Graeme Harper was fresh from completing an Arts degree and intent on surfing east coast breaks – not penning his first novel – when his life veered towards UNE.
“Mine was the quintessential ‘Plan You Have When You Don’t Have A Plan’,” says the newly appointed Member of the Order of Australia, now Dr Graeme Harper AM. “Reading about the Master of Letters at UNE in the Taree Library, I realised I wasn’t finished with education, and probably not finished working out what I wanted to do in life either.”
Enrolling part-time in the Masters (in Economic and Social History) gave Graeme the chance to spend the rest of his time “surfing mostly and writing fiction at an old red Formica table”. His first work would go unpublished but earn Graeme a NSW Premier’s Literary Fellowship that launched his literary career.
Image: Graeme surfing at Crowdy Head.
The book that subsequently earned Graeme the inaugural National Book Council New Writers Award – an historical novel titled Black Cat, Green Field – drew on his UNE research and Graeme fondly remembers intensive schools on the Armidale campus.
“My teachers at UNE were of a high calibre. When in residence, I would wander out in the evening and if there were any lecture theatres open I’d go in and sit. Yes, that was me in there, after hours. Even a few minutes allowed me to feel the presence and exchange of knowledge that makes universities so miraculous; that palpable sense of human curiosity and discovery and possibility. It got me at UNE.”
An Australia Council Literary Fellowship then enabled Graeme to travel overseas to begin researching and writing his next novel, a doctoral work, as he toured Europe, Africa and the USA. He would become the first Australian to be awarded a doctorate in creative writing (from the University of Technology, Sydney, in 1993).
A wide range of fictional and academic works, and literary and research awards, have followed. Since 2012, at universities in the United Kingdom and the US, Graeme has variously been a Distinguished Professor, Director of Research, and Foundation Chair of the National Institute for Excellence in the Creative Industries (at the University of Wales). His academic writing has focussed, predictably, on the contemporary critical study of creative writing and creativity, but also film, comedy, colonialism and even the design of medical spaces.
Although he often publishes under the name Brooke Biaz, Graeme doesn’t consider Brooke a pseudonym.
“Brooke started writing when I was in England. It was a funny moment. All of a sudden Brooke was writing and I was watching Brooke write. Strangely, I also was writing. In that perhaps is the clue. We write constantly because it always combines imaginative invention and factual interpretation and there is something wonderful about that. I see Brooke more as an element of me. Brooke might disagree. Incidentally, I have occasionally been other people as well. Writing often defines its personality, according to need and according to what matters when you’re doing it.”
These days Graeme is Professor of Creative Writing and Dean of the Donna and Walt Young Honors College at Oakland University in Michigan, USA. His latest work of fiction (or rather Brooke’s) is Robots and Other People.
Indeed, far from being challenged by the implications of technology, Graeme recently encouraged his students to take part in AI internships, to “set the agenda”.
“AI is not an issue, as such. It is a tool that is making us contemplate what it is about human creativity that really matters,” Graeme says. “I would suggest the creative in creative writing is the action of doing it. The creativity we love in the arts is located in how we engage with artists through their work. How, why, where and in what ways they are behind that art is what connects us. I think we’ll find it is the humanness in creativity and the humanness in the arts that continues to move us.”
The investiture ceremony for Graeme’s King’s Birthday Order of Australia for significant service to literature, education and creative writing – for which he is “humbled, moved and immeasurably appreciative” – is due to take place in Washington D.C. later in the year.
“Brooke and I are big believers in the global connections we can create, and the conversations that can happen between people, wherever we are, and whomever we are,” Graeme says. “So, there is something significant about going to the Australian embassy in the American capital to be invested, and we’ll be celebrating the brilliance of conversation and empathy and understanding while there.”
