By the 1980s, Doug was a mainstay of the education department at La Trobe, and its head in the mid-1990s. Doug’s charismatic teaching and supervision of students was legendary. He took a “reflexive” relationship to the inherited power structures that school systems reproduce, while maintaining a commitment to teaching for mastery of traditional disciplines. This approach, which drew hundreds of teachers as students, was fighting on two fronts: initially against traditional and uncritical approaches, and later against “post-modern” approaches, which did not recognise a “real” structure of knowledge, or the importance of skilling.
The interest in skill flowed into Arena’s experiments over several decades with combining manual and intellectual labour, printing the journal, constructing buildings, large-scale gardens and a semi-commercial orchard at its rural block. When he retired to Longwood East in central Victoria in 2001, he developed his interest in indigenous plant species, in his huge rambling garden, and at the community run Euroa Arboretum.
Before that, he had a final professional chapter with strong connections with Yunnan province, China where he taught often and whose students, when visiting La Trobe treated him with unabashed reverence.
He also became involved with Aboriginal education in Central Australia, and in the 1990s he worked for three years at the Institute for Aboriginal Development in Alice Springs, affiliating it with Latrobe. He was active to near the end, when dementia claimed his final years. A key figure in Melbourne’s intellectual and political life for several decades, when asked what he had done, he would always reply: “I was a teacher.” So can many since, who were inspired by him.
He is survived by his former wife Eva, their children Anna, Jim and Miriam, and his companion in later years, Eileen Sedunary.