Foreword: Regional Humanities

HUMANITIES, ARTS and Social Sciences in Australia, it was already clear that the state of the humanities in regional universities in Australia was heading for a crisis (Turner and Brass).At the time, there were certain areas which were already so depleted as to be no longer viable without corrective intervention-teaching in foreign languages, for instance, and in the creative arts.Even disciplines one might have thought were more or less indispensable to any modern university-history is one such discipline-were on a similar trajectory.The Regional Universities Network (RUN) responded to the warnings we raised by setting up consortia which enabled students in one university to take courses for internal credit at another university, and this did assist in plugging some of the gaps in provision and opportunity that were opening up around the country.Nonetheless, we had argued, it was only a matter of time before the representation of many of the humanities disciplines across the sector would have diminished to such an extent that they would only be found in the metropolitan universities or, worse, just in the Group of Eight.Over the decade since the publication of Mapping HASS, Australia has continued to make its way towards that outcome.Sector-wide, the shrinkage of traditional humanities disciplines such as history has continued, and indeed has accelerated to the point where even their survival across the Group of Eight can't be B