Thank you too, Jackie! it's cool hearing (reading!) another's answers....

sjm, for some reason I thought you were in Auckland...? I'm pretty sure that's where Prof. Dowling came from. I could be way out to lunch, he might've been from the South Island (Christchurch in particular) - but I had a feeeeeling it was Auckland. My mitsake.

No, I did NOT mistake him for a Seedneysider. He did do a creditable Aussie accent when we started on the Oz part of the course, though - and brought tinnies (of Fossie's!) and, in a unique cross-cultural reference, doughnuts, for that first Ozlit tutorial - a peculiar mixture but I think all we students appreciated it!

I remember my shining moment of glory in that class: we were about to start our tutorial on Ian Wedde's novel Symmes Hole, and I held up my copy and said, "I just want to say this book is full of shit." Got a good laugh! (only funny to those who have read it....!)

I also remember one very snowy night when I thought the tutorial was probably cancelled. Trent's campus, in themdays, was spread out - the Nassau Campus on the edge of Peterborough, on the Otonabee River, consisting of three colleges, and the downtown campus consisting of two colleges. The lecture was at one of the downtown colleges - Catherine Parr Traill (Canajun literary great, pioneer and writer). I could see the building where the tutorial was held from the living room window of the flat I shared with one other student. As I cooked my dinner, I watched to see if anyone was arriving for the tutorial (think I might've even heard that the university had effectively shut down because of the storm). I'd just finished boiling up some spaghetti and heating some sauce when I saw Prof. Dowling arrive. Put the sauce on the spaghetti and left it on the countertop and hurried over to the tutorial. When I mentioned that I'd been watching out the window, he was quietly impressed: "Like the French Lieutenant's woman," he said. "But why don't you go and eat your dinner?! don't worry about the tutorial!"

Prof Tromley used to get quite excited during lectures, and he knew we enjoyed this and were just waiting to see what would happen next. Now I'm trying to remember the story, but he told us that in one lecture he either pushed the desk-top lectern off the table he was lecturing from, or fell off the table himself (he was long and lean and he tended to fold himself up into a pretzel and push the lectern around in front of himself as he got into his subject).

He was the one who rang me at the end of third year to thank me for my final exam in his Jacobean Lit. course. [blowing-own-horn-e] Things like that resonate for a student years later. I still get high when I think about it....