Memories of transformative teacher remind why the arts matter

Hello everybody maybe somebody could close the door at the back 

Welcome to the inaugural Celeste Lawson Lecture we've got a program with different people who are both introduce and remember our valued colleague and also uh lecture my name is Steven Dobson I'm the Dean of Education in the Arts and I will do the acknowledgement we acknowledge the Darumbal People and all the peoples who are watching from different countries around Australia we thank the elders past present and emerging for looking after all of these lands and for letting us hold this memorial lecture today without any more ado I will thank some of the people who are online our Chancellor Graeme Innes is listening today we also have present our Vice-Chancellor Professor Klomp who will take over in a moment and then in a very short time we'll begin with the the lecture Professor thank you thank you Stephen and welcome everyone to this inaugural Celeste Lawson Lecture um as Steven just mentioned we're on Darumbal land at the moment for those of you who are sitting in the audience but it doesn't matter where you are anywhere in Australia you're on the lands of First Nations people and we always stop to acknowledge that and pay our respects to Elders past present and emerging Well done to you Stephen and your and and your crew all the colleagues of Celeste Lawson for arranging this uh the Celeste Lawson lectures and for tonight's inaugural Celeste Lawson Lecture we're we're really looking forward to it and it is a terrific way to honour her memory and I'm delighted to be to be part of that this um inaugural event tonight and and it's delightful to see everybody here in such numbers and I know lots of you are online I'm just looking at that the the portrait of Celeste there and um I just can't believe that it's actually just bit more than a year uh since we've had Celeste in person running around the campus in all her colour and all her energy and everybody that that that uh that worked with her and and chatted with her or engaged with her in any way on any given day always walked away that much taller that that that's much more fulfilled she had so much energy and so much advice um I uh worked with her for lots of different reasons not just because she was chair of our academic board uh and of course on a University Council so there was reasons why I had to work with her but no she was she grabbed me uh for lots of different reasons I turned to her for expert advice on communications particularly during the covid period uh and uh not only was she really helpful but she was really honest when I got it wrong uh really open about that and that was just always terrific but always so supportive as well in a way that I could improve but always in that supportive way and this is the the message that I hear from everyone whenever we start talking about Celeste and her memory um so it's kind of bitter sweet and you could probably hear it in my voice being being up um making some introductory marks this evening because we miss her terribly and she will always be in the hearts of of the of everybody at the CQUniversity but I think it's particularly appropriate that we're having the inaugural Celeste Lawson Lecture here in a lecture theatre you you might think that you know where else are we going to have it but actually this is really where Celeste's energy and her commitment to education came to the fall she just just had so much energy and enthusiasm and she the lecture theatre was her own it was something that she really the area that she completely dominated and everybody particularly our students were the absolute beneficiaries of that um and of course you didn't just talk about how important it was you'll all know because it's it's it's it's now part of the the history of of CQUniversity that Celeste kept on talking about lifelong learning and indeed she partook in eight different degrees eight degrees so boy was she committed to never stop learning and she reflected that in her actions and she encouraged that in all our policies and in all our activities so that was a long-winded way folks of just thanking you all for being here congratulating again the school on on organising this inaugural lecture I'm looking forward to all of them into the future and it's a terrific way to honour the memory of Emeritus Professor Celeste Lawson thanks everyone for coming. 

Hello and good evening uh my name is Dr Amy Johnson I'm the head of course for the Bachelor of Arts and and the best sort of part of this night is to get to bring with you some of that passion and a bit of what we do in the Arts team I'm particularly pleased to introduce you to my colleague Dr Jan Cattoni giving tonight's lecture uh Celeste was warmth and colour and passion and my colleague Jan brings all of that and she is the true embodiment of the future focus of Celeste in her research I'm going to read to you the blurb about Jan because I could not give a credit to Jan and all the wonderful research that she does so Dr Jan Cattoni is a impassionate about the importance of storytelling and its capacity to bring positive change to people's lives Jan's professional career span several disciplines including writer director academic and paediatric intensive care nurse and she's woven these disciplines into a hybrid career in ethical film making often working with vulnerable individuals and marginalised communities Jan's research interests are in creative practice research and she is currently Chief investigator on an Arc Discovery project future stories co-creating Virtual Worlds with young people in hospital Jan currently teaches screen production with us in Cairns and I'm very very excited to welcome Jan to the stage

