The Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane since 1992, the Most Rev John Bathersby, will be guest speaker at one of two University of Queensland graduation ceremonies tomorrow, Friday, December 20.
Archbishop Bathersby will speak at the 3pm ceremony for Arts graduands at the $20 million UQ Centre at St Lucia.
The Director of the UQ Centre for the History of European Discourses, Professor Peter Cryle, will speak at the 6pm ceremony for graduating Arts and Music students. Graduands of interest include:
• Amanda Lynch will miss her graduation because she will have run away to the circus at the time of the event. Ms Lynch, who graduates with first class honours in Theatre Studies, will be performing on stilts at the Powerhouse at New Farm for a fundraising event for Vulcana women’s circus. A circus performer with Vulcana, her specialties are trapeze, swinging trapeze, stilts, hula hoops, and trio acrobatics. Ms Lynch’s thesis was on Representations of Women in Indian Theatre. Her areas of special interest are postcolonial theatre, circus, and gender.
She has just completed an honours performance/research essay on Sprezzatura and the Representation of the Female Aerialist. Sprezzatura is the mode of doing things with ease, naturalness and nonchalance; making the artful appear to be natural and things natural appear to be artful. Ms Lynch worked previously as an administrator of Cracka Theatre Troupe; and currently is working as research assistant to various members of the School of English, Media Studies and Art History. She is rehearsing for her appearance in the Magdalena Festival, an international festival of women and theatre to be held in Brisbane in March/April.
• After leaving school at 15, Ms Flloyd Kennedy returned to higher education at age 54 to undertake an Arts degree majoring in philosophy and music. “I wanted to extend my ranges,” said Ms Kennedy, who is a professional actor/director and voice and acting coach. Ms Kennedy left for a professional career in the UK while she was in her early 20s. Her son Dr Roderick Kennedy, who recently was awarded his doctorate in plasma physics by Oxford University, and her mother, Mrs Ina Hofmaster, will attend the ceremony. Ms Kennedy, who has been awarded Dean`s Commendations for high achievement every semester since commencing her studies, hopes to complete her honours degree in English and Drama, and to undertake postgraduate studies in voice in performance. “We take for granted the sounds of our voices,” she said. “Through working with actors I’ve come to appreciate that audiences are affected not just by the words, but by physical emotion, the integration of the whole body, sound, and text.”
• Richard Mollee is the first graduate in the University`s new Graduate Certificate in Arts: Environment and Culture. Although he was initially overwhelmed to find himself the only person in his course, Mr Mollee was pleased to receive individual attention and undertake studies tailored to his interests. He graduated in science from UQ in 2001, majoring in botany and ecology, before deciding to explore complementary cultural and communication issues in the environment through the Graduate Certificate in Arts. During the year he has also volunteered with the Environmental Protection Agency before commencing full time work with Greening Australia QLD in July, and completed two certificates at TAFE — a Certificate in Horticulture, and a Certificate in conservation and land management. He also found time to work at Woolworths on the weekends and tutor high school English. Mr Mollee is continuing contract work as a project officer for Greening Australia, writing a book on dry sclerophyll forest rehabilitation, a topic on which he has already developed materials and given workshops. Dry sclerophyll forests are the open eucalypt forests that are a dominant feature of south-east Queensland. As such, he is working with industry groups, council and local government representatives, on rehabilitation frameworks and techniques. Mr Mollee hopes to undertake his Science honours degree in 2003 with the Botany department at UQ, studying the uptake of organic nitrogen in native plants.
• Valedictorian at the 3pm ceremony will be Arts honours graduand Sophia Close, and at the 6pm ceremony Bachelor of Music (Performance) honours graduand Alexis Kenny. Ms Kenny commenced music tuition at seven years of age whilst living in Melbourne. She is the principal flute with the Queensland Youth Symphony and is also Flute 1 in Sydney Sinfonia, which recently participated in the Maazel/Vilar Conducting Competition. Her work with Sydney Sinfonia is part of a mentoring program with members of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Additionally, Ms Kenny was the principal flute in the Alexander Orchestra at National Music Camp, an activity of the Australian Youth Orchestra, in 2001 and 2002. In 2001, Ms Kenny was the winner of the James Carson Memorial Competition, and consequently represented Queensland in the Australian Flute Competition held this year in Melbourne to coincide with the triennial Australian Flute Convention.
At University she has been awarded Commendations for High Achievement by the Faculty of Arts in each year of her degree, and has won the Music Students’ Society Wind Performance Prize in 2000, 2001 and 2002. Ms Kenny was awarded her Associate Diploma in flute in 1997 while attending St. Peters Lutheran College where she is now a tutor. She has participated in master classes with such performers as Petri Aalanko (Copenhagen Radio Symphony) and Paul-Edmund Davies (LSO) and recently performed Carl Nielsen’s Concerto for Flute and Orchestra with the Queensland Youth Symphony, and was a soloist in Françaix’s Musique de Cour. She has also been selected to participate in the Australian Youth Orchestra to perform Schoenberg’s Gurre-lieder at the Perth International Arts Festival, and the Young Australian Concert Artists Program under the guidance of the Southern Cross Soloists in 2003. She has been offered an Australian Postgraduate Award to undertake a Master of Philosophy in Music at UQ in 2003.
Media: Further information, Jan King 0413 601 248.
