2009-01-30T14:21:00.061+11:00

Dr David Daintree

President of Campion College,

- Australia’s first traditional Liberal Arts college -

8 Austin Woodbury Place,
Old Toongabbie, NSW 2146,
Australia

Telephone: (61 0)2 9896 9300
Email: d.daintree@campion.edu.au
College website: http://www.campion.edu.au/

ABOUT MYSELF

I am a native of Sydney. My academic background is in Classics, but I am by temperament a Latinist, with a special interest in medieval literature. My career has been mixed: I left school early and worked for a while in advertising and public relations before going on to university. After graduation, school teaching followed for a number of years, a period that I remember with great affection - especially trying to enthuse students about Latin and outdoor education. I taught for four years at Geelong Grammar School’s Timbertop, where I introduced kayaking and cross-country skiing to the curriculum. Subsequently I was Senior Classics Master at St Peter’s College, Adelaide.

I was Principal of Jane Franklin Hall, the only independent college of the University of Tasmania, for 18 years and have been a visiting professor at both the Universities of Siena and Venice, and a visiting fellow at St. John's College, University of Manitoba, Canada. I was founding Chairman of the Tasmanian branch of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy.

From 2002 to 2008 I was Rector of St John’s College in the University of Sydney. St John’s was the world’s first Catholic college established in affiliation with a secular university since the Reformation. My first predecessor as Rector was appointed on the advice of a committee of which John Henry Cardinal Newman was a member; Cardinal Newman’s letter of recommendation is still held in the College’s archives.

I am married to Elizabeth (we were married in Quatt, Shropshire, England on 5 July 1980) and we have three grown-up children, and four grandchildren. Elizabeth is a social worker by profession who worked in palliative care for ten years. She loves all animals, but especially horses, and is an excellent horsewoman. She has a special interest in the Cleveland Bay breed, the native English warm blood.

Our children are:

Matthew, a professional fisherman, lives near Hobart in Tasmania. Matthew and Dena have two children, Eloise and Mason.

Columbine, a medical doctor, lives with her husband Kevin on a small farm in the high country of north Tasmania. Their son Rupert was born on 13 January 2009.

Camilla lives with her husband Ben at Wellingborough in England with their daughter Ava. Milly and Ava seem to manage a visit to see us every year, and all three are hoping to move to Australia in the next couple of years.

ABOUT CAMPION COLLEGE

Campion College was founded on the model of the American ‘Liberal Arts’ tradition. It is fully accredited as a degree-granting institution. The Liberal Arts course consists of Theology, Philosophy, Literature and History as compulsory core-units, though students may take Latin as an optional extra. In the third year a science course is taken in place of one of the core subjects.

I love Campion College. It simply sparkles with freshness, energy and new life and I feel enormously privileged and elated to be part of this young and vibrant institution.
Campion is Catholic, but accepts non-Catholic students. Far from being narrow it offers students the broadest possible education based on the liberal arts. It is simply the only institution of its kind in Australia. I cannot imagine a better way for a young person to begin his career than to read Liberal Arts at Campion before going on to professional or vocational training.

ACADEMIC BACKGROUND

Doctor of Philosophy, Department of History and Classics, University of Tasmania

Dip Ed St (CoT, London)

Master of Letters, Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, University of Cambridge

Bachelor of Arts with first class honours in Latin, University of New England, with the Bishop Doody Memorial Medal for Latin

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Appointed President of Campion College on 17 July 2009.

Elected Rector of St John's College in September 2002

Principal, Jane Franklin Hall, University of Tasmania, 1984-2003

Senior Classics Master (Head of Department), St Peter's College, Adelaide, 1976-9

Member, Classical Studies Syllabus Committee, South Australian Schools Board, 1976-9

Master-in-charge of English and Latin, Geelong Grammar School, Timbertop, 1973-4 and 1982-3

Served on staff at the Leys School, Cambridge and the King's School, Sydney

At Cambridge, College Tutor and casual University Lecturer in the Faculty of English

Honorary Research Associate, Department of History and Classics, University of Tasmania

Visiting professor in classics, University of Siena, Italy, 1988

Founder and lecturer, annual Medieval Latin Summer School

OTHER AWARDS OR APPOINTMENTS

Visiting Fellow, University of Venice, Italy, 1998

Visiting Fellow, St John's College, University of Manitoba, Canada, 1995

Awarded a Pro Helvetia grant by the Swiss Government (1992) to defer the cost of collating manuscripts in the Burgerbibliothek, Bern.