Thank you very much Amy for that wonderful introduction I'm used to being behind the camera and I'm quite good at appearing calm but I'm anything but so with the encouragement of my Dean I have some white wine here and in fact the VC said I'm amongst friends so I need to just relax so that's what I'll do we've had lots of technical challenges today um and I'm grateful for to Delise for helping solve some of those and for my digital media team um and Delise I might get you to start that first slides I'm doing something a little bit tricky the slides are on one computer we can't get the notes up so I'm reading my laptop so I ask you to uh to bear with me um thank you Amy for the lovely introduction and it means that I can kind of uh not say a couple of other things which I was going to say okay it's the far one thank you and I'll just grab the mouse so I can progress these slides yep great this is a beautiful flower it's actually a plum blossom taken up in Hokkaido in Japan I live in a very old Japanese house the oldest Japanese house in the world outside Japan and I travel to Japan a lot so I'm very interested in Japanese culture I wanted to start by saying I am deeply honoured to be here tonight uh presenting the inaugural Celeste Lawson lecture um I wanted to flag that I know that this is a very vulnerable time for many of you it really really is and and I guess I want you to all be gentle with each other it's really really important um I asked for the lights to be dimmed but they're not dimmable so you know if you need to leave that's all right as well when someone dies suddenly It's a catastrophic event even though we're all aware that that's our final destination very few of us are prepared it's disorientating the horizon shifts and we try and make sense of the altered state in which find ourselves in none of us will get through life without that experience um in other cultures there's a lot more rituals to support people moving through that process but we largely live I think in a post-religious West in which we don't have those rituals our parents our grandparents they kind of lived with death a lot more because medicine wasn't so great and so there was a lot more experience but here we're really left to kind of flounder a lot of the time and there's nowhere I saw that more than in the children's Intensive Care Unit um and grief is an enormous area of research you know it's an emerging area um of research and it's now generally believed that the bonds with the lost person continue long after that person has gone it's like just because a person leaves the room our relationship with them doesn't end and rather than some of the earlier thinking which was about re reaching point of closure we no longer believe that we know that the relationship continues and it evolves and it changes um and so in this first year it's kind of vulnerable for everybody but it will continue in events like this are so important in honouring what you've all been through sometimes it's just really hard to focus on that um so this is really an important event and as the the lecture series continues you know we will continue to honour Celeste in different ways okay so I just have to do this yeah there we go um I started at CQU just prior to the pandemic so I actually only ever met Celeste online and I was deeply impressed here was this person who could cut to the chase in a very important meeting she cleared everything out of the way and student welfare always seemed to be her priority that was she brought everyone back to that point I was deeply impressed with her but I was also impressed with the institution that recognised her leadership I think that's a really important thing to say you know she was just someone as we've you know been talking about everyone she made an impression didn't she she made an impact um when I was asked to leave with to deliver this lecture I you know I was aware that there were many more people particularly here in Rockhampton who knew Celeste a lot better than I did and with the support of my Dean um Professor Steven Dobson and my DDR Associate Professor Linda Pfeiffer I asked if I could come down and I I could talk to some of the corridor dwellers I tinged this um photo pink uh and I just have to flag I am a creative practice researcher and this is largely image-based and I tend to go off script anyhow so just flagging that um Celeste's colleagues were incredibly generous and they shared some stories and I asked if I could kind of share them here today we put didn't put names on them but you'll probably work out who everyone was but for me as a I guess as a creative a creative practitioner and a researcher to me and uh I thought this was one of the nicest ways of honouring Celeste so I'm going to read those excerpts um I'm aware Amy's job is to try and keep me on Q Amy how much longer do I have so I can look at my okay what's that sorry 3 3 3:3 sorry just so I can know which slides to go ahead with oh I take 30 30 cool thank you so I'm going to read these as we go through them Celeste was energy I think we've already heard Nick say that she did things in a big way and she was not one to go quietly but she was also kind and compassionate she was game to try anything and she placed no limitations on herself she read the tarot cards and she also studied to be a sommelier even though she didn't drink um and she loved experimenting with art we did a painting together and she enjoyed it so much it was NAIDOC Week and there was a lot of laughing Celeste drew two birds and with each stroke of pain birds something else they started off as brolgas we go and then she'd add another stroke of paint and the birds evolved into something different a little bit like Celeste herself they ended up having yellow hair which I discovered from Gemma was probably her equally favourite colour is that right Celeste had an enormous energy and I looked for this energy after she left us this is what we do in our culture we look for that person's presence in nature I looked for her and I found her at her memorial I noticed that the birds were calling Sulfur-crested cockatoos, magpies, kookaburras, there was one of her scarves on the stage on the lectin she loved scarves and I noticed that the air was moving through it bringing it to life and I thought she's here with us today Celeste was sound and movement the silence when she was no longer there was deafening I needed to wear headphones and listen to music to block out her silence and to fill the emptiness every time I walked out of my office however I saw her empty room a closed door to a dark space and so I had to change offices as well only then could I begin to breathe and begin to set sail without her losing Celeste meant losing knowledge enormous institutional knowledge and her knowledge of people she taught me that you can get almost anything you want at the University if you know the systems and you're willing to do the paperwork and the hard work as our supervisor she also shielded us from a lot and in this corridor of which she was the heart in the circumstances of her loss I just wanted to ask her what would you do in this situation how do I navigate my way forward how can I set a course of course that can achieve a good outcome for my students and for my team in the way that you have Celeste had a genuine passion for lifelong learning and was always studying something or other and it's a large she's a large part of the reason I signed up to do another postgraduate qualification she always celebrated learning and growth and I imagine this won't be my last enrolment

