Part 2 - Riding the winds of reflection

Part 2 - Riding the winds of reflection

Until I started composing the leaves in Part 1, I left my past largely untouched, apart from one brief moment late in a Mexican afternoon. It was unexplored territory, hidden from everyone, including myself. If I had ever turned a light, as Karl Popper suggested, onto that forgotten region it was only a small and weak torchlight for a few seconds and directed to the fringes.  The process of writing, reflection and sharing of various drafts of the memoir had brought me to the cusp of a critical decision. Would I exchange the torchlight for a searchlight and was I willing to alter my history to account for new facts? I had shared earlier drafts of my stories with a small circle of friends to get their feedback but had hesitated to share these drafts with my family, especially my mother.  My mother, now separated from Dad, was not on the internet so my choices about how to share were limited. I could mail it or I could travel north to Devonport and ask her to read it.

 My past is also her story. By sharing, was I asking to open a conversation about my natural father and my early years? Would she read it or talk about those times? Throughout history, authors, especially where they directly mined their own lives for content, inspiration and story ideas, had been confronted by their choice to reveal secrets long kept buried by others in their family or to form judgments favourable or unfavourable on the actions and inactions of those around them.  These authors, often simplistically depicted family members as villains, self-centered or they selfishly opened difficult and intensely private decisions to public judgment and walked away from the fallout. Others have learnt more about themselves by learning to understand the ‘others’ around them -- to appreciate the lover, young girl/boy, old woman/man who before, simply wore the label ‘mother’ or ‘father’. In my life, my mother had simply not discussed or hinted at period after I was born until my first tentative memories.

I half played with the idea of heading to Devonport, over the Christmas period, to share the stories with mum. However I jumped at the slightest excuse to delay the journey northwards and into my past.

The decision was made for me. Lance, my son, had headed north on a Sunday night, after Christmas, to visit a girlfriend’s family in Devonport. In the glove compartment of his car were his sister’s Falls Festival tickets.  Lance was not returning home until after the festival. By 6am on Monday morning, with a new version of the draft printed out, I was on the Midlands Highway playing Dylan Live 1975 and The Clash with two missions: retrieve the tickets; and share my reflections with mum.

Mission 1 was easily accomplished.  I reached Devonport around 9am, had a late breakfast with Lance and caught up with Dad. Mission 2 was just as easy. I made a quick visit to Mum, explained I had been writing about my journey and had come north looking for old photos but would also like her to read the stories. We arranged to meet the next day for lunch. I left the printed out stories on her kitchen counter.

During the afternoon, Dad’s brother in law from Queenstown, Kevin popped in to chat with Dad. He was in Devonport for his regular visit to watch the Devonport athletic carnival. The afternoon passed in a lazy conversation between Dad and Kevin, two men in their 60s who had intricate and overlapping histories of family, work and sport and the experience of living most of their lives in one small remote town and working for the Mt Lyell Mining Company.

I always had difficulty keeping track of family conversations. Dad and Kevin were recalling the past, mostly about their workmates from West Lyell and stories connected to playing footy in the 1960s on Queenstown’s famous gravel oval. The conversation was an ongoing ebb and flow of free association, name recall and a challenge for me to piece together bits and pieces of stories and keep up with a constant turnover of characters and relationships.

Dad “His mother worked in the corner shop, she had married Buster’s son Old Flabby….”

Kevin “ You mean Doreen’s cousin Nell who lived up near the smelter who married the guy at the pump station before she took up with the oldest boy of the Craigbourne’s.”

Dad: “Dickie James from the Comstock?”

Kevin “You mean Stewie Jones played half back for Gormie when Tiger Barnes was coach.”

As I tried to align their oral history with my faint knowledge of places and people, my carefully created understanding of my own history was flipped on its head by another turn in the conversation.

Kevin “He played for Smelters with Dougie Gamble.”

Dad “Yeah Dougie was a good player, I played against him” ….turning to me and in a rare venture into the personal simply announced “that was your real dad”.

I stopped listening, as I struggled to take this in, and the conversation headed off into new side tunnels.

