At
the moment the memoir consists of a series of leaves or postcards that
slip between time periods without following a chronology or trying to
tell a structured story.
Appreciate feedback, reactions and suggestions.
Blue Echo Cover art: with kind permission of Rachel-Ireland-Meyers (see http://www.redbubble.com/people/grace4)
Background see Working on a Memoir
1st leaf see Memoir Leaf 1 - Mexico 2008
Leaves 2-6 Ireland, Launceston, Cape Town, Whyalla, CambodiaLeaves 7-9 Hooning, Teaching & Presenting
Leaves 10-11 Bookseller, Vexatious FOI applicants and shaky start to an academic career
Leaves 12-14 Car crash, Launceston early 1960s, A Road Not Taken
Leaf
7 “My last
hooning on a Friday night in Queenstown” December 1980
It was a warm Friday night in Queenstown.
Part of me relished the surge of adrenalin and the thrill of being with my
childhood mates. I even made the link with the antics of my favourite Beat
authors and envisaged how this was like a scene from On The Road. Yet the law student and political science major in me
was thinking “what shit have you got yourself into”? I was 22 and John Lennon
had just died. I was back home working underground in the Mt Lyell mine during
my university holidays. I was in the back seat of a station wagon with a carton
of beer cans on my lap. Massive sparks were rising up from the back of the car
as it hurtled dangerously around corners. There were eight or more young men
and boys in the car, three or four of them in the back hurling cans, empty I
hoped, at a pursuing police car. In a mining town like Queenstown, police,
doctors, teachers and mine management were always treated as outsiders and at
times enemies, at best they were tolerated in a very uneasy relationship.
I was thinking of that Dylan lyric, “They
got him on conspiracy, they were never sure who with” and that there would be
no doubt this time. Some of the guys in
the car were old school mates, some relatives and other younger ones were like
I was at fifteen - full of grog on a Friday night and so filled to the brim
with excitement there was little room for foresight. At one point, the wheels
on one side of the car left the ground as we drifted through the tight
roundabout on Driffield Street designed for a much slower speed. We had a good
driver, a veteran of many hair-raising episodes like this, but everything rests
on fate. Our destination was the Webster’s old house on Robertson Street, a
couple of houses from my old family home. We skidded to a halt, everyone
vacated the car and spread themselves around the lounge room pretending to have
been there all night long. The cops grabbed the driver took him outside and
gave him a bit of a belting for being another Queenie smart arse. Later that
night, we engaged repeatedly in several very drunken and heartfelt full renditions
of American Pie.
Over the next few hours and sometimes
over the following years I played this night through a series of lenses. One
lens is that of the lucky survivor of a ‘What if’ scenario. What if the car had
rolled on that roundabout? The headlines would have read, like many headlines
over the years in small country towns, ‘Tragedy and heartbreak as young men die
in accident’. Another lens is that of a young man inexorably drifting away from
his childhood mates and hometown. In another lens I converted the experience,
almost as it is happening, into a poem, novel or a piece of reflective
narrative rather than a simple story of hell raising that is quickly forgotten
among the episodes of every day life or wild nights in a mining town. No one
else in that car had by their bed a copy of, or echoing in their head parts of,
Yevgeny Yevushenko’s Zima Station:
I had been thinking, and I wondered
whether
I would see any changes when I got
in.
I figured if it wasn"t any
better
at least it wasn"t worse than
it had been.
But
everything appeared to be small,
the chemist"s shop, the city
park and all.
It seemed that things had shrunk and
therefore
were smaller than had been nine
years before.
As I was circling around the
vicinity
I gradually came to realise
that it was not the streets that had
become diminutive,
it was my steps that now were big in
size.
Simply having the options of playing with
my thoughts branded me in my own mind as an intruder. If the thoughts had been
given a voice or shared on paper I would have been branded an outsider. This
was my last summer in Queenstown, a summer working underground with my cousins,
catching the mine bus to work with my uncles, staying with my Nan, listening to
the direct and caustic wisdom of my aunties, trying to remember all the names
of the various tribes of my younger cousins, watching girls I had hopeless
school crushes on push their second or third babies around town. After this I
rarely returned and the gaps started to stretch into years and decades. I no
longer fitted comfortably within my home town.
