The defunding of the University of Sydney’s professorial chair of Australian Literature was announced earlier this month to follow the retirement of Professor Rob Dixon, causing an outcry in the academic community and drawing scathing responses from several of the discipline’s most senior colleagues and professional bodies. The Australian attributed the move to our oft-cited cultural cringe—a national unwillingness to claim as worthy our own literature. Its headline asks, ‘What kind of country can’t bear to teach its own literature?’ But this is a question which draws greater attention to the traditionalist perceptions of academia, to the concept of a professor leading a research team at a top-ranked university, than it does to the broader question at hand: that is, what is the role of Australian literature today, and why does it matter?

Certainly the loss of the University of Sydney chair suggests a failure to recognise the importance of studying our own literature, as well as literature and the humanities more broadly. Susan Lever has made the case for the short-sightedness of the cancellation and the critical importance of this professorial chair.[1] Julieanne Lamond, too, has recognised the causal link between the underfunding of the humanities and the loss of this position at the University of Sydney. As Lamond has pointed out, the move is hardly surprising, given the lack of government funding to these areas and thus the persistent belief that this does not constitute worthwhile research.[2]