In my history, Doug Gamble was simply a name on my original birth certificate and a man who had exited stage left before the real drama of my life had really started. To this point he had no history, no presence and no real story that connected at all with mine. Now his ghost had returned and it had played footy against the only man I had called Dad.  Where was I in this story? If my Dad had played against Dougie it had to have been in the early 1960s after I was born. Nothing in the fragments of my past or photos had suggested an earlier association with the West Coast.  However old information started to have newer connotations. When Mum had taken us to Queenstown in 1966/1967 her parents and brothers were already living or working there. How long had they been there?  A long forgotten memory resurfaced where as a very young boy I was watching my Mother’s brothers walking up the old Sand Hill, after a day working at the mines, at the top end of Queenstown, near the Central Queenstown Primary School. This memory had always been out of synchwith the way I had constructed my history. Now I was sitting there with new pieces of a puzzle and did not want to pry further until I had talked with mum.

Later that night I started to sort through and scan the old photos. With each photo especially those of my mother when she was a young woman, I looked closely at any men in the picture. Was this man my father? That one? Was that man in the background a cousin or family friend? Meanwhile, Dad and I kept up a conversation about footy and relatives. We have very few areas of common ground or interests. He has never read and all his spare time has been spent working on cars (he was an auto-electrician), in the garden or doing up the house. The only travel he is interested in is trips back to Queenstown. My lack of interest and skill in most things mechanical kept us restricted to a narrow band of topics.  My tales of Botswana, Mexico or Vienna were politely listened to.  For Dad sheer hard, or long, manual work weighed the measure of a man. Reading books and office work (uni) seemed to be an easy life.

Late next morning, I visited Mum at her apartment. She had prepared scones and sandwiches that we ate while I set up the scanner. We started to talk.  We edged closer to the key point of my visit, each of us treading carefully. Mum’s main concern with the stories were their intended publication. She has always been a private person and she felt that people would look at her like a scarlet woman, moving from relationship to relationship, having exposed her young children to a troubled childhood.  She contrasted her life and parenting to the longevity and stability that Esther and I had created. There is no escaping that both Esther and I have worked hard to achieve that stability based on a strong mixture of love, as well as a reaction to both our childhoods.  I told mum, I admired her for following her own heart and surviving in a tough environment. The early 1960s were not kind years to lone women with two young children.

We used the scanning of the photos as conversation bridges and inroads to our shared past.  Mum would fill in details for me of people, places and surrounding events often struggling to recall times and places. What follows are the newer segments of my history many of them reworking my story as I had known it.

Movements

Mum confirmed my hazy memory of moving frequently. After mum left Doug we left Cornwall, a small village on the East Coast up in the hills behind St Marys and seemed to be endlessly on the move. First we stayed with mum’s Aunty Clarice near St George’s Square in Launceston and then a large house in East Launceston at Hornsey Avenue. Nan and Pop Gleeson rented the downstairs area and shared with Mum, my baby sister Julie and mum’s Aunty Clarice and her partner Roy. During this period Pop Gleeson contracted TB and was in hospital for a fairly long period. Somewhere in this period, I have a faint recall of being encouraged/forced to toss my dummy into a fire in return for getting a Sooty teddy bear.

After Hornsby Avenue we moved to Melbourne, living in St Kilda, with Mum’s new partner and, for part of the time, in country Victoria. I have a faint recall of living in St Kilda and the detour to a Victorian country town but the recall was too faint and indistinct to expand upon in my early stories. I remember playing behind Punt Road Oval, going to the shops for milk and being somewhere that had a pigeon coop.

We then returned to Launceston and a downstairs flat in Elphin Road near city park where Aunty Clarice and Roy lived in an upper flat. Roy was the old man I recalled teaching me draughts. Clarice and Roy would often look after Julie and I when mum was at work.

My speech impediment

My speech difficulties started earlier and lasted longer than I originally remembered.  When we were living in country Victoria, neighbours remarked how chatty a little boy I was but they were unsure of my nationality as they couldn’t make out the words I was saying. Mum and others close to me could understand, with some effort, but strangers were left with the distinct impression I was from another country. The problem was a combination of speed, a struggle to form understandable syllables and difficulties with ‘th’ etc sounds. The end product was not the stuttering found in The King’s Speech but the same crippling level of anxiety, frustration and social isolation – without the castles, servants and money to soften the adversity.

It seems I had started kindergarten while living in St Kilda and my speech problems continued both, at East Launceston Primary School and to a lesser extent in the early months of our move to Queenstown. Mum recalled constant hours spent helping me to try and pronounce words under the guidance of the speech therapists. I recalled none of this.  However 3 to 4 years of struggling to communicate must have been frustrating to family, teachers and myself. As I write this I have vague recall of spending my play and lunch times at school in East Launceston on my own, isolated and often fearing having to ask questions in class. The move to Queenstown seemed to trigger a major communications breakthrough.

