ABSTRACT
The mediaeval liberal arts are not adapted to the task of liberating men today and the humanising arts are not the 'humanities', or the 'social sciences', or the 'cultural sciences', or any interdisciplinary amalgam in which humanists will learn the second law of thermodynamics and responsible governmental posts will be created for scientists. Resurgent humanistic geography insists that the indisputable professional need to examine the accumulation of distinctive kinds of knowledge is omnipresent, not recurring or episodic. Geography's capacity for producing good general literature was severely reduced in the 1960s and 1970s, and in this regard Meinig's trenchant criticisms of the profession at large were well deserved. Geography in its twentieth-century British and European representation is a comparatively new arrival in Australian schools, and it was not until the late post-war era that it managed to gain a toehold in most of our universities.