Leaf
8 “Not another brick in the wall” Hobart May 1997
In the front row of the assembled
academics at law graduation, I had tears in my eyes
Sitting in an upper balcony, my parents,
Esther and our two young children looked down on this created ritual with
medieval overtones that explicitly and symbolically distanced the graduates
from their past. That was the first and last exposure of my parents, both
diverted from their own education journeys, to university life and the annual
pomp, colour and ceremony of university graduation. I had skipped my previous
two graduation ceremonies not realising that the events were more for family
than for the student. The tears were caused by a spontaneous standing ovation
from the law graduates as my name was read out as the recipient of a Vice
Chancellor’s Teaching Excellence Award.
Receiving the award was
a needed capstone to a long and difficult 6 year journey as a law teacher:
a journey filled with
uncertainty about employment; a journey where my teaching methods had been
viewed as abnormal; and a journey in which my young family too often came second behind teaching, a masters
thesis in political science and attempts to build a profile as a legal
researcher. In my journey as a new teacher. I had rejected mainstream
approaches to law teaching but the replacements I was testing were largely untried,
intuitive and assembled from a multitude of ‘unorthodox” sources. Every class,
every new technique or different type of assessment was launched with the
prospect that failure or a mistake would see the end of a new career, and the fragile
and uncertain indicators of success (testimonials from students) were regarded
by many of my superiors and colleagues around me as at best, generally unreliable
or at worst, just plain not worth the paper they were written on.
In 1990, after a couple of years of
teaching a handful of political science tutorials part time, I had taken the
gamble of forging a new career. Leaving behind the two years of developing a
tutor’s surface level expertise in Australian, American and South Pacific
politics and political philosophy, I made the switch to Law. Over the next few
years, I struggled to complete my left over Masters in Political Science
(including a complete topic switch – from Industrial Democracy in Australia to
Politics in Western Samoa) whilst building up expertise in Property Law (a
subject failed as an undergraduate LLB student.
Indeed, I have a rare distinction among Australian law academics of
failing two undergraduate units and having no honours degree in law),
Constitutional Law (rarely attended as an undergraduate) Administrative Law
(vaguely recalled) and Advanced Administrative Law. In addition to my teaching and research, I
had two small children and a market stall at Salamanca Market where I sold
‘pre-loved’ books on Saturdays.
From 1990 to 1993 I struggled to win a ‘permanent’
position, and was employed on a year to year basis (albeit with a safety net of
a position remaining open for me at the Tax Office). However in 1993, that
safety net disappeared and for several months I was in limbo as the Law School
delayed confirming if I had successfully gained a tenured position. This was a
tough period for me: two young children, Lance, who was 7 years old and Elise ,just
over 2, and a wife who I had vowed, never to place in the financially
precarious position her family had faced when she was young, when her father took
his own life leaving behind a young wife and two young girls to put back the
pieces. Every time I took a risk, each time I failed to get shortlisted for a
contract position, every time I riled my Head of Department, a judge, a student
or a Premier, I was confronted with a growing temptation to simply turn aside
and settle for the security of a low level position in the Tax Office.
In the face of this employment
uncertainty, I was coming to grips with the hard core knowledge of several law
subjects and my publishing efforts were still in the early stages. In most
academic disciplines, staff are recruited because of their expertise in
particular niche areas yet in Law no second thoughts are given to pitching a
legal academic into any number of new areas.
I had taught myself to teach and the
ceremony in 1997 was a vindication, in part for the hard choices, struggles and
the risks associated with wanting to offer students a better learning
experience than I had generally encountered in my university days. The award
and ceremony was also a point where I started to be much more systematic and
professional about understanding and improving the learning processes
associated with my teaching. The experience of others in most universities
reflected my own introduction into the ‘profession’ of higher education
teaching – the sink or swim method. The
award confirmed I had learned to swim! The award also gave me a degree of
immunity to continue to explore and develop my teaching practices.
“Prelude to Leaf 8 - Just another brick in the wall….” Political
Science Department UTAS 1988
Desperate to escape the confines of a low
level clerical job in the Tax Office, I enrolled in a Masters of Political
Science degree in early 1988. The original plan of doing this while being a
full time parent to a 6 month old in late 1987 quickly evaporated in the
reality of nappies, washing and 100% focus on a small, often uncooperative,
human. The following year I became the first male to go part-time in the Hobart
Tax Office and commenced my political science thesis. My Political Science
mentor felt the best way to dust off my mental cobwebs was to do some part time
teaching.