Doug Gamble

As we talked about the various photos I was scanning, mum reached for an old photo album and said, “[t]he picture you are looking for may be in here.”  Mum pulled out an old group photo taken with a box brownie camera. I’m in the front, aged about 1 or 2, along with a very young looking Pop and Nan Gleeson and my uncle Basil with a dog.  In the background, wearing some type of cap and overalls, is Doug Gamble. It is the only photo mum has of him.  This was not the photo or man I was thinking of when I had written about Doug’s photos in my Mum’s old tin.

We then had our first and brief conversation about the man who was my father. Mum said he was a good man and their breakup was mostly caused by her and her immaturity. Their split came shortly after Julie was born when Mum was about 24. At that point the shutters went up and our conversation stopped.

The destination of this journey

Mum asked what I intended to do with the writing? At first, with the urging of Professor Gary Meyers, a friend at the Law School, I just tried to capture a few of the key stations of my journey: the story of a recently promoted law professor who had followed an uncertain and meandering journey from a working class, West Coast environment to become the first in my extended family to attend university.  By the time I had travelled to Devonport, the story had become much more complex, multi-layered, hybrid concept, somewhere between Patricia William’s Alchemy of Race and Rights and a Rough Guide to Teaching.

The next step in the journey was enriched by the intervention of Taylor Bildstein. When I first meet Taylor, as a postgraduate Masters student, I was struck by her beauty, her earnestness and her determination. Taylor would become my first postgraduate student, strangely, in journalism rather than law, and I learnt to fully treasure her skills as a writer, editor, researcher and friend.

Yet, it was in the personal part of my life rather than the professional that Taylor would forever place me in her debt.  When Elise was in Grade 9, the parent-daughter relationship became very rocky and under intense pressure. I was doing my best to aggravate the problems by channelling the only male role model I had  - my loving but strict disciplinarian father. A lunch time conversation with Taylor rescued me from the gravest of parental errors. My response to the problems with Elise was to assert my will. But I was confronted by a daughter, proudly and deliberately raised to be independent, strong willed and more than capable and stubborn enough to see through any struggle of wills to the end, no matter the consequences. As Esther said, “[s]he’s your daughter.”

Seated across from me at a small café in South Hobart Taylor, simply advised me to stand back. She described a similar confrontation with her father and advised what I  needed to do was to let Elise know I loved her, and would always be there, but let go of the reins. This would allow mother and daughter to keep open the lines of communication and avoid the inevitable escalations when Elise and I butted heads. This advice and the circuit breaker of Elise spending 6 months in Spain as an exchange student, allowed us to form a much more understanding and supportive relationship. A few years on I now share a strong and intense friendship with my daughter.

A couple of years later in a small coffee shop in Salamanca Square, after my dash to see Mum and Dad, Taylor put me in her debt again.  In between our meetings and relaxed sharing of coffees, she had moved to Ottawa and undertaken a Masters course in International Relations in French.  She quizzed me, with all her skills developed as a communications director and editor. What type of book was I trying to write? Who would be the main audience? Why was I writing it? I couldn’t give a clear answer to any of these questions. Taylor, generously and without criticism, allowed me to mumble a few incoherent explanations. She then asked, had I read Obama’s  Dreams From my Father? She had half read it in French and thought there was some degree of similarity with what I was attempting to describe as the end result of my writing.

After Taylor and I had said our goodbyes, I walked through the bus mall to a bookshop. I was surrounded by “bogans.” a term invented well after I had left Queenstown, but which would have fitted so well with the younger version of me.  If the current version of me now met the bogan me of yesteryear would I be aware of, and wary of the latent aggression and the coldness in the eyes looking at me? Would a slightly more radicalised and older youth hold this middle class academic in contempt? Later at the bus stop, I watched as these reflections of a younger me walked away towards a future of limited options. I started to read Obama’s search for his past and his attempts to construct and understand his identity.

