Speech by Kevin Windle at Rosh Ireland's Farewell Dinner 13 October 2014

Our guest of honour tonight, Rosh Ireland, is probably a record-holder, having been at the ANU for no less than fifty-five years. When Chancelry instituted awards for long service, in 2009, these were for a maximum of forty years, making no allowance for the possibility that a few, like Rosh, had been here for fifty. So the Vice-Chancellor had to make special mention of that fact when he presented what I think Rosh later referred to as his ‘good conduct medal’. I’ve known Rosh for thirty-five years; some people here tonight can better that. Although he officially retired in 1997, he has remained firmly attached to our School since then, and has continued to make regular generous contributions to some of our courses, and publish articles and translations, and give very erudite seminar papers, all of which we have very much appreciated.

Permit me a brief excursion into prehistory: in the early 1950s Rosh was a National Serviceman who made officer’s rank, sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and the Navy taught him Russian and trained him as an interpreter, before he proceeded to Cambridge as a student, and then to the staff of the British Embassy in Moscow. He came here in 1959 as a Lecturer in Russian, at what was then Canberra University College, before it became part of the ANU. He very soon met and married Jo – they celebrated their golden wedding a couple of years ago - , and he worked with the eminent Russian scholar, the late Harry Rigby whom many of us remember fondly, before Harry found his true home in Political Science. Later Rosh was head of the Department of Slavonic Languages, later still head of what was called ‘CAMEL’ (not because it was a horse designed by a committee, but because it was ‘literally’ the Department of Classics and Modern European Languages).

Rosh specialised in literature of the Soviet period, and went on to become a widely recognized authority on Russian drama of both 19^th and 20^th centuries. If you need to know anything about Chekhov, Alexander Ostrovsky, Tolstoy’s plays, Eduard Radzinsky, Viktor Rozov, and particularly Vasily Shkarkin and Evgeny Shvarts, Rosh is your man. But his knowledge is by no means confined to these. I have always been impressed by his elephantine historical memory, and that includes the history of Russia and the USSR, the history of Russian literature, and the history of ANU. He has this huge mental storage capacity for all kinds of useful facts and precedents which I, for one, can never retain. For many years Rosh was the mainstay, with Margaret Travers, of Russian studies at ANU, which in its heyday boasted a staff of five. He also served for a period as sub-dean, so he knew the workings of the then Faculty and the University backwards, sideways and in every other possible dimension, which was very valuable for his colleagues.

Rosh has taught and supervised a considerable number of extraordinarily able students (u/g & p/g), who went on to distinguished careers; some are present this evening, some not. They include Robert Dessaix (later a colleague, later still a writer and broadcaster), Kyle Wilson, Stephen Fortescue, Anna Booth, Shun Ikeda, Mandy Metcalf, Subhash Jaireth and Marian Hill.

Rosh is also a very accomplished translator of Russian, French and German.  I count myself very lucky to have had him as a collaborator on several translation projects for Oxford University Press and other publishers, and we’ve also collaborated to produce occasional articles. For many years Rosh played a vital role in the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters (NAATI, chairing the Russian examination panel, where we also worked together. All of this means that I personally have a great deal to thank Rosh for and I will very much miss his presence. I know many other people present here and absent, are also very much in his debt. I will hand over in a moment to anybody else who might care to speak, but before I do, may I propose a toast to Rosh and Jo, their very good health and their future in a new home in Brisbane.