Most classical journals report on research on literary, historical and linguistic questions, and rarely allocate space to discussions of pedagogy at tertiary level. This article, however, falls into the latter category. It takes the form of a report on the teaching of Latin and Greek (both classical and post-classical) in universities in Australia and New Zealand; and it makes a number of suggestions regarding the future of the classical languages in this region.
Any general examination by an outsider of the situation of Classics in Australian and New Zealand universities would readily conclude that most departments are managing well, or at least holding their own, compared to other disciplines. Student enrolments are high overall, since most departments, like those in Britain and North America, have expanded their teaching range to embrace ancient history, classical literature in translation and, in some cases, archaeology. This has been the situation for the best part of the last two decades. Often these subjects were introduced in order to ‘subsidise’ and protect the continuance of Greek and Latin with their smaller numbers; but they have been extremely popular with students in every university in Australasia in which they are taught. And so these teaching areas have come to have a life and a rightful presence of their own.