Dreams from My Father blew me away. I was impressed by the use of words, Obama’s reconstruction of scenes, his careful but frank interrogation of his surroundings and his willingness to expose himself on the eve of his plunge into adversarial politics. Taylor was right, there were faint echoes of my tale in Obama’s book but he has forged a much more poignant, perceptive and in many places, rawer account than I had accomplished. I loved and responded to the passage where Obama wrote:

“Then they’d offer a story to match or confound mine, a knot to bind our experiences together—a lost father, an adolescent brush with crime, a wandering heart, a moment of simple grace. As time passed, I found that these stories, taken together, had helped me bind my world together, that they gave me the sense of place and purpose that I’d been looking for. Marty was right: there was always a community there if you dug deep enough. He was wrong, though, in characterising the work. There was poetry as well — a luminous world always present beneath the surface, a world that people might offer up as a gift to me, if I only remembered to ask.” At 190.

Leaves 41 - 43 Media Tart, Teaching in Canada and public engagement

Leaf 41 An introduction to the world of the media tart, local ABC Radio 1991

Until the early 1990s, only two University of Tasmanian academics seemed to feature regularly in local media: Michael Stokes, a constitutional law expert, and Richard Herr, a political scientist. Both had taught me in the 1970s. Richard had supervised my Political Science Honours and Masters theses and had enticed me into tutoring in political science in 1988 as a means of ‘blowing the cobwebs from my mind’ after a period of time working in the Australian public service. Within academic circles, there was a fairly heavy air of disdain for this activity and both men were regarded as “having tickets on themselves” – a politer label than the latter use of the term media tart.

The issue of Tasmanian secession from the Australian Commonwealth had been raised in the Tasmanian media and somehow both Michael and Richard were unavailable for comment. An intrepid ABC radio journalist managed to trace down a tutor in constitutional law and postgraduate political science student - me. My dilemma was that the issue of secession was far from any of my areas of speciality. Indeed, it was hard to find anyone with any degree of expertise in this area in Australia. I promised the journalist I would do some research overnight and would be prepared to try to add a little more objective information to what had been a fairly uninformed debate to that stage. I didn’t realise it must have been a quiet news week because normally a request to do some overnight research would have been the kiss of death. The media will lose interest in most topics – especially secession – before any work day is ended.

 The gradual building of a media profile had begun.  Over the next couple of years, I made a couple of further forays into radio, print and two brief spots on local TV.  From 1993, my media activity expanded in terms of quantity, variety of topics and medium. I now average 20+ appearances, in both local and national media, a year. The total, since that first and hesitant interview, is almost 500 media comments ranging from brief 15 second TV grabs, to 30 minute morning talk back sessions, in-depth interviews, talk back radio, special filming sessions for SBS Documentaries  and opinion articles in national newspapers.

My first media foray taught me a couple of quick lessons. Despite briefing the interviewer, on the key points I wanted to focus on, the first few questions were only indirectly relevant to the topic. I fell into the murky waters of trying to tackle the question asked while attempting to move the conversation back to the more germane points. I quickly learnt the trick of answering the questions I wanted to rather than being solely guided by the interview questions.  Lesson 2 was that listeners found long answers difficult to follow unless you had a clear structure.  I was only vaguely aware of the concept of ‘sound bites’ but within a couple of years I had mastered packaging my responses, especially for non-live media (recorded radio and TV interviews or journalists seeking a quote or two to fill out a story). The biggest danger in the recorded interview is the chance, almost likelihood, of misquotation or selective editing that will make your carefully limited and qualified response seem abrupt, pointed and heavy handed. The well chosen sentence and carefully outlined qualifiers sound completely different when only the last half of a sentence or carefully crafted quote is used in the TV footage and juxtaposed with another different comment from someone else. Sometimes it pays to be first off the rank in terms of comment because you set the tone of questions asked of those interviewed after you. On occasion, it pays to be last and receive a brief summary from the journalist of the ‘sound bites’ already given and then pitch yours to best fit or respond to the direction of the commentary.

In my first few media encounters, it annoyed me that the interview I did a day’s research for, or the 10 minute conversation with a journalist, filled with great points, or that an hour spent filming ended up as a 5 second grab or a half sentence quote. Later, I learnt to trust most journalists and understand how they crafted their stories.  If I presented them with clear material, insights and ideas they would often construct their stories using those ideas but use better visuals (than a pudgy balding wild eyed academic) or manage to get a government minister scrambling to respond to the questions I raised earlier with the journalist.

