Cameron Richards grew up on a sheep station in North-West Queensland literally a few kilometres from Dagsworth Station where the events (and the writing) of Waltzing Matilda took place. He is a still active academic whose 1994 PhD dissertation was sub-titled ‘Re-framing the problem of interpreting Australian cultural and literary models’. In this and also a number of papers either published in the Journal of Australian Studies or presented at ASPACLS conferences in the late 1990s, his work explored several related themes of relevance to Australian literary studies. Based on the recent insights of Paul Ricoeur and others that metaphor and narrative are really basic (not add-ons) to all human thinking and communication, one is that various modes of ‘literature’ involve a facility for narrative models and metaphoric insights into various aspects of life. Applied to an Australian literary context, this insight was also developed as a defence of as well as a demonstration of the continued relevance of Australian literary histories/studies (and story-telling more widely). This was exemplified by his use of a local ‘post-colonial’ framework to defend as well as distinguish sustainable versions of Aust Lit from the Cultural Studies – cum – postmodern ‘discrediting’ of literary studies as well as both modernist and nationalist models of criticism (i.e. 'saving the baby from the bathwater'). Likewise, his work applies various original rhetorical methods of analysis which have particular local as well as more global application in literary as well as popular cultural contexts – in particular, the use and abuse of utopia vs. exile rhetorics, the identification of distinctive Australian verbal as well as situational ironies, and a focus on how ‘the migrant’s dilemma writ large’ still remains today (engaging with recent literary and multi-cultural contexts) the pivotal theme in Australian cultural history. Since the late 1990s Richards has worked as an academic in various multi-disciplinary fields of education and policy studies – after leaving QUT being based in universities in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. Recently ‘semi-retired’ to the Gold Coast he remains an adjunct professor at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand where he continues to teach on an occasional basis, and still regularly undertakes consultancies of interest involving community and industry-based issues of sustainability, policy and applied ‘complex problem-solving’.
Source: Supplied by author, August 2016.
