It says much about Canberra scholar Bruce Bennett that some of Australia's most important contemporary writers are coming to town later this month to honour him. As does the fact that he's hoping it will not be an exclusive, rarefied gathering of academics and writers, but one at which the reading public feels welcome.
Helen Garner, Robert Drewe, Peter Porter, Alexis Wright, Alex Miller, Frank Moorhouse, John Kinsella and other notable writers and academics are on the top-notch line-up for a colloquium in his honour in three weeks' time.
A leading scholar of Australian literature and its links with the literatures of Europe, Asia and North America, Bennett is Emeritus Professor of the University of NSW at the Australian Defence Force Academy, where he has taught and researched since 1993.
The quietly spoken, unassuming Perth-born Rhodes scholar, who once seemed destined for a career in foreign affairs, is enormously well regarded for his role in promoting Australian literature, not only at home but internationally. As Canadian academic Terry Goldie says of him, ''Around the world, but particularly in Asia, Bruce has been the face of Australian studies.''
Home and Away: Writing About Place is the title of the colloquium, reflecting his special interest in the lives of writers and their interactions with place.
His interest in the notion of ''home and away'' in Australian literature began, he thinks, when he himself first left home for Oxford in the 1960s and started to value the place he had left behind.
''I began to understand what it was for an imagined homeland in a place that you might have thought was lacking in imagination, culture and intelligence, and wasn't in fact at all. I think that's happened around Australia, that we have neglected the real imaginative richness that exists.
''Most recently I've written a paper on the ACT as a region of literary history, which again deserves further development.
''I think this notion of home is hard to understand fully until you've perhaps been away, and being away means different things to different people, of course.
''You can, like Gerald Murnane, live in Australia and live in a certain part of Australia and not travel and imagine very clearly as he does, but I think some of the writers invited to this conference, and the scholars, are very interested in different ways in this combination of home and away.
''I also want to stress the point that places inhabit us as much as we inhabit them. Places are often crucial identity-markers. Many of the writers and scholars who will speak at the colloquium demonstrate this point in their writings.''
Asked what inspired his interest in literature, Bennett says, ''I suppose it goes back to your parents often; in my case my parents left school at 14 and they had no formal education but my mother was always lost in books from the local library, and my father, who didn't read many books at all he'd let his three sons, of whom I was the eldest, know, 'I'm up to page 12 or I'm at page 24' but he was a great reader of newspapers and a great raconteur and storyteller around the bar or around the house.
''I guess it was that kind of sense of enjoyment of holding an audience and telling stories that appealed to me. Then later I was good at English and languages and I enjoyed the drama of words on the page.''
When Bennett returned to Western Australian from Oxford in the late 1960s his interest turned towards what was then the most neglected literature in an Australian context the literature of Western Australia.
''The thing that struck me was it hadn't been taught in universities and therefore was not valued in Australia,'' he says.
He developed bibliographies, wrote literary histories, edited anthologies, and with his colleagues introduced Australian literature into the University of Western Australia as a full subject of study in 1972-73. As chief examiner of English in Western Australia, he also had a big influence on school curriculums and encouraged others in that direction.
We discuss the current debate over moves to strengthen the study of Australian literature in NSW schools, which the English Teachers Association of NSW opposes, saying it confers a superiority over the literature of other cultures. Some have accused the ETA of thinking of Australian literature merely as colonial works about the bush and swagmen, such as the ballads of Henry Lawson and Banjo Patterson.
''Australian literature is part of world literature and it interacts with the literatures of other countries in quite interesting and surprising ways,'' Bennett responds. ''Generally speaking, it's not an isolationist literature and that applies as much to Alexis Wright's recent novel Carpentaria with its indigenous interests as it does to Robert Drewe's novels about the Asia Pacific or other types of works. I think that to stereotype Australian literature as Lawson and Paterson is to do them a disservice and also the notion of Australian writing by Australians.''
Asked whether he thinks there is sufficient emphasis generally in the Australian education system on our own literature, Bennett responds emphatically, ''No, no I don't.''
So what could we be doing better? ''I know we shouldn't look to American models but I taught at Georgetown University for a year in 2006 and I had a bunch of very interested American students who were pretty ignorant about Australian literature but very keen to learn. And what I learned about their system was that in Virginia they have to learn Virginian history. Why shouldn't Australian students be putting Australia at the centre of their education?
''Certainly we're all global citizens we need to think in broad terms but why don't we pay more attention to the creativity in our midst and learn from that, understand more from that and make it part of our curriculum in a quite natural way, which I think we're still having to fight for and we shouldn't have to be?''
Now semi-retired, Bennett still works at his ADFA office most days of the week. He has two big Australian Research Council grants: one to study expatriate writers in Britain, extending back beyond the ''Greer and Clive period'', especially since the 1830s; the other to research ''the spying game'', that is, Australian constructions of espionage in life writing, biography and fiction.
A fine and accessible writer himself, Bennett's books include An Australian Compass: Essays on Place and Direction in Australian Literature (1991), Spirit in Exile: Peter Porter and his Poetry (1991) which won the West Australian Premier's award for non-fiction The Oxford Literary History of Australia (1998) with Jennifer Strauss, Australian Short Fiction: A History (2002) and Homing In: Essays on Australian Literature and Selfhood (2006).
He notes proudly that among those coming to the conference are ex-students, including Salhia Ben-Messahel, an Algerian-born young woman who teaches at a university in France and has written the first full-length book on Tim Winton, and Megumi Kato from Tokyo, whose PhD he supervised and who is writing about Australian literary perceptions of Japan.
''It helps to reinforce the point that these are people from other countries who found a great interest and enthusiasm for Australian literature and who just exemplify a much wider trend in my interests, which is partly to take Australian writing, Australian culture to other countries, to build an interest in universities and cultures of other countries.''
He agrees that the number of countries where there are Australian studies and centres is surprising. He has had visiting appointments in several universities around the world, including London, Cambridge, Bologna, Singapore and Indonesia.
''It's certainly been part of my work to do that,'' he says. ''It seems a bit odd in a way going to France and talking about Australia, or going to Japan, or India where I've been very regularly with the Australia-India Council ... [but] Australians are part of the world and we also have a brilliant culture here in this country at its best. And the more intelligent people can get to know about it, the more people can write about it in journalism or books, or teach about it in universities [the better].''