Many academics, afraid of being misquoted, avoid the media and/or view those like me who engage with the media as simply media tarts seeking every opportunity to jump in front of a camera or radio microphone. One night in a Sydney restaurant, two fellow legal academics were savaging Professor George Williams, in his absence, because he had listed his media interviews on his cv/publications listings. The savaging came to a halt when I pointed out that I did the same. Media engagements were not undertaken lightly, they were high risk and exposed your expertise to full scrutiny. I have refused more requests than I’ve accepted to comment or be interviewed. The key questions I ask myself when a media comment is sought are – what is my level of expertise, is someone is better placed to comment, what can I add to the debate or existing commentary and will my involvement make a positive or informed contribution?

Leaf 42 “Forty degrees below zero - blessed are the micro thermals and Gore-tex coats” London, Ontario January 2003

The temperature in Ontario, Canada in January 2003 never rose above 0 degrees for the month I was teaching at the University of Western Ontario Law School. The micro thermals, I had purchased at a Katmandu clothing shop in Hobart in the middle of a hot summer, offered only a minimal layer of protection against wind chill temperatures of -15 to -30 degrees. My first purchase on day one in Canada, after slipping and sliding across several massive car parks and 4 lanes of slush, ice and exposure to Canadian drivers, was a $320 Gore-tex coat. Over the next 30 days, that thin coat was a lifesaver and one I still wear 10 years later. My January in Ontario also taught me that “Too cold to snow” was very true.

I was in Ontario for a month teaching an intensive course on Comparative Freedom of Information (the first such course offering in the world) to 25 students, mostly Canadian but including students from Hong Kong and France. In early December 2002, I had emailed all the students advising them of the course outline, reading list and assessment tasks including a small group work component worth 20% of the final mark. I soon discovered that special species of Canadian graduate law student -  “next stop Bay Street.”  Bay Street, Toronto is the centre of the commercial law district. The Bay Street students had a serious mission in life:  to out compete, out score and out apply all others to gain the holy grail of a job with a Bay Street firm.  Shared marks for group work was both anathema and a complete threat to the very core of these students.

In the emails I could feel the angst and tension I had caused one student in particular. Let’s call her Miss Bay Street. She wanted to know what was I going to do about this inequity as there was no way she would allow her hard fought marks to be lowered by the lesser capabilities of others in her year group.  My solution arose from a conversation about the use of reflective journals in education teaching I recalled having with Maureen Innes, a fellow Salamanca stallholder and casual lecturer in the Education Faculty. I offered my University of Western Ontario law students 5% to write a 1 page reflection on their experiences of group work and stated if it seemed from any student’s account that they had been disadvantaged in the group process I would adjust their marks.

Miss Bay Street, in her single page, reflected upon how dysfunctional and difficult to manage her group had been. On the other hand, the rest of her 5 member group reflected on how they had to wait until Miss Bay Street was absent so the group could function co-operatively and achieve their peak performance. I called it a draw and left the marks for that group work undisturbed. Yet this purely instrumental and limited initiative left an unexpected and incredibly rewarding legacy. A number of other students wrote more than a page about the group work, and then went on to reflect deeply about the course, the readings, their experiences and even the extent, and basis, of the differences in teaching style between their crazy Aussie Professor and the local staff.  

Student reflective journals became a key part of my teaching over the next decade. In many ways, this insight into the thinking, perceptions and motivations of students allowed me to find a way to fully develop my approach to teaching. It turned haphazard impressions, wishful thinking, assumptions and guesswork into much more informed intelligence about what motivated my students and what caused them to disengage.

Over many centuries, the nature, purpose, intent of, and approaches to legal education, and university education in general, has remained in continual contention. Therefore, I was not surprised when a colleague complained, with only a slight degree of exaggeration, that the greatest difficulty faced when marking an exam was finding a mark between 30-50% to give most students. In this model of legal education, the lecturer is a gatekeeper for the profession and his/her job is not to assist students to pass but to assess whether they had passed and to what degree. The job is to simply be an assessor of quality and the better the quality of students (proven in difficult exams and marked hard) the better the academics are as lecturers.

My approach, derived in part from my background but also from the history of successful sporting teams, is built around providing the support and assistance to students who want to improve their capacity and skills.  This approach centres more on the student and relies very much on the level, type and degree of student engagement. The former approach centres on the lecturer and requires attention to their comprehension, determination and delivery of the material on which the student is tested. The lecturer is a gatekeeper, constantly vigilant to bar the way to barbarians, the unwashed or those lacking credentials.  My approach to the gatekeeping role was to turn away those who were in the wrong place but to steer others to where they wanted or needed to go even if they couldn’t identify their destinations. Exceptional students can cope with both regimes but the former inflicts a heavy toll on many students and often on the lecturers. The marking process rather than being an opportunity to celebrate student achievement and understanding more often than not becomes an intense process of lamenting student incapacity to get the basics of a particular subject.  And this lament is often more strident and angrier year after year. 