either the first time I met Celeste she was on the ground I mean on the ground embracing someone's dog that they brought into the corridor I love dogs too but this was something altogether new soon afterwards she began the pet wall where we all hung photos and her office it was amazing she had a great eye for design and then she started the corridor parties to keep us all connected with each other she loved fishing but she didn't fish in her master of letters she wrote a 1000 word rhyming pentameter can't even say this she was formal and creative the sinking boat Celeste was both an anchor and a safety net for many of us at CQU and after her death it felt like the bottom of a boat had been ripped out and water was coming in quicker than we could bail it out we were all trying desperately to stay afloat it was at this moment that we all became aware of the enormity of Celeste's work and what she had been involved with her presence was spread across so many different areas and the boat now felt rudderless and in danger of going down but then something seemed to happen those of us who'd spent large periods of our lives in that Corridor had heard Celeste's words often she had a full voice and she used her words to negotiate with many many people she knew how to use words to connect to people regardless of their rank to direct others to what was important which was always students and to advocate to steer a clear path forward and to remind us all of what was important those words which had bounced around the corridor and entered our psyche came back to us as we were trying to stay afloat and they guided us in knowing what to do and trying to find a way forward out of the deep water and onto the shore Celeste was Joy Celeste made a habit of looking for the best best in everybody and everything it's easy to find fault but it's possible also to be alert to the things that can bring you joy and joy is a word that I heard her say often she approached people and friendships with that intent and made everybody feels special and welcome it's a mistake to think that this led to a frivolous nature because her deep integrity and strong sense of justice proved that Celeste was anything but frivolous she simply allowed herself to be tender almost childlike in spite of the seriousness of the world and potentially some of the things she witnessed as a police officer contributed to this it's possible that she was a simply a thoughtful communicator crafting her sentences with care and creating just the right amount of poise as she often did but I would contend that Celeste fostered her own empathic response to people pets places trees and flowers and I'd like everyone to kind of hold on to that idea of joy and the importance of joy even in really challenging situations it's so important I think neurologically kind of sadness and joy are close to each other the way they're stored so you know it's some of the reasons we sometimes find ourselves laughing in really difficult circumstances okay going to have some water this is a reference to the Schitts Creek series that everyone's has or may not have seen a little bit what was her name the character Al a little bit Alexis this is a little bit Celeste this is a combination of sad and happy Celeste saw me as a person and not just an employee she saw the work that I put in and she shared this open me with her peers and others now carry that value and they see me as she did in her absence she gifted me that and I will be forever grateful it was a Thursday afternoon and I was walking past her office and something inside me said thank her for her warm welcome into the corridor it was one of those if you don't say it now you'll regret it kind of moments I took another step toward my office thinking this is silly and people don't say these kinds of soppy things in the workplace but as I walked away the feeling grew stronger now is the time to say this I turned back and I stood had her office door I could see she was deeply engrossed in a task but as always within a few seconds she turned to me and she said yep like what she was doing was no longer important and I had her full attention I stood there awkwardly in her doorway and I thanked her for her warmth and kindness and my and um following my move to the building and into the corridor nervously I said you've given me a safe and kind place to work and you've also helped foster my sense of belonging she didn't seem sure how to respond but eventually she said thank you and as I suspected she would she said people don't usually say these kinds of things and something along the lines of making someone feel welcome in the workplace should be the most normal thing in the world but we all know that sometimes it isn't it's safe to say that I don't regret interrupting Celeste that afternoon to thank her for her kindness it was the Thursday before she passed and it was the last time I got to see her I will always hold this awkward and vulnerable conversation close to my heart as a fond memory and a reminder to tell those around you that they make an impact on your life I can't remember who said it at her memorial at the amphitheatre but they commented that her life was like that of a cooker bar and now whenever I hear them I think of her Bountiful chuckle and it makes me smile we all need to hold on to a little bit of Celeste she sha a light that deserves to be relit for all of us and hopefully this will play

