Thank you for the opportunity to open this seminar program today. I have been asked to speak on more or less the same themes that I addressed at the postgrad research seminar last year, when my name appeared much further down the program. I’m going to take this elevation as an indication that some of the things I was talking about last year—when I relayed the saga of my postgrad and post-postgrad experience—had resonance and relevance. I apologise in advance to those of you who were here last year and may notice some repetition. Equally, I’m sorry to those new postgrads for whom I might not provide enough context of my own experience. (I sometimes think PhD stories are a bit like birth stories. You tend to think that everyone is going to be interested in all the gory details, because they’ve been so deliciously traumatic and transformative for you. But for some people, just the name and birth weight are more than enough!)

The broad question that I’m going to discuss is: how to get the most out of your time as a postgraduate candidate. That is, how to get more out of it than just your PhD.

In making any grand pronouncements about the lessons I’ve learnt from my own apprenticeship, I’m mindful that everyone who undertakes postgraduate study does it for their own unique reasons. If we were to start off this seminar today by going around the room—much as you do in a first tutorial—and ask everyone to get up and say WHY they decided to write a masters or doctoral thesis, I suspect we’d get as many answers as there are ways to format a bibliography. There will be mothers of grown children for whom a return to study is a reward for a lifetime of services rendered, and mothers of young children for whom further study is personally satisfying and professionally advantageous but has the potential to totally overload a finely wrought, and mostly sleep-deprived, balancing act. There will be fathers for whom writing a thesis instead of say, getting a proper job, will entail significant sacrifices for the family. There will be young un-marrieds, for whom writing a thesis requires putting off other major life events. Some of you will have had to convince doubtful relatives that you are not completely mad. Others will, from time to time, have a sneaking suspicion that the doubters were right.

We all come to postgraduate study at different life stages, and with different personal goals and aspirations. In these days of relatively high employment, insanely high real estate prices, prohibitive tertiary fees and drastically filleted university departments, few people choose to undertake postgraduate study because they think it is a financially sensible decision or that it will get them an academic appointment. The mind-blowing qualifications, experience and output of the three recent appointments to this department are ample evidence that a PhD is merely a tick the box to an academic career.

Now, I don’t want to sound gloomy, nor to seem nostalgic for a halcyon age of academe where the career path was straight and narrow. My point is that to undertake postgraduate study in our particular age requires a great deal of motivation, persistence and deferred gratification. There are many pleasures involved in thesis-writing, but what I want to focus on today is the idea that the period of your postgraduate candidature is about more than just researching a topic and writing up a thesis. I think that, as well as unearthing original material, documenting your findings and accumulating specialist knowledge of your particular subject area, there are several skills and attitudes to be learnt along the way that will both enhance the possibility that your thesis will make an impact and hold you in good sway for whatever comes next in your professional or personal journey.


The Dark Art of Skiting

The first skill that you need to develop and practice during your candidature is what I like to call The Dark Art of Skiting: that is, the ability to present yourself and your work in the best possible light. I don’t mean here your competence in writing up your research findings in a clear, logical and academically rigorous fashion (though of course you must do all those things for the thesis to be successful). What I mean is the capacity to convey in the most enthusiastic terms to the broadest possible audience what it is that you do, why it is interesting and worthwhile, and why you are the best person for the job.

There are a couple of components to this skill. First, I’m a firm believer that you should be able to explain what your thesis is about to the person sitting next to you on the tram just as effectively as to your supervisor. The tram companion mightn’t need to know the ins and outs of your daily struggle (perhaps your supervisor doesn’t want to hear this either!) but I don’t think that there is anybody who is too smart or too stupid to grasp the basic content and contention of your research. I doubt that any of you would be so snobby as to consider that some people are just not worth expending the effort of discussing your work. Conversely, in my experience, postgraduate students are mysteriously prone to internalise the idea that what they are doing is either a self-inflicted penance or a guilt-ridden privilege, and that consequently nobody really wants to know what they’re doing. They shy away from direct questions about their research, laughing nervously about how obscure, arcane or effete their topic is. They reduce their work to a few self-deprecating lines and hope to hell the conversation moves quickly on to what happened on Australian Idol last night.