Leaf 43 “A call to arms” the Staff Club, University of Tasmania, Wednesday 19^th October 1994

My lunch, at the University Staff Club, was interrupted by a phone call. John White, the then Shadow Attorney General was on the line. The Groom Liberal Government had, that morning, introduced an FOI Amendment Bill (that they had previously denied they were working on) into the Tasmanian Parliament.  Could I immediately come to Parliament House to brief the ALP opposition?  The Liberal Government had mistimed their introduction of the Bill and had left Michael Aird, an opposition MP, holding the floor at the luncheon break, thereby allowing him the opportunity to fully respond to the amendments after lunch.

In the Opposition rooms at Parliament House, I was confronted with a scenario we often described to our students of what thinking like a lawyer requires. The amendment bill was over 30 pages in length and changed 29 out of the 55 sections of the Freedom of Information Act and significantly altered the structure, purpose and operation of the Act. I had about 30 minutes to read, analyse and then present to the Opposition members key points they could make about the amendment. As always the academic, media tart and activist within me conflicted. Many of the key amendments hinged on slight changes that had a profound impact, but would be difficult to get across either in a media sound bite or by an opposition member on the floor of the House. In the end, I produced a brief presentation with a few key examples and talking points that would gain traction in the press and would survive any government attacks on the credibility or relevance of the points.

The Government was caught flatfooted, first, by my involvement and presence at Parliament House, and second, by the precise nature of the Opposition response. After the briefing, I spent the afternoon being on hand to do interviews and background briefings for all the TV stations, papers and radio.  Unfortunately the Government had picked a day where I had no teaching commitments.  Surprisingly, the Government had no campaign in place to justify or promote the changes and found itself on the defensive for several days. Furthermore, the early influence of the internet and the benefit of my embryonic networking came into play. I was quickly able to call on the input and expertise of several academic colleagues and activists, from interstate and overseas, to support and improve my original critique of the changes. In the mid- 1990s, this rapid networking and influx of commentary from outside Tasmania was unheard of – whereas in 2013, it is the norm. A further surprise was that the Parliamentary Greens made no effort to call on my expertise in resisting the changes.

 Many academics would have refused to become so directly involved in a political process holding to the view that their role extended only to providing objective analysis of proposed changes when formally requested. Or worse the reluctant academic commentator uses the old “on the one hand this is a negative but on the other this change may be a positive” device.  I had been influenced by the writings of Sir Geoffrey Palmer, a former Kiwi Prime Minister and administrative law academic, who argued that public law academics need to play an active role in the debate. Moreover, previous experience in various jurisdictions demonstrated the necessity to intervene when administrative reforms like Freedom of Information were under threat of being undermined by political processes or the bureaucracy. Sitting back and allowing the government to alter the very dynamics of the game with their proposed retrograde changes was not an option.

Memoir - Leaves 35-40 - Talking in Queenstown, King O'Malley, subtle impacts in Indonesia, joys of teaching, encounters with Mounties

Leaf 35 “The toughest audience of all” Queenstown Footy Club Rooms February 2008

We stood outside the Queenstown Footy Club rooms at the world famous gravel oval. In the background was Mt Owen, which always seemed to me to be like a resting lion overlooking the town. All the men around me were members of the Mt Lyell Mining and Railway Company 25 Year Club.  Members needed to have had 25 years of service with the company before its closure in 1993. Therefore I was the youngest person there by almost 20 years. Each year they gathered for a weekend to recall old times, renew friendships, play cards and drink heavily. The Footy Club’s women’s auxiliary were on hand to supply the catering. The only presence or role for women at the event was in the kitchen and serving.

I had been invited along to give a talk. It did not look promising as one of my uncles came to me and, tapping his watch ominously, said, “sonny we are here to drink not listen to you! So you have 2 minutes!” I was preceded by some mine engineers talking about drill shafts, copper bearing lodes and mine profitability clearly topics that enthralled this audience of old miners. By the time I was introduced, the audience had another hour of drinking under their belts. My uncle tapped his watch and put two fingers up in the air.