Awarded a travel grant from the Dunbabin Fund (1991) to assist with the collation of manuscripts at libraries in Europe.

Ombudsman for Students, University of Tasmania, 1986-98

Founding Editor, Camena, journal of the University of New England Classical Society, 1968-70.

Foundation Chairman, Tasmanian Chapter, Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, 1994-98

PUBLICATIONS - MEDIEVAL AND CLASSICAL STUDIES

Version: 'Nautae qui celeres percurrunt nauibus alta ("They that go down to the sea in ships", Ps. 107, 23-32)', Camena 3, 1970-71, p. 14

'St Ambrose and John Donne, Preachers', Camena 4, 1971-2, 38-41

'Virgil's Aeneid', Occasional Paper for the South Australian Department of Education, Adelaide, 1979.

'Glosse irlandesi', Enciclopedia Virgiliana II, Rome 1985, 774-6.

(With Prof Mario Geymonat) 'Scholia non serviana', Enciclopedia Virgiliana IV, Rome 1988, 706-20.

'The Virgil Commentary of Aelius Donatus - Black Hole or "Éminence Grise"?', Greece and Rome 37.1, 1990, 65-79.

The Latin Syllabus, stages 1-3, for the Schools Board of Tasmania, 1992.

'The Importance of Latin', Proceedings of the Conference of the Modern Language Teachers' Association, Hobart, 1993, and in Oriens 2.3, Autumn 1996, 12-15.

Later Latin - an Anthology, Archetype Publishing, Hobart, 1994

'Quomodo tum antiqui cum medii aevi Latinitas in schola aestiva Universitatis Tasmaniae tradatur', Convegno internazionale sulla didattica delle lingue classiche, Montella (Italy), 1998.

'The Transmission of Virgil and Virgil scholia in early Medieval Ireland', Romanobarbarica 16, 1999, 33-47. (Later published in Origins and Revivals: Proceedings of the First Australian Conference of Celtic Studies, ed. G. Evans, B. Martin and J. Wooding, Centre for Celtic Studies, University of Sydney 2000, 135-47.)

'Latina Viva', The Tablet, 9 January 1999, 47-8 (also published as 'Latin live', The Adelaide Review 185, February 1999, p.18).

'The Latin Language - Dead, or just Playing Possum?' Oriens 5.2, Winter 1999, 16-18, 24.

‘Non omnis moriar - the lyrical tradition of Horace in the Middle Ages’, ANZAMEMS Conference, Wellington, New Zealand, 1998. Latomus 59.4, 2000, 889-902.

‘Audi Benigne Conditor: The Poetry of the Roman Breviary’ (in three parts) Oriens 6.2 (2000), 14-6; 7.2 (2002), 14-6; 8.1(2002), 15-9.

Scholia Bernensia in Vergilii Bucolica et Georgica, Vol. II Fasc. 1 in Georgica Commentarii (Prooemium/Liber I 1.42), ed. Luca Cadili, David Daintree and Mario Geymonat, Adolf Hakkert, Amsterdam 2003

'Scholia Bernensia on Eclogues 4', in The Virgilian "Tradition - The First Fifteen Hundred Years, ed. Jan M Ziolkowski and Michael C. J. Putnam (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2008), 674-98.

‘Latin…as I please’, Oriens, October-December 2008, 13.

REVIEW: Latin and the Romance Languages in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Roger Wright (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), Parergon, New Series, 16.2, January 1999, 339-42.

REVIEW: The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400-1200, Mary Carruthers (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, Parergon, New Series, 17.2, January 2000, 188-9.

REVIEW: Vulgar Latin, Jozsef Herman, (trans.) Roger Wright, University Park PA, Penn State University Press, 2000, Parergon, New Series 18.3, July 2001, 203-5.