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering why postgraduate students are so self-effacing, so reluctant to speak confidently about their topic and their purpose. I’ve also noticed that this phenomenon tends to occur the further a postgrad is down the track of thesis-writing; rather than feeling more assured of their authority to speak about their subject, they seem more convinced of the futility of the exercise. I think part of the answer lies in the fact that as superbly educated, critically-minded, analytical high achievers, postgraduates are likely—as a personality type— to be prone to self-doubt, anxiety and perhaps, in the face of extreme stress, even depression. As a cohort, we who are attracted to intellectual endeavours are likely to see our own deficiencies and weaknesses as glaring signs of inadequacy. We think that others will naturally see these blind spots too, and we work very hard, very methodically, to shield ourselves from the criticism of others.

Temperamentally, most of us who are drawn to scholarly life are not natural extroverts. We might even find academia appealing precisely because we don’t like to draw attention to ourselves, we enjoy the solitude and slightly monastic conditions, we’re cautious, risk adverse, perfectionist types. Think about it: if there was a reality TV show called Academics on Ice, how many of you would volunteer to go out in the spotlight and fall flat on your face?

I think this inherent tendency towards self-control and restraint is both enhanced by and feeds into the fact that writing a thesis is essentially a defensive act. In training to be scholars, we are taught to cover our tracks, to dot our I’s and cross out T’s, to never make any assertion unless we can back it up with evidence, to show how familiar we are with all the latest and most significant literature on the subject. Of course, these practices are vital to scholarship, but they can also leave you feeling like a fraud, an impostor, a lot of time. I once heard Greg Dening say that in writing a thesis, we always ‘imagine a thousand foes’. It’s a kind of siege mentality that is not particularly conducive to standing up straight, holding your head up high and cheerfully, even light-heartedly, telling someone what it is you’re doing. The inherent psychological framework of thesis-writing is conservative, rather than expansive, open and expressive.

Again, this vaguely distrustful and self-protective stance of the thesis-writer is compounded by the wider culture of academia. Unlike other tertiary industries that trade in ideas—say advertising or entertainment—universities have operated on the somewhat bi-polar ethos of collegiality and patronage. Collegiality works against the idea that you might stand out from the crowd, while patronage discourages rising above your station without first paying your dues. In the past 10–15 years, universities themselves have been expected to operate on market principles and find entrepreneurial ways of running along business models, yet university workers—especially the ones at the bottom of the industrial rung, the postgrads, the academic proletariat – are still stifled by the old cultural values. I feel like a complete neo-con shmuck in saying this, but it’s not unwise in your postgrad years to begin to cultivate a more business-minded ethic, seeing your work as a product, your ideas as marketable, and perhaps even yourself as a brand. Being able to sell your work—as interesting, innovative and constructive—and being able to sell yourself—as intelligent, capable and useful to public culture—are skills which should act as a counter-balance to the postgrad’s natural and conditioned tendency to become demoralised by the long years of being an adult student.

So what I’m really saying here is be positive, be confident, be assertive, be ambitious for yourself and your project. Believe what you’re doing is worthwhile, and find a language in which you can communicate to others that what you are doing is worthy of attention and, even, praise.

You’ll also find that blowing your own trumpet is just about mandatory if you wish to continue in academia after you’re through the eye of the postgrad needle. An application for a postdoctoral fellowship, for example, requires an enormous amount of hot air. I remember when I wrote my application, I physically squirmed and felt utterly nauseous while writing shining testimonies to my own brilliance. (I was trying to convince my invisible interrogators to catch this rising star, but what if—that small voice inside me kept saying—they saw that I was really just an exhausted mother of two small children pretending to be a scholar?)