one more I remember a painting of hers depicting a cherry blossom tree in full bloom she' exhibited at our CQ Creates exhibition and the painting was title Hanafubuki later I looked up the meaning of this Japanese word and the translation approximates to flower snowstorm it poignantly conjures the moment the spring breeze dislodges Cherry blossoms um petals and from the tree and the petals lived fall and they dance on mass giving visibility to an otherwise unknown source the word captures a moment a phenomenological event and a sigh flower snowstorm Hanafubuki I'm sure Celeste would have been captivated by the word the image and the spirit that it encapsulates aggregate words like this can be standalone poetry no haiku was needed Celeste was a flower snowstorm her memory reminds me to find poetry in the things that I see and to find joy in the people that I meet um and I kind of love that idea of the flower and the snowstorm the force of who Celeste was along with her Joy Of Life her gentleness and I think that's such a lovely vision for us to take with us um I'm probably going to skip and I and we're not having questions uh today but I'm really happy to follow up with anyone who's interested uh in doing that what I do want to talk about this is an enormous topic the title and maybe you could continue it next year you could have part two so some of my colleagues can address it but the role of the Arts and Humanities in the 21st century where we now live it's a pretty huge area and my colleagues and I could keep you here till Christmas and we'd all be talking you wouldn't get a word in um I started my you know when I left high school I'm going to tell a short narrative I wanted to be a documentary maker and I have no idea how that happened I you know I'd never met a documentary maker in North Queensland at the time we had one and a half TV channels but I had this idea and I looked there was no course certainly in Queensland I think the only course was at Swinburn it was before the Australian film television and radio school opened in Sydney so a Bachelor of Humanities was the closest thing at Griffith University and I taught something called Film Theory so I learned about film and politics deconstructing films I learned nothing about making films and I did a whole lot of other courses um and after 18 months it really wasn't what I wanted to do so I was a Humanities dropout I finished half a degree I went back to North Queensland I was the first of seven children to leave home and my mother was not happy she thought she'd got rid of me so she rang the matron of Mackay Base Hospital and she said I think my daughter wants to be a nurse so that's where I ended up and it was so different to being a Humanity student you know very progressive thinking I'd enjoyed first wave the aftermath of first wave feminism it was during the Joe years it was you know a whole sort of things so here I was entering into the old apprenticeship system in the bottom rung and it was a tribal world but this is where I realized that my Humanities my 18 months was really helpful because it really helped me interrogate that workplace and it depersonalized it for me and I pondered about which set of sociopolitical circumstances had contributed to this phenomena that which is a hospital you know I really did but then there was another thing that happened to me and that's that I put on a nurse's uniform and people told me their life stories I went from being someone who really couldn't learn anything about the real world which you need to have as the documentary maker and I was enthralled absolutely loved it and I loved the science of nursing and you know you know one of the things I want to touch on is this division between the science and the Arts that I think you know the world works best when they're much closer together and we as an institution I think can play a role there um so when I finished my nursing I went and did pediatrics at the Royal Children's in Melbourne and then I returned and I did that finished that Humanities degree and then I did my Honours and basically this is what I looked at um I think I've missed a slide yeah um I actually found that historical social moment in history where science got elevated beyond the Arts um and it was a point you know where governments were still you know starting to regulate the population and scientific knowledge was incredibly important this is where some of my slides um so Michelle Fuko in the order of things examines there we are that's the science and the Art of nursing um actually I'll leave it on that previous one for a moment um no I can't go back sorry about that but you saw it there was I in the Florence Nightingale um he looked at the mid 20th century and he looked at two accounts of the horse 50 years apart and it was kind of around the emergence of the microscope and the capacity to see and the elevation of scientific knowledge and in the first account knowledge around the horse was really like complex it included where the horses lived the sound of it the history of it the stories and there was a whole lot of information that was embedded in accounts of what the horse was 15 years later we've come up with a classificatory system of knowledge and a lot of that knowledge has been lost and science has been elevated and it was a very useful body of knowledge but it wasn't all there was to know um there was a lot more to know and in my work as a nurse I used to think that um medical knowledge was like this thin slice of a cake it was a deep slice it's incredible knowledge it helps us in a whole range of circumstances if we look at the statistics around heart disease a whole lot of common diseases it's phenomenal but it's not all there is to know about the lived experience of being a human and of being healthy and where you know we are in an era where where the kind of the other bodies of knowledge are really surfacing to kind of make us think more broadly about health um and what it is and one of the things that I knew was that as a nurse I had learned a huge amount and it was a it was really valuable knowledge that this idea of observing a situation again and again and again contributed to a sense of what's often referred to as intuition but it was really bound on you know based on really solid observations so by this stage I progressed to becoming a a clinical nurse in the children's intensive care uh unit and so I could see how every consultant might approach the same problem whereas the consultant might only see how they you know approach a problem so you get this really embedded knowledge we know it's embedded knowledge and I knew it was valuable um and I found nursing hard to kind of survive in for that reason to be honest and I I did a short stint in nurse academia which wasn't for me so I went back to the academy and I did a graduate diploma in film making in media production and I went and worked um in the Pacific for UNICEF initially in Vanuatu in the Marshall Islands and then in Vanuatu and I used my film making skills in a kind of applied way and I learned firsthand that allowing people to tell their stories to see their stories reflected back at them had a huge impact on their lives I made a documentary about a group of kind of they call espias on the public road in Vanuatu and there were young people who drifted in from the outer islands and were blamed for everything um but allowing them to tell their stories meant that people saw them differently once they looked at them through their television screen and it it was a really high impact documentary Amnesty International got involved and I really started to think this was an area where I could really um you know embed a lot of my learning uh and so I went back and did a Doctorate in Visual Arts I went to an art school and I that was where I really got to learn about creativity and how it really can help connect us with our other senses and in my doctorate I uh I looked at telling difficult stories in the documentary context and bearing witness to these and the effect of that on the storyteller the audience um and the filmmaker so I'm going to round up this little area by saying I think we could agree that Celeste was someone who soar around the edges of disciplinary knowledge as well um she used lived experience she involved you know she could see things from many different perspectives and we see that in her stories that she's told us um so I think the humanities are a bridge between the arts and the science and I think we live in an era where they're kind of in jeopardy um it costs a lot more to do arts or humanities