REVIEW: Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition, Sian Echard (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 36), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, Parergon, New Series, 18.2, January 2001, 154-6.

REVIEW: De Sion exibit lex et verbum domini de Hierusalem: Essays on Medieval Law, Liturgy, and Literature in Honour of Amnon Linder, Yitzhak Hen (ed.), (Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 1), Turnhout, Brepols 2001, Parergon New Series 19.2, July 2002, 207-9.

REVIEW: Medieval Mythography: From the School of Chartres to the Court at Avignon, 1177-1350, volume 2, Jane Chance, Gainesville, University Press of Florida 2000, Parergon New Series 20.1, January 2003, 206-7.

OTHER PAPERS AND PUBLICATIONS

'Relations between Students and the Head - a Mediation', National Association of Australian University Colleges Quarterly 4, 1998, 15-18.

Address to the Schools' Constitutional Convention of the Constitutional Centenary Foundation, Newstead College, Launceston, 26 June, 1997.

Can a Residence Head be a 'One Minute Manager'?, AHAUCHI Conference, University of Tasmania, July, 1996.

Founding editor, Handbook of Australian University Residences, published by the Association of Australian Heads of Colleges and Halls (AHAUCHI), in 1994 and 1995.

'The Tyranny of Language: Residential Life in an Australian University College', ACUHO-I Talking Stick, September 1993, 6-7.

'Collegiality in the Senior Common Room: the experience of Jane Franklin Hall', AHAUCHI Conference Papers, James Cook University, September 1989.

'"Each Thought and Deed unruly": Applying Newman's Idealism to the realities of college life', in The Role of Catholic Colleges in the Modern University, papers from an international colloquium held at St John's College, University of Sydney, 10-11 July, 2008, ed. David Daintree, Sydney 2008, 7-12.

REVIEW: The Misery of Christianity, by Joachim Kahl (Pelican, 1971), in Neucleus (Journal of the University of New England Students' Union), 26 July 1972, p.14.

ACADEMIC INTERESTS

My primary current academic interest is the classical tradition in the early Middle Ages.
Together with Professor Mario Geymonat and Dr Luca Cadili of Venice I am still working intermittently on an edition of early commentaries on Virgil.

I teach an annual summer school in Medieval Latin, which I founded myself in 1993. I am continually revising the anthology I use as a textbook, and am currently preparing a new edition.

RECREATIONAL INTERESTS

My other interests have included music, riding, sailing, hiking and skiing.

I enjoy travel, and have for several years have led an annual study tour of Italy - a country for which I have a particular affection – for an educational travel organization called Odyssey Travel (http://www.odysseytravel.com.au/). The tour I lead is called Roaming Heritage Italy, it takes 23 days, and centres on Rome, Naples, Perugia, Padua and rural Tuscany.

PHOTO ALBUM

Photos taken during one of my Roaming Heritage Italy tours

The following photo shows us riding out on some local ponies during a wonderful holiday in Rajasthan in the late 90s.

The photo below shows part of our wonderful flat in the Cloister at St John’s College where we lived for six years.

Above (from left): Camilla, her husband Ben and baby Ava (baptized in the College Chapel in July 2006), godfather Tommy Cassidy (our nephew) and godmother Columbine (our daughter).

This is a more recent picture of Ava

This photo was taken at Columbine’s wedding in the Chapel of St John’s College. I am proud to have been the first Rector of St John’s to give his daughter away in marriage.

In 2008 we bought a small listed property at Colebrook, in Southern Tasmania, where we shall eventually ‘retire’. The house, 'Waterdale', built in the 1830s, is also known as the Commandant’s Cottage, for it was the residence of the commandant of the convict probation station that operated there for about a decade. One of the first, if not the first, person to live in our house appears to have been Lieut Blackman Crookshank, a cousin of Capt John Johnson-Brooke, elder brother of the second Rajah Muda of Sarawak. Here are some photos of the house:

Incidentally, the village Church in Colebrook, St Patrick’s, was designed by Pugin and is in the process of being completely and intelligently restored. Though modest in scale it is regarded by many as the most architecturally important structure in Tasmania.

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