Oxbridge Alumni Forum in Fiji August 2017

Oxbridge Alumni Forum in Fiji August 2017

  • Daku Resort
    Daku Resort
  • Talk by Bill Forbes
    Talk by Bill Forbes
  • Dianne Pinder making wheat free pizza
    Dianne Pinder making pizza
  • Visit to Yaroi
    Visit to Yaroi
  • Talk by Eugenie Lumbers
    Talk by Eugenie Lumbers
  • Kava Ceremony
    Kava Ceremony
  • Coconut Palm

Fiji has to about as far away from Oxford and Cambridge as you can get: it sits on the 180 degree meridian whilst Oxford and Cambridge are found either side of the Greenwich meridian at 0 degrees. Yet in the first week of August, college life was gloriously re-created amongst an eclectic group of Oxbridge alumni at Daku Resort in Fiji.

The annual Fiji forums (this was the fifth) have been dreamed up and run by Delia and John Rothnie-Jones who describes theirs as a mixed marriage – she was at St Hugh’s Oxford, he went to Emmanuel, Cambridge. They are joint Presidents of the Oxford and Cambridge Society in Fiji, and they also own a small resort – so it makes an inventive and convenient match with a delightful result.

The format of the week is simple: the mornings are given over to talks and discussions, the afternoons are free for excursions and relaxing, and the evenings promote more discussion over a good meal and several bottles of wine. For those who attend (and some have been coming back every year) it’s a rare opportunity to hear people with a lifetime’s experience in their field lay out some parts of their knowledge. It makes for a rich cross-referencing of thoughts and ideas in much the same way as we once did in the JCR or in late night discussions in our own rooms at college.

Once we leave college, many of become immersed in our chosen fields, and to hear about ideas and development in totally different fields is surely what intellectual growth is all about.

Allow me to give you a quick whizz through this year’s show:

Day 1

We started with a talk from Millicent Hughes (a woman who was once so frustrated by being unable to play rugby with the boys at school that she became a fully accredited Rugby Union referee and subsequently the rugby correspondent for Honi Soi, Sydney Uni’s paper edited at the time by Clive James). She spoke on Birth Registration - a Basic Human Right, and described how official neglect of birth registration, particularly of girls, lead to human rights abuses, especially sexual exploitation.

William Forbes gave an enthralling demonstration of Year 7 maths and showed us how to fold and refold paper to produce the Golden Angle, leading to an exposition of Fibonacci sequences (may sound obscure but I hadn’t had such fun with maths since….well, ever).

Day 2

Phil Allen and Dianne Pinder dovetailed their talks: she showed us how to make a pizza without flour (Easy swaps to low carb eating), and sent it off for baking whilst Phil took up the story and talked about The war on cancer (and why we are all losers) :concerning the metabolic rate of cancer. His particular targets were carbohydrates and sugar, and since then I’ve cut out the sugar in my tea.

Day 3

Chris Hughes talked about Consensus – Benefits and Problems – based on 2 medical situations of long duration and established benefit. The examples were the work on the treatment of ulcers by Robin Warren and Barry Marshall, which overturned the medical consensus of the day; and Semmelweiss’ groundbreaking work on death in childbirth, and the resistance he had to battle from the medical profession at the time. This proved the catalyst for a long discussion on the nature of how we learn and how knowledge is advanced.

Margaret Mackenzie Hooson protested that Chris had just delivered much of what she intended to talk about! but then proceeded to give a thoughtful and intriguing paper on Mindsets and Misunderstandings: an anthropological attempt at comprehending intercultural differences, in which she delved into ideas of the effort of empathy, and avoiding our all-too-immediate tendency to judge people with differing viewpoints with contempt.

The final talk of the morning was much less rigorous and had lots of pictures: Delia Rothnie-Jones (that’s me) talked about Sharks – their habits, their importance in the ecological system of the ocean, the enormous threats they face and some arresting figures on the true nature of their threat (did you know that about 4 times as many people are killed by ants each year as are killed by sharks?!).

Day 4 

Eugenie Lumbers gave a presentation all about how your grandma lives on in your genes. Entitled When we were very small: how life before birth determines your health, she described the way genetic understanding has developed and how much we do (or don’t) owe our make-up to our granny.

And finally, John Rothnie-Jones (that’s him) talked about Fiji and its development into its modern body politic.

The real joy of the gathering lies in the conversations around each talk, and in the way people get sparks of inspiration from new fields and exposure to ideas from fresh sources. Who would have expected that Chris’ talk on medical consensus would have triggered off an increasingly philosophical discussion on how we acquire knowledge? After Millicent’s talk, we ranged over world politics and the intractable challenges of reform. And after my talk, we all went snorkeling in hopes of seeing a shark……

Is this the last Fiji Forum? We (Delia and John) were reluctantly ready to close the doors as it’s increasingly hard to put out the word to alumni: our own UK alumni associations are supportive, but overseas organisations tend to guard their lists and access to their newsletters fiercely. This is of course their prerogative – but it throttles our marketing efforts. However, the alumni who came this year (and every one of them was a returnee from previous forums) were adamant that it was too good an experience to be allowed to wither and have undertaken to spread the word and make it happen. So, energized and encouraged by their attitude, we’ve fixed a date for 2018: September 1 – 6. Hope you can make it!

Written by Delia Rothnie-Jones, President of the Oxford and Cambridge Alumni Society Fiji