in our current climate and and I think uh students who enroll are already pretty brave because there's no job assu and yet we know there's really really significant uptake so I kind of ask everyone in the room who has any influence to really champion the arts um and in terms of the environment in which I worked in the hospital you know often when science doesn't work this is you know when we lose someone this is the time that the Arts the creative arts in particular really come into play and they can help us and these are situations in which um we as I said we'll all find each other um I was going to talk about something else but I'm going to just this is just actually I should show you this one I wanted to talk about first nations' knowledge because it's probably the most connected knowledge that we have um and I didn't know how to do it and because I'm not a First Nations person and I didn't uh I didn't feel I could do that but um I've kind of often talk about my approach to research as um serendipity as methodology and when I hopped on the plane yesterday to come here I ran into Sid Bruce short Joe at can's airport so this is Sid Bruce and I said Sid I'm giving this talk tomorrow for a colleague who's passed and I want to try and explain first nation's knowledge and could you give me some words to share and your photo could I take your photo and he said yes so I said to him can you explain to me how knowledge is connected in the first nation's um context and he said everything is connected to the seasons and the land and the sea when the White Plains flower is In bloom it tells us that this is the time to hunt the bull shark so he lives in Parampara in Eastern Cape York he's a Wikwonkan man um and I said do you eat the bull shark and he said yes we do but we only do that after we've had a ceremony I said what happens in the ceremony and he said the bull shark is our ancestor and we thank our ancestors and we also praise them and then there's a song and a dance that goes with this and in the dance the position of the dances is very important because we place experienced hunters beside inexperienced ones and together they make a zigzag pattern in the sand and at that point we were interrupted and Sid had to go to gate 15 to catch his right to pump her out but I thought it was just this lovely example and his generosity in allowing me to share it with you I thought would he's an amazing director he really is um so looking at the time I'm gonna skip this I think you get the gist of this uh slide here it's what I've been talking about a lot just that we all you know what I've learned learned from that amalgam of experiences that we all need to see stories that reflect our experiences and that when we face immense challenges in our life creativity music and the Arts are some of the things that can actually guide us through them um and as I said we live in a world that's incredibly divided at the moment the polarisation of positions is really of concern and so once again I think the humanities and the arts can help us refocus okay so what I want to talk about now and I've got a couple of I I can do all this talking but I might like to show you some work that we've been doing so uh future stories project um involves co-creating Virtual Worlds with young people in hospital the young people are our co-researchers we take their role very seriously and they're co-designers of the of the virtual worlds um what is it it's an ARC Discovery um program and it's goes over three years I'll show you that in a moment for each participant we do five to six world uh weeks of world building and in total by now we've done about 16 worlds um it's for ages six plus 12 plus and currently um we deliver this program to long term stay or young people receiving ongoing treatment and it's a multiplayer experience meaning more than one person can go into the world um it was one of those accidental discoveries in that we found that for young people particularly adolescence were stuck in the room for long periods of time often they're out of reach of a lot of the arts and health programs and a lot of the social activities that are available to young people and in from when we first started it um multiplayer has become available these are the partners in this project so three hospitals Sydney uh Queensland children's and Cairns five universities and the Australian Research Council this is the team and um so there's the three of us at the top myself Michael Balfour is the lead researcher and Margaret Gibson from Griffith Uni and myself as chief investigators and all the orange little folk are our hospital-based um partners and they're extraordinary and ironically that medical consultants are probably our strongest supporters um this is guy down here on the right don't know if I can I can't do that so a Guy and I do most of the engagement with young people um this is our timeline we started the pilot in 2018 we've had 16 weeks at children at Queensland Children's Hospital last year 10 weeks in Sydney uh Children's Hospital this year and uh we're going to Cairns to kind of look at the applicability in the regional setting um so our young people get referred to us through clinicians and we'll often go and we promote the project um once they've deemed that a young person is can you know might benefit then we start a whole series of meetings with parents and participants and then we go visit the nursing staff and those who look after the children we use Oculus Quest but you know there's some issues with going from one young person to the other so we have to be really vigilant in terms of not you know cross infection and not um particularly with immunocompromised young people Guy and I have a toolkit so we start um with drawing writing whatever the young people want we give them jobs to do and we come back and they've always done the job so this is an example of world building in Jamie's world and you'll see that in a moment so she was a drawer so her world was really defined by the things she couldn't do in her actual life so she wanted to swim with dolphins and eat chocolate cake primarily um other two you can imagine the for those of you who are the tech heads some of the challenges of creating these virtual worlds um I want to create a fantasy island where I can meet my dragon fluffy um and I want to land a 1970s Concorde while being chased by a UFO when we first started this project we were quite concerned that young people might be able to come up with ideas you know we kind of say where would you rather be um we create a hospital foyer in each site and the worlds are on these little platforms and so in the hospital foyer here's an example of it this is Sydney Children's Hospital sorry Queensland recreated this is a sculpture by Emily Floyd and because it's multiplayer the players have to be able to see each other so we got her permission for the players to be able to recognise each other as parrots which you'll see in a moment um my role is a really interesting one and it's evolved as the project has and really the big thing I do initially is I read the room I understand the context and the really sensitive nature of what happens to families when they have a seriously ill young person it's a really big thing um and that's something I've learned over many years so in its current version I probably do about two or three jobs that we need to extract out as does Guy as both a creative artist and a coder you know if we kind of there's been a lot of support it's been a very popular program I also have an agreement with guy that if I notice a young person starting to deteriorate I let him know so that he can prepare himself because it's a huge thing for a young person who hasn't had experience in that environment and I'm very sorry to have to say we've lost about a third of our participants up to now so wealth um uh you know research or well-being is really important but because it's an area like we maintain contact with families they have a say over everything we have an incredibly responsive consent process and that's probably one of the um really strong standing points that we um yeah that we've come one of the great outcomes and talk about impact this is uh research impact this is potentially research that has incredibly um huge impact I'm gonna just go through I'm going to come back to this what we might do now is we might show an example so you can see for yourself so this is five minutes sorry am I get to have some water and some wine it's the other benefit of being a filmmaker and being able to work in this environment I guess so I

