Acting Head of the School of Communication Bill Blaikie will take a “lifetime of memories” with him when he leaves Charles Sturt University (CSU) early next month.

 

Mr Blaikie was a student on the Bathurst Campus of CSU – back when it was Bathurst Teachers College. Eight years later he returned to teach at the then Mitchell College of Advanced Education.

 

“I have seen CSU change again and again. And it is interesting how the Communication School and staff have so readily adapted. Their constant improvement of the courses they teach is a measure of them as people.”

 

He says the staff and students are what he will most miss: “The intellectual stimulation of being with people who are always asking questions about why things are they way they are and how we might improve them is an exciting privilege.

 

“I grew up in a newspaper family, so it was a given that good reporting can keep society and its systems as honest as possible. Theatre also has this function, to help people enter into the debate of what is important morally, ethically and factually.”

 

Mr Blaikie has endeavoured to instil in his students the role of theatre as a “social tool”. It is what he is most proud of: “We have worked constantly to connect the Theatre/Media course as widely as we can - internationally and locally.

 

“Taking CSU students from the suburbs to small schools in the Central West and seeing the amazement on their faces when they realise people live very differently in the country from what they had ever imagined, and seeing the delight in the eyes of the school pupils at the shows the students devised.

 

“And where people have picked up on that and run with it has been where it has been really exciting.”

 

One of his former students, Brendan Cowell, is an acclaimed actor, producer and director. “Bill taught me not to assume the position of ‘tool in a toolbox’ waiting to be plucked out and used, but to get up off one’s arse, stop the whinging and make the art happen yourself, to take it to the minds and hearts of the people; in essence to be the whole box of tools yourself.

 

“Bill’s main interest is in the complexities of the world, and that’s what makes him such a great teacher, artist and bloke. I wish him well and will always carry with me the pearls of ‘Blaikie’.”

 

Mr Blaikie said, “The students make this place. Their willingness to undertake projects quite daunting to them has always been something that I have been warmed by, encouraged by, delighted by. As a place of learning, this place is incredibly powerful – it does things to people. It opens their minds and imaginations to serving something greater than themselves. It is what you want out of a good education”.

 

An expert in directing, circus, physical theatre, mask, and theatre as arts education, he has organised and overseen workshops in Australia and overseas in mask making, acrobatics, and clowning.

 

Mr Blaikie’s post-CSU retirement plans include travel, workshops in directing and mask-making, a mask exhibition at Bathurst Regional Gallery later this year, the launch of colleague Ray Harding’s play ‘A Terrible Beauty’ at the Ubud Writer’s Festival, Bali, and “perhaps being an outside eye for a new show for Circus Oz”. Circus Oz is directed by another of Bill’s former students, Mike Finch.