senses that the steeliness in her mission is underpinned by a low level of tolerance for stalling and ineffectiveness. Her rallying cry is ‘Can’t we get our act together?’ There is emotion in her voice but it is a dignified, restrained demeanour that Stanley presents. October’s Festival of Ideas should set Melbourne alight in all the right ways, if Melbournians will take up this most meaningful of endowments.
The 2013 Festival of Ideas runs from October 1 – October 6.
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