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The actual goal of the map is not only the pain but then to find her lost dragon eggs lost dragon eggs oh my gosh um so Harrow has requested a um sort of like a an island where you discovered different mythical creatures fantasy creatures um one of them being a dragon of his creation Fluffy the dragon must have five legs two teeth spikes on the tail a suction foot to allow it to walk on ceilings the ability to fly and small yellow eyes red eyes sorry and uh nostrils on the nose and on the uh forehead so I think we're getting pretty close I just we just really need to add the fifth leg somewhere fluffy fluffy she's pretty good good she's sleeping at the moment do you like her yes she's big and furry and fluffy that's why you want her fifth leg yes right there bit of darker blue okay I'm watching you guys in the process of doing it yeah that's one of the really fun parts actually Harrow I'm just adding some collisions to fluffy because uh currently it's quite hard to get up on fluffy so just full yeah oh my God leg on bye Guy I'm waving I'm I'm going to go flying get exhausting after you just full yeah you got get me so I press the button press the but this is the most happiness and like most happy and excited character that my getting is the only time when he's doing this with you guys so it's lovely to see I'm Jamie swimming with dolphins eating chocolate cake and riding a horse I'm drawing my door Ruby Ruby the dolphin with a firework [Music] Hi my name is Jamie welcome to Dolphin Land keep an eye out for my three friends Ruby the Red dolphin Gemma the purple dolphin and Daisy the white dolphin you can eat from the picnic basket or hop into the water and go for a relaxing swim or hop on the jet ski and go for a thrilling ride hope you enjoy my world have lots of fun do you have anything to say to other kids who might be interested think big we have delivery of the Concorde here uh this is Brisbane airport here this is one of the runways which is 01 left it's um what the Concorde is going to land on we have the Tic Tac here so this is kind of going to be what it's like so this is all going to be window kind of a a futuristic design it took a screen grab out of Blender so I use Blender for like most my 3D models I've used oh yeah really cool I will um maybe I'll show you a bit more of this stuff when we come in that second one looks pretty cool as well I need the plane to be kind of still otherwise the players will fall off oh yes oh yes so oh oh oh There's the Tic Tac it's pretty it's pretty great that is awesome is so so we're in the middle of the storm now I have added something really cool if we we can go out in the wing we can oh my hey describe the best part of that experience I feel like just that's a smile little happiness to look at takes you away from reality it's like it's like another world and you actually get to have real good fun in other world and you feel like you just teleported away from the hospital for a second [Music]

