Jobwatch: Change your convictions

If your job is beginning to feel like a long-term sentence in purgatory, you could do worse than to soothe your pain by transporting yourself south for a stretch in the sun. Chris Johnston reports

Now the new year is upon us, many readers' thoughts may turn to a new job. If that is one of your new-year resolutions and you are determined to get the ball rolling this week, it may involve a move Down Under. That is because a whopping 25 per cent of the advertisements in this week's edition of The THES are for positions at Australian universities.

One is for a research-only lectureship in physiotherapy at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia's fastest growing city. The institution was established in 1909; it was then the nation's fifth university and the first in the state of Queensland.

UQ is one of Australia's premier research and teaching universities; it is a member of the Group of Eight, the Antipodean equivalent of the Russell Group. Its academics have won the Prime Minister's Award for Individual University Teacher of the Year in three of the past four years and picked up 11 subject-based awards in six years.

Twenty per cent of UQ's students are postgraduates and the advertised position, in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, involves supervising masters and PhD candidates undertaking research at the Princess Alexandra Hospital.

Some 1,000km south, in suburban Sydney, is Macquarie University, which is seeking to fill a position as a senior lecturer/associate professor in linguistics.

The university is named after Lachlan Macquarie, a governor of the colony of New South Wales in the 1800s, and was set up in 1964 as "Australia's most radical and unconventional university". It has one of the highest proportions of overseas students of any institution in the world.

The successful applicant will direct research in the National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research, particularly in relation to the government's Adult Migrant English Program.

The third Australian job on offer is a position as senior lecturer in law at the University of Tasmania in Hobart.

Applicants with experience in environmental law will be highly regarded, as will those with an interest in European Union law. The university wants to increase the number of women in senior academic positions, so women are encouraged to apply.

The University of Tasmania became Australia's fourth higher education institution when it was founded in 1890 and the School of Law was established three years later. It now has 12,000 students on two campuses.

Reflecting Tasmania's origins as a British penal colony, the university is home to the International Centre for Convict Studies, a transnational and multidisciplinary consortium of scholars engaged in research on penal transportation and convict experience in the British empire from 1600 to 1940.

Links: www.uq.edu.au ; www.mq.edu.au ; www.utas.edu.au