In a postdoc application you basically have to say why the project you are proposing is the best thing since sliced bread and why you are the only person who is even remotely qualified to conduct the research. You have to justify the significance and impact of your past research outputs as well as make a compelling case for the innovation, indeed the national benefit, for god’s sake, of your proposed project. Obviously, this is a matter of substance – you have to have done the work and have some runs on the board or ‘track record’ as they call it— but it is also largely a matter of tone. The whole thing is an elaborate exercise in skiting. As is, I should add, the RQF (Research Quality Framework) which all salaried academics are now required to submit.

Now I will be the first to admit that the dark art of skiting is not without its problems. If you achieve some measure of success in selling your ideas to the wider world, especially when you are still a postgrad— and this is distinctly possible—you run the risk of being labelled as self-promotional, entrepreneurial, a prima donna, a populist, shallow, vain, attention-seeking, a Lone Wolf, punching above your weight. There is even a suspicion that these things are a bit un-Australian; that it’s not quite cricket, too American in style, all froth and no grunt. (Though it must be said that La Trobe is a very outward-looking university and I’ve encountered no resistance here.) All I can say on this score is that you will always have your detractors, and the more you stick your neck out into public life, the more of them you will attract. Learning to cope with jibes from within our small and quite insular industry is good practice for dealing with the media, book reviewers, letters to the editor, bloggers and job interviews. It’s best to develop a thick skin now, when the criticisms are mostly benign, before moving out into the wider world of public discourse where, I’ve found, the disparagement and disapproval can be vicious.

The real trick is not to believe your own publicity. It’s important to be able to separate your ego from what you consider to be important tools of the trade. This will help keep your feet on the ground, keep you focussed on what is important—which is always the work—and remind you who your friends are.

OK, now what I want to turn to in the final stage here is the pragmatics of attention-seeking. I want to give you some strategies for finding concrete ways to raise the profile and the status of your postgraduate research—and, in the process, begin to make a name for yourself.

I haven’t really got time to go through the hands-on methods of, say, writing a press release or otherwise making contact with the media, but I have in the past, and again today, extend an offer to the postgraduate co-ordinator to run a workshop on these skills if there is interest.


Practice writing history for different audiences

To some extent, I think historians are fortunate that there is an innate human need for and interest in story-telling about the past. You’ll find that it’s not hard to interest people in what we do as historians. Writers Festivals, for example, always have multiple sessions on history-writing, where other social sciences such as anthropology, sociology, archaeology and geography are not represented at all. I think the trick is to find a way to tell your story that stays quite close to the documentary sources and shies away from academic discourses—that is, the conversations you might have with peers about how your work fits in with or challenges so-and-so’s theory of blah-blah. These scholarly debates are important, but they’re mostly important to other scholars. They rightly belong in academic journals. But your story-telling can go beyond that, and reach into the public and popular culture, where they rightly belong too. By all means write journal articles, but also write (and read) non-academic essays. Think about how you might tell your story for The Monthly, or Meanjin, or Eureka Street, or The Saturday Age. Connect your story about the past to contemporary politics or current affairs. Makes its relevance and significance immediately apparent. I’m not saying you will be able to do this in the early stages of your candidature; you might find that you don’t start to make sense of your material in these terms until after you’ve written the thesis proper. But I do think you should be thinking in these terms, with these goals in mind and beginning to practice the skills it will require to write, say, an essay for The Monthly.

You should also think about writing book reviews and other forms of journalistic writing, like feature articles or opinion pieces. You could, for example, email the editor of Australian Book Review or the books editor at The Age or Overland or Arena Magazine and put your name forward as a potential reviewer. Let them know your particular areas of interest and expertise. You might feel a bit daft and certainly quite vulnerable doing this, but my rule of thumb is—really, you’ve got nothing to lose, and maybe, just maybe, something will come of it. Putting yourself forward like this isn’t easy, but neither can you expect that things will just come to you.