See the words and the vision just give you so much more don't they um I'd like to say the only complaint we've had about this project is a noise complaint that the laughing is too loud um I just wanted to uh finish off this is Dorothea Lange who's one of my uh she's one of my heroes she was a photographer who started the social uh documentary kind of documentation um movement and you might have seen that that photo of hers which is the Migrant Mother um one of the things that she said that always interested me was that she was working as a photographer for it was like the agriculture board and she went to like a service station and she noticed the migrants coming in and no one else seemed to notice them she said I didn't know what was going on uh she said but I could see what no one else could see and she often wondered if it was her own life experience the challenges she'd had that gave her empathy and she said this really important thing which was um the camera is an instrument that teaches us to see without a camera that we bring our lens to show other people and my last slide and then we're going to listen to a bit of music just to have a moment is that Celeste had a kaleidoscope lens and we know that from the beautiful stories that we've heard um so she saw the world in many colours and in many ways um and uh but one of of the things we know is that like Dorothea Lange and if we want to keep joy at the centre of this is that Celeste has shown many of you how to see the world without her okay and we know that and so moving forward I just like everyone to keep that joy of life inside them um we're going to Judith's very kindly allowed us to play some music she recorded last year um for Celeste's memorial and I just think it's just a chance for us all to settle um when we talk about losing someone else we are revisiting all the people we've lost in our own life and we're kind of thinking about our own final destination so as I said earlier be tender with yourselves I think the arts and humanities can help us all and then we'll just play um Celeste's piece and yeah just have a reflective mind 

