Posted by: Wah Guan Lim <wglim@unsw.edu.au>
Source: Sydney Herald News (3/10/20)
Torchbearer for Chinese studies at the University of Melbourne
By Andrew Endrey, Christopher Nailer and Carol Simon
Harry Simon.
Harry Felix Simon: September 13, 1923-July 7, 2019
Professor Harry Felix Simon, who led Chinese studies at the University of Melbourne for a remarkable 27 years, was born in Berlin on September 13, 1923.
His father, Professor Walter Simon, was lecturing in Chinese at the University of Berlin. Unable to retain his position following the Nazis’ rise to power, Walter departed with his family for England in March 1936, where he became professor of Chinese in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London.
Harry, aged 12, adjusted swiftly to England at the Thames Valley Grammar School. Following in his father’s footsteps, he studied Chinese at SOAS during the early years of World War II and was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry Regiment. By 1944, he was a service instructor in Chinese at London University; in 1947, he took up an appointment there as lecturer in Chinese.
From July 1949 to August 1950, Harry continued language studies in Chengdu, China, where he researched Chinese ci poetry and drama of the Yuan period. He also bought Chinese paintings, which later formed the basis of a substantial collection. He was in Chengdu on Christmas Day 1949 when the People’s Liberation Army entered the city. As he later commented: “The seven months that followed gave one an unusual insight into the making of a Chinese revolution.”
In 1952 Harry married Margo – Margaret Elizabeth Ruttiman, of Toronto, Canada. Their first child, Carol, was born in 1953 and a second daughter, Jenny, in 1959.
Harry visited China as an official interpreter on three occasions in the 1950s, accompanying two British trade missions in 1954 and 1955 and again in 1957, travelling with Sir Allen Lane, the founder and chairman of Penguin Books.
Harry published Translations from Chinese Poetry in Studia Serica in 1949 and two important articles on Chinese grammar in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1953 and 1958, after which his research focused increasingly on Chinese linguistics, with papers throughout the 1970s and 1980s on sentence structure and oral discourse tactics in modern standard Chinese (Mandarin).
In 1959, Ken Myer set up the Myer Foundation and made a generous grant, including the purchase of a building, to enable the University of Melbourne to establish a new department of oriental studies. Harry was appointed its foundation professor in 1961. The programs Harry devised followed the London/SOAS model with a first year of intensive language priming followed by three years’ immersion in literary texts – modern, medieval and classical – as well as contemporary material from mainland Chinese newspapers.
He believed university programs in Asian languages should include grounding in the literature as well as cultural background on the historical, political and sociological contexts – an approach thought “traditionalist” by then, when language education was increasingly prioritising communication competencies. From 1965, Japanese was added to the department’s offerings, and from 1971, it also incorporated Indonesian and Malayan studies.
Harry invited friends and distinguished academics as guest lecturers, including his father, Walter, also professors C.P. Fitzgerald, Arthur Huck, Cyril Birch, Goran Malmqvist, David Hawkes, Arthur Stockwin and many others, awakening students’ enthusiasm for related fields of study.
In the early years, the Cold War and the White Australia Policy contributed to a shortage of native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Lecturers were recruited from among the northern Chinese scholars who had moved to Taiwan. Harry also spent time there continuing his research. Tutors included past graduates and members of Melbourne’s then small Mandarin-speaking community.
As soon as circumstances allowed, Harry established links with the People’s Republic of China, sending a first cohort of students to Beijing in 1976, just before the fall of the Gang of Four and the end of the Cultural Revolution. Chinese academics with expertise in linguistics and modern Chinese literature also began to visit the department to teach and support research.
The department was never large. The intensity of study required for competence in Asian languages required many more hours than regular class times allowed. To address this, Harry advocated “cross-teaching”, where students coached each other in a departmental library, which doubled as a common room enabling encouragement, support and informal interaction.
He fought tirelessly with the university administration to hold onto what seemed a generous amount of space for such a small department. Students remember with affection its collegiate ambience, its mother-confessor-cum-tea-lady Margaret Powell, the supportive friendships and occasional hilarity that took place there.
Despite its small size, the department punched far above its weight. Its Chinese studies alumni from 1961 to 1988 include: an ambassador to Beijing, a consul-general to Shanghai, heads of mission in countries other than China as well as many Foreign Affairs officers at other levels. One was the official interpreter for successive Australian prime ministers from Bob Hawke to John Howard.
In academia, Harry’s students include a professor of Chinese at Macquarie University, a professor of Chinese studies at Monash University, the director, Chinese Teacher Training Centre at the University of Melbourne, an associate professor, South Asia Program at the Australian National University, the foundation director of the Museum of Chinese Australian History and several lecturers in Chinese and allied disciplines in other Australian universities. The department also trained many teachers who expanded primary and secondary school language programs in Chinese, Japanese and Indonesian.
Harry chaired the department for an unprecedented 27 years. He was associate dean and dean of the faculty of arts between 1966 and 1977. Elected to the University Council, he served vigorously on faculty and council committees and was pro-vice-chancellor from 1979 to 1980. He promoted Chinese cultural activities in Melbourne, organising an exhibition of Modern Chinese Art in 1974, and took a keen interest in the Melbourne Theatre Company, serving on its council, too.
Harry was visiting professor at the National Taiwan University in 1972, at the University of Hong Kong in 1980 and 1983, and at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1984. He was visiting fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford University in 1976 and 1980. And after retiring from the University of Melbourne in 1988, he was appointed professor of translation at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, later serving as vice-president of that university.
On returning to Australia in 1996, Harry made his home in Toorak, Melbourne. In 2009, he donated his large collection of Chinese books to the university – more than 1000 items in all dating from the 1880s on, the result of a lifetime of research and collecting – a substantial resource for later generations. His wife, Margo, died in May 2010. And, Harry died peacefully, aged 95 years, at his nursing home in Melbourne on July 7, 2019.
Through the awkward years of the Cold War, Harry Felix Simon energised the study of Chinese at the University of Melbourne with an infectious enthusiasm for the language and culture long before there were economic reasons for understanding China. He was a dedicated teacher, a dogged university administrator, a thoughtful mentor to many, a man with a lively sense of humour, forever young. He is survived by daughters Carol and Jenny, and grandson Jack.
The authors were students of Chinese at the University of Melbourne between 1970 and 1981. Andrew and Christopher also tutored there. Carol is the third generation of Simons to study Chinese.