I was out of town for the duration of the Festival of the Arts, sod's law, and in particular I was sorry to have missed the 50th anniversary of the University of Otago Burns Fellowship.
But I gazed for some time at the picture on page 3 of Saturday's ODT and mused on what it says about Dunedin, the University of Otago, and the extraordinary riches the fellowship has bestowed not just on the city - although there is much reflected glory in which to bathe - but on the cultural life of the country as a whole.
There, assembled in front of the old bard Robbie Burns himself, is a kaleidoscopic array of the talent that has raised the bar for, indeed in large part helped define, literary culture in New Zealand over the past 40 years or so: the embodiment of a "new" tradition backgrounded by the statuary and architecture of St Paul's Cathedral and the Dunedin Centre, all of which speak so plainly of heritage.
There is O. E. Middleton, whose fiction and poetry continues to lap against both conscience and contemporary consciousness, Owen Marshall, whose short stories reek of "New Zealandness", Witi Ihimaera, whose early fiction provided a bridge to Maoritanga, Keri Hulme, who put us on the world map with her Booker-winning novel The Bone People, Maurice Gee, whose Plumb Trilogy is one of the great works of this country's fiction, Catherine Chidgey, whose modern sensibilities entice us into new territory; then there is Roger Hall, who took a generation of Kiwis into the theatre, Stuart Hoar, Jo Randerson and Renee, who continue to reinvent it; bard of the back country Brian Turner, lyrical raconteur Sam Hunt, poets Cilla McQueen and Sue Wootton, historian-writers and critics Lynley Hood, Philip Temple and David Eggleton to name - perhaps unfairly - but a few.
We cannot ascribe all their imaginative activity and creative output to a fellowship year in Dunedin, but as many of them have said themselves, the Burns award represented a critical step in their careers.
I like what Charles Brasch said when he wrote in the magazine Landfall in 1959: "Part of a university's proper business is to act as nurse to the arts, or, more exactly, to the imagination as it expresses itself in the arts and sciences.
"Imagination may flourish anywhere. But it should flourish as a matter of course in the university, for it is only through imaginative thinking that society grows materially and intellectually."
This is a traditional view.
It fell abruptly out of favour in the 1980s and beyond when the new Right sought to define education, and that abstruse and inconveniently elusive concept, the imagination, as well as just about everything else, in terms of individual opportunity and personal advantage.
Accruing as such, it ought to be paid for by the person who consumed it.
And of course it was a short step from the user-pays concept to the idea that if it wasn't "useful" then it ought not be paid for at all.
Culture, and in particular literary culture, is not useful in any immediate and tangible sense.
And perceiving the use of higher education in society as a social good rather than an individual benefit - in the slipstream of those "unthinking" years when we were encouraged to see all human endeavour as essentially self-interested - is still a big ask for many.
There will be those whose sensibilities are offended by the electoral "vote-for-me" wrapping paper in which the Labour Party's latest inducements to study have been delivered, but there is a compelling argument that it is a step back in the right direction - towards an attitude championing education for its own sake; and towards a system deployed in such civilised, socially cohesive, economically productive and similar-sized countries as Ireland, Denmark and Finland, where tertiary education is free.
Education pays its advantages forward.
They reverberate well beyond the confines of the sphere - the colleges, polytechnics and universities - in which education resides.
And as long as it is developed over a broad range of both subject matter and application, you can never have too much of it.
In a country this size without extensive natural resources, where even our most productive industries - for instance, dairying - must at some stage reach saturation point (beyond which the price of environmental degradation is just too high to bear), education offers limitless possibilities.
Bring it on, I say.
To repeat the words of Brasch, "it is only through imaginative thinking that society grows materially and intellectually".
This is as true in 2008 as it was in 1959.
Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
