ABSTRACT
So here was I, with a near-new PhD and just I arrived at Monash University, itself recently established in a paddock on the then-edge of Melbourne’s suburban sprawl. Not any more. The paddock continued for a while to appear on maps as the site of an ‘epileptic colony’, an unfortunate and nowadays politically most incorrect, but some said not completely inappropriate term for the new tenants. I was soon asked to prepare a course of lectures on Memory and Learning, about which I knew little. The term ‘business speak’ was then an abomination way below the temporal horizon, and ‘problems’ had not yet been euphemised to ‘issues’, much less to ‘challenges’. Nevertheless, I decided in accordance with that sorry modern cliché to make an opportunity out of a problem, to turn a necessity into a virtue. I would lecture on the Biological Bases of Memory and Learning, an approach with which I felt rather more comfortable. Because I soon recognised that in no way could the currently available material fill a standard 13-week lecture series, I expanded the course to cover Biological Bases of Behaviour generally. As no-one seemed to notice and the students seemed happy and interested, which in those halcyon days seemed to be the chief criterion of successful teaching, the following year I simply rebadged the lectures as Biological Bases of Behaviour, and these continued, with annual updates, for two decades.