I had spoken around the world but this was my hardest crowd ever.

My talk was entitled, “Mining the Imagination.” The previous year a group of young people had produced a CD of their experiences living in Queenstown and used this title. The theme of my talk was how miners had great stories to tell but as they passed away, so did their stories and their legends. In an information age, their tales, insights and passion added a layer of uniqueness to the town. About 5 minutes into my talk, two old timers at the front started talking; to a man, the other fifty or so shushed them and I heard my uncle say “shut up and let the boy talk.” At the end of my 20 minutes, I received a standing ovation and found it hard to hold back the tears.

At a previous talk in Queenstown about King O’Malley, an old woman had complained to the University that I had been billed as “a returning Queenstown boy.” Her complaint “everyone knew I hadn’t been born there so was not really a Queenstowner.” The King O’Malley talk was the first time my parents, relatives and other old timers of Queenstown had seem me demonstrate my professional skills outside of brief media interviews.  It was a very strange feeling, with both the O’Malley and Mining the Imagination talks, to be back in Queenstown displaying my academic craft and presentation skills. I was among people who had first hand knowledge of my foibles, had struggled to understand my words as a youngster, who had seen me drunk or misfielding in cricket and who probably knew more of my background than I did.

Leaf 36 “Foucault would be proud of me – invented or real narrative?” Queenstown mid 1970s?

I don’t know whether I have created this story or whether it actually happened. Every recounting seems to give it a greater life. With each retelling it gains certainty, assertiveness and a clearer authentication.  It is the early 1970s, possibly mid winter. I arrived at the small library in the High School after walking in the rain on a dark night. A very small audience is gathered, maybe two or three students, a couple of old ladies and I think one teacher but I was never sure who. Thinking back, it might have been Mr Tom McGee who was always interested in local history. Not sure why I had come but curiosity or an invite from Mr McGee may have been enough. Into the library swept a magnificent figure wearing a black felt hat dripping with rain, a large black cape or flowing coat and longish silver hair; his face had a sharp profile, small slivery beard and a captivating stare. Manning Clark had rampaged into my life. This description matches one of Manning Clark’s most well known pictures and therefore may be the true source of my vivid recall.

For what seemed like hours, Manning Clark held me spell bound as he expounded upon the subject of King O’Malley, a larger than life figure who Clark animated and elevated into almost mythic status. Manning Clark spoke of O’Malley’s oratory from the balcony of Hunter’s Hotel, his role in the Transcontinental Railroad, creating the aged pension and the founding of both the Commonwealth Bank and Canberra. What inspired me was not only the way a speaker could grab an audience but that my town, in the middle of nowhere, could have provided the platform for this key player in Australian history. Later, before learning of O’Malley’s many foibles, I transplanted onto O’Malley many of those things I thought were quintessentially West Coast – straight talking,  a wicked and cutting sense of humour (that still gets me in trouble in polite circles or when talking to Vice Chancellors), a concern for the average person, and a source of great ideas if people only could experience the place. Whether real or not, that talk or its imagining led me to eventually  study Australian history at College and at University and to a great love of Tasmanian history.

Leaf 37 “Our man in Jakarta?” Jakarta, Indonesia March 2003

On a steamy night in a Jakarta restaurant – thatched roof, open sides -- the main speakers from a large FOI conference and key Indonesian activists were gathered together. Behind the flickering light of the candle sits the key organiser of the conference, a long time environmental activist whose contact with me dated back to 1998. In late 1998, I was asked by his organisation to write a briefing/policy paper about developing an FOI type regime for the environmental area in Indonesia.  The paper was for a key conference to be held in Jakarta which would then be translated into Basara.

Over several weeks the conference was postponed, reconvened then postponed again, a common feature of working in countries like Indonesia. Eventually I was given a firm date and booked my airfares. Shortly thereafter, I received the invitation to teach in Ireland and had to negotiate a return trip to Australia to speak at a pre-arranged Sydney conference, appear before a South Australian parliamentary committee, a quick 3 day trip home (the only time I would see my family in four months) and then the stopover in Indonesia. In early February, during my time back in Australia, I was told the Jakarta conference had been postponed, yet again, this time to later in March. I couldn’t cancel my Indonesian tickets nor could I return to Jakarta for the next date for the conference. The organisers arranged for someone else to deliver my paper. Meanwhile I spent my 3 