News Archive

The Centenary Poem, written by one of UWA's resident poets, Winthrop Professor Dennis Haskell, expands on our motto, Seek Wisdom.

You can read it here or watch Professor Haskell , a senior honorary research fellow, in the School of English and Cultural Studies, read it himself, in a video produced by Akos Bruz, senior video production officer at iVEC@UWA .

The Elusiveness of Wisdom

for UWA at its Centenary

A hubbub of bubbling voices

surges out of the lecture theatre,

young voices, strong voices, exhilarated

into sun-laden grounds, into the intransigent

summer's impossible light, into a place

that Nyoongar people fished and sang

for thousands of years, tossing up ideas,

chiacking each other, taking the mickey

but so alive and dimly aware:

the future is on their tongues

and they taste it because others have worked and thought,

discussed and written, through study and intuition

in laboratory, library and class, over coffee and committee

- the endless striving to know, to imagine, to understand

from what we are what we might yet be

in Romanesque stone and flourishing gardens

that show the first academy an Athenian grove:

an acknowledgement of history even in times

of easy cynicism, when history is glibly forgotten,

drowning in pop culture and mindless chatter;

here is a place where apprehensions of thought,

of ideas and imagination really matter,

a community that is the wider community's best part;

the heart lifts a little on perceiving its beauty,

eyes open a little wider,

ears listen a little more acutely.

To be of our time is all that time allows us

but UWA, one century old, will persist

bigger than any or all of us. We lucky enough

to have studied here, taught here, to have thought here

acknowledge the University as part of us

because we have been part of it, know that wisdom

is a horizon, that as you come closer it recedes,

and that this is the nature of knowledge, the journey

more enriching than the goal. To those

who have gone we cannot speak, but can respect;

to those young voices to come, a hundred years hence

we offer you the gift of what we know

and of our ignorance, that you will sweep aside

in that ongoing search, yours and ours;

and may you keep a sense

of the modesty of wisdom,

of its poetry and grace

pursued forever in this special place.