Hi I'm Mary Hawkins and I’m the Director of Academic Programs 
for Sociology, Criminology and Anthropology at Western
Sydney University. I always wanted to
attend university from the time that I
was a child and what I thought I wanted
to study was literature and history which
I'd loved at school but that lasted for
about a semester because I discovered
this thing called Anthropology and it
really did change the way I looked at the world and
it gave me an impetus to leave Australia and
go and see other parts of the world and
I set off. I embarked on a program on looking for
a place to do field work because
that's what Anthropologists do. One time I was in
Indonesia and I saw this bus and it was
full of people from Bali but where I saw
the bus was way up in the North of Sumatra which
is a journey of some three, four days and I thought,
Who are these people? What are they doing
all this way up in Sumatra? And I discovered there
was an Indonesian relocation program and I thought
that's what I want to do.
So some years later I went to Indonesia
and then I didn't come back five years because
I was studying there and I started doing,
working in places like the World Bank, UNDP
and so on and after a while I decided I wanted to
come back to Australia and just started
working in Anthropology and then I got the job
at Western and worked a little time in
Anthropology as we did have a program some
years ago and then moved into Sociology
and built that program. My heart is always
been in Anthropology
so I'm ecstatic that we have the
opportunity to offer it again.
