Chris Bowen walks the talk

Published 19 June 2019

"I wanted to study Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesia's national language) because increasing our Asian language literacy, particularly in Indonesian, is so important to Australia’s geopolitical future. We pay the Asian Century lip-service and will continue to until we lift our level of cultural, linguistic and social engagement in our region.

I thought it would be hypocritical of me to lecture young people that they should be studying Asian languages if I wasn’t prepared to “walk the walk” myself.

I won’t pretend it was always easy, but it was an enormously rewarding experience. Mid-career study of a language is possible, especially with the amount of support for distance students that UNE provides.

My advice to anyone contemplating studying a second language, regardless of their stage in life is: get into it. It’s not going to be easy, but it is enormously satisfying at the other end. Australia needs to massively lift the number of people who can speak Asian languages and it won’t happen unless we all start somewhere."