Garry Trompf: Australia's Only Historian of Ideas Retires
Retiring University of Sydney professor Garry Trompf was a rare scholar of religion and politics, writes Bernard Lane
'I MUST tell you, I was a bit of a loner and I still am." Garry Trompf says this matter of factly, as he reflects on an unusual academic career.
He chased grand ideas down the halls of European history.
In Melanesia, he went from village to village, charting tradition. This month he retires as Australia's only -- perhaps its last? -- professor in the history of ideas.
"Australian intellectual life, for the generation in which I grew up, was strongly secular with preoccupations that were different from mine," he says.
His chair sits within the religious studies department at the University of Sydney, although Trompf has never seen religion as something to be confined or relegated.
"When I work on religion and politics, I find that Australian intellectuals have been caught napping," he says.
By the irruption of political Islam? Yes, Trompf replies, but not simply by Islamism.
Many in the 20th century were lulled into thinking that politics and economics were the engines of event and conflict; religion was a cog discarded by history. Or so it was supposed.
Trompf: "There are forms of fundamentalism across the globe which show the resurgence of intense religious positions -- and these positions are becoming politicised.
"[In world affairs now] we're not just dealing with politics, we're dealing with politics and religion.
"I'm one of the few people training students to do these two together but I feel very lonely," he says, laughing a little ruefully.
It's not that the religious impulse went unfelt during those long years of intellectual disdain.
"There's something in us that can't remain secular," Trompf says. "And the trouble with Australia is that we're totally out of true with the rest of the world -- so much of the rest of the world is massively religious."
His own religious world began in Melbourne, where he "grew up between Anglicanism and Methodism". "It was about 1952 when I went to [a Catholic] mass for the first time -- I would have been 12, and I take that year to be the melting of the ice," he recalls. "I couldn't stand religious divisions."...
'I MUST tell you, I was a bit of a loner and I still am." Garry Trompf says this matter of factly, as he reflects on an unusual academic career.
He chased grand ideas down the halls of European history.
In Melanesia, he went from village to village, charting tradition. This month he retires as Australia's only -- perhaps its last? -- professor in the history of ideas.
"Australian intellectual life, for the generation in which I grew up, was strongly secular with preoccupations that were different from mine," he says.
His chair sits within the religious studies department at the University of Sydney, although Trompf has never seen religion as something to be confined or relegated.
"When I work on religion and politics, I find that Australian intellectuals have been caught napping," he says.
By the irruption of political Islam? Yes, Trompf replies, but not simply by Islamism.
Many in the 20th century were lulled into thinking that politics and economics were the engines of event and conflict; religion was a cog discarded by history. Or so it was supposed.
Trompf: "There are forms of fundamentalism across the globe which show the resurgence of intense religious positions -- and these positions are becoming politicised.
"[In world affairs now] we're not just dealing with politics, we're dealing with politics and religion.
"I'm one of the few people training students to do these two together but I feel very lonely," he says, laughing a little ruefully.
It's not that the religious impulse went unfelt during those long years of intellectual disdain.
"There's something in us that can't remain secular," Trompf says. "And the trouble with Australia is that we're totally out of true with the rest of the world -- so much of the rest of the world is massively religious."
His own religious world began in Melbourne, where he "grew up between Anglicanism and Methodism". "It was about 1952 when I went to [a Catholic] mass for the first time -- I would have been 12, and I take that year to be the melting of the ice," he recalls. "I couldn't stand religious divisions."...