Hello my name is Judith Brown and I'm the head of college for the Arts and Celeste was my friend Celeste was my colleague I'm very grateful for everything that Celeste has done for me for our college for the university for her friends when we can't say very much we use Music this piece is called grateful and it sums up how I feel about our relationship and what Celeste has done for us all

[Music]

Vale Celeste Lawson 

Jan I don't think I've ever been so emotionally happy and sad and then happy again thank you so much for that um I'd like to invite my colleague uh Dr Ben Jones uh head of course for the Master of Arts

Thanks Amy uh the Dean asked me just to comment briefly on the origin of this event and I'm honoured to do so uh but I'm loathed to get between the audience and the uh after lecture drinks and chats so I'll be brief but we've been privileged to listen to a rich thoughtful provocative erudite truth piece on the importance of the arts uh from Jan and we've all been given much to contemplate about how the arts and sciences are not in competition but academic pursuits uh with much to learn from the other so uh thank you uh Jan and I I think one of the most valuable points you made also is that we all can learn from First Nations knowledge where the arts and sciences are not as siloed as they are in the modern western university and in particular your own career demonstrates um the sheer diversity of where an arts degree can take you and how thoroughly it enhances other disciplines and I think our hearts all sort of collectively melted watching those beautiful children combining the sciences and technology with creativity and with art and storytelling the ancient disciplines of the arts examine what it means to be human and uh the BA is the original university degree and even at detractors would not want to live in a world without them without music and art and history literature poetry and philosophy uh this lecture began really as a conversation between um Stephen and uh and Linda and myself uh about how to promote what we do here at CQU in the arts and how we punch well above our weight and Celeste was the ultimate champion of the arts and uh she took enormous pleasure in collecting the art articles and media appearances and publications from the arts team each month and collating them to present to the dean and show off all the things uh that we're doing and for those who worked in building 32 we fondly recall her uh voice echoing down the corridor that's brilliant that's wonderful and um you know as we told her about our projects uh so to Jan just a heartfelt thank you on behalf of the organising committee for giving such a poignant inaugural lecture that so fittingly honours our much loved colleague and it fills me with a particular joy that this is not only a memorial but it's a legacy event and uh Celeste's name will be forever associated with our school and our university and as the years uh go on we will continue to hold this event and celebrate the arts at Central Queensland University and in doing so Celeste's words and deeds will live on thank you [Applause]

Thank you Ben um as we start to draw to a close I'd like to invite Professor Linda Pfeiffer our Deputy Dean for Research uh to come forward to present Jan um with a lovely certificate 

Thank you as part of the annual Celeste Lawson lecture we have some Celeste inspired artwork um created by Pat and Carmen and I'd like to invite Jan up please to receive this certificate and gift to thank you for the very first in augural Celeste Lawson annual lecture thank you Pat can I can describe a little bit vittie culture did I pronounce it right the grapes and the vineyard sunflower some guinea fowl and a dog you can all ask about after but thank you so much I I have a funny little story that's that I told Nick just before we started and I said my my dear father died last year and um in the final year final week few days of his life I said to him you know if I had my time over again I'd retrain as a sommelier it's my Italian heritage and then I learn you know later learned that Celeste had uh in fact done some sommelier training even though she didn't um didn't drink so I think this just is a sign that I need to apply for that leave next year to go I've got a family wedding to go to in Verona in September Stephen I'll be asking for a bit more leave and I'll wrap it into a creative arts research project thank you very much everyone I'm really honored to be invited I really really mean that and it's was such a joy to talk to you all about Celeste and to share this event so thank you [Applause]

That brings us to a close this evening I'd like to thank everyone who came uh to join us here on Darumbal Land in Rockampton and especially also to those joining us and streaming in live I know there's a big group of you in Gympie um so hello to everyone in Gympie it's fantastic um that you've been able to join us um and we in advance invite you to come along next year as we continue to investigate um the and and challenge its importance um in the 21st century um so please stick around have a chat to Jan and hear more about her fantastic research um and again thank you for coming.