I knocked nervously on the door. My postgraduate
supervisor had arranged an appointment with the coordinator of first year
political science. Ironically, but true to form, I had skipped most of my
lectures in first year pol sci – to sit on the grass and look at girls, listen
to music and read books that were not listed on my reading lists – Gunter
Grass, Camus, books about revolutionary priests in Latin America and
mercenaries in Africa. I didn’t know what to expect behind the door. In the
public service where I was still employed, every job vacancy required
applications and the extensive addressing of numerous selection criteria,
interviews and reference checks. I was flying blind with this ‘job’. Teaching
at university was a serious business wasn’t it?
Although I then recalled a number of the abysmal tutors inflicted on
students in my undergraduate degree and was totally uncertain about what
awaited me behind that door.
A strong voice boomed “enter”. Before me
was a distracted, bearded academic who clearly had no idea why I was there. The
floor was covered with newspaper and two large puppies were busy staining and
smearing the newspapers. On the surrounding walls, hundreds of thick tomes on
communism in Russia, China and elsewhere appeared to be in the process of
tumbling off the shelves. In desperation I tried to recall some vague points
about communist politics and failed. After a few stops and starts we realised
why I was there – “Room 536 Tuesday at 9am and Wednesday at 10am. See
Bev.” Who was Bev? Bev was the
departmental secretary and my major teaching point of contact and leadership
for the next two years. There was no hand over of notes, course details or any
further discussion about the course. I left the room a fully licensed tutor
with an open permit to play with the minds of first year political science
students. My university teaching career was underway and I never looked back.
Twenty plus years later the support and training of casual tutors has generally
improved yet there are still far more tutors than there should be who still
start in the same fashion as I did.
Leaf
9 “Fast Talking” and “my short life as a spy” March 2003 Jakarta, Indonesia
I was inside a large assembly hall within
the Indonesian Parliament building, speaking to a gathering of Indonesian
parliamentarians, civil society activists, military personnel, journalists and
a handful of other international experts. Earlier on, the entire conference had
been bussed to the Presidential Palace and the five international speakers had
been presented to President Megawati at a very elaborate and formal ceremony. As
I shook the President’s hand my thoughts went back 20 years to writing endless
papers on Indonesian politics and history at uni and how I could not have
envisaged the path from that small classroom in Tasmania to the Presidential
Palace in Jakarta.
My talk, after we were returned to the
Parliament, had a few small hiccups. At
the start, a frantic representative from the translators interrupted my talk
after a couple of sentences saying, “Mr Rick, Mr Rick you talk even faster than
Mr Toby (the previous speaker Toby Mendel a Canadian had been asked to slow
down about 15 minutes into his talk) please slow down and can you confirm you
are speaking English?” My lingering speech problems had emerged yet again.
Later in the Question and Answer period an Indonesian gentleman accused me of
being an agent of the Australian intelligence services attempting to undermine
Indonesian security by allowing access to sensitive secrets. Later that night I
was in a Muslim nightclub, swept up in the beat and for the first time to enjoy
the bonding of Muslim men dancing together.
The invitation to speak had been
organised through Article 19, an international non-government organisation
focused on freedom of expression and speech issues. The five day trip involved
a whirlwind round of talks and events in Jakarta and Manila to promote and
assist with the development of FOI in those two countries. I had managed to
organise my teaching schedule to make the journey, but the striking contrast
between these two versions of my working life was palpable. On one hand, I left
behind, and was shortly returning to, a group of students who struggled to be
moved by what I was trying to teach them and always left the lectures and
seminars seemingly unimpressed with what they had endured. I was simply another
boring academic paid to disrupt their far more interesting social and work
lives. On the other hand, my short 10-15 minute talks to several hundred
politicians, activists, lawyers and others were considered, debated and
applauded.
‘On tour’, my days were filled by all
expenses paid airfares, accommodation and meals and opportunities to meet and
spend time with interesting people who were working hard to make a difference
in their homelands. At a meeting in Manila, the next leg of the tour, I sat
next to a beautiful young woman, one of a handful of truly breathtaking people
I have encountered. She had just graduated from film school and had recently
returned from the civil conflict on Mindanao where she had been travelling
alone creating a film about social justice. During our meeting, she exploded in
frustration and railed against the old lawyers (including me) in the room who
were debating the meaning of technical words in legislation thereby excluding
the likes of her and many other ordinary people from making the law do what
they needed it to do.
Every meeting since, every time when I am
invited to assist in the law reform process in another country, or the rarer
times in my own country, my thoughts go back to that fiery outburst and the
young Filipina’s passion. I try and make that extra effort to include the
non-lawyer, non-expert voice into the process and to make the technical words
work for them rather than cut down their hopes and aspirations for the law.