Can I also say here that as well as learning to write for a wide range of audiences, I think it’s important to read across a wide range of history books. The tendency during our postgraduate research is to only read books that are relevant to our topic—and usually not even the whole book; we learn to quickly pick the stuffing out of a text using an index and a vulture’s eye for what affirming quotes will help our cause. This is an efficient use of time, but it does not necessarily make for good writing of your own. I consider this a big mistake in my own thesis-writing. I deliberately saved up for my reward, once the thesis was in, all the works of popular history that I considered a naughty indulgence during my candidature. I’m talking about books like Sian Rees’ The Floating Brothel, Sarah Murgatroyd’s The Dig Tree, Robyn Annear’s The Man Who Lost Himself and Marele Day’s historical novel, Mrs Cook. You could also list Dava Sobel’s Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter or the many books by Jared Diamond or even Colleen McCullogh. These are books of literary non-fiction with historical subjects that have caught the public imagination. They are all written by skilled writers with or without formal history training. Reading them will teach you a lot about writing, if not contribute directly to your research findings.

(I’m taking for granted here that finding a publisher for your thesis, and therefore writing it with an intention to reach more of an audience than just your examiners, is a prima facie way to attract attention to the fruits of your postgraduate research.)


Prizes

Another way to put yourself forward is to enter prizes. Now this will likely only be relevant after you’ve finished your thesis, but there are prizes for postgraduate work available, and you shouldn’t expect that anyone is going to nominate you for them. Self-nomination is de rigour, even if it feels weird. Again, you’ve got nothing to lose by entering, and you might just win one, and then you can call yourself an award-winning historian, which again, takes some getting used to the immodesty of the description, but you’ll find that it’s a very effective attention-seeking device. [The prizes I have in mind are the Serle Award for Australian history (presented by the Australian Historical Association) and the Max Kelly medal for work by an emerging historian in any area (presented by the History Council of NSW). I’ve also just noticed that La Trobe has introduced Research Thesis Merit Awards for postgraduate theses. There are also essay awards that you should consider, such as the Calibre Prize presented by Australian Book Review and the Copyright Agency. This one comes with a $10,000 prize money, so fortune as well as fame await you here!]


Networking

Finally, I’d like to speak about another sordid subject: networking. Now, the word networking has come to be associated with a sort of 1980s, greed-is-good, power-dressing, corporate style of engagement that suggests scrabbling over competitors to get to know all the right people in all the highest places. It’s suggestive of golf days with people you hate and exchanging business cards only to dump them in the nearest bin. I don’t believe this is what networking is really about. I would define networking as getting to know a wide range of people who are broadly working in your field of endeavour, becoming familiar with their work and letting them know what you do too. And I think it’s an important part of one’s professional identity and professional practice. For historians, I would say that people working broadly in our industry are museum curators, librarians, teachers, archivists, arts administrators, writers, journalists, media workers and academics working in other disciplines. There can be material benefits to knowing such people—such as the opportunity for employment, getting published or working on co-operative projects—but there is also a more emotional aspect, which is feeling connected to a broader intellectual and professional community.

This sense of belonging can ameliorate some of the feelings of despondency that can arise from being a small fish in a small pond. Being a small fish in a big pond can be intimidating but it is also infinitely more stimulating and enriching. I think it’s also important to say that networking is not just about getting recognition for yourself, but knowing what your peers are doing well enough to be able to pass opportunities on to them. Because I have developed a reasonably high public profile for someone at my career level, I now get many offers for public speaking, or media interviews, or book reviewing that I am not in a position to take—either because I am too busy or because I don’t feel properly qualified to speak on the subject. But when I say no to an invitation I always put forward someone else’s name in my place, usually another emerging scholar whose name is not yet known around the traps. I think good networking requires generosity of spirit, not being jealous or covetous of other people’s successes and—again—a commitment to the idea that it is the work that is important, not the attention for its own sake.

In conclusion, I know it is not easy to stay on top of emotions of self-doubt, anxiety, possibly even guilt and shame over the long grind of your postgraduate research. Theses are undertaken at great personal cost, often for little tangible reward beyond knowing you have set yourself a goal and you have achieved it. My message to you is: be brave, be bold, push the boundaries of your comfort zone and, now and again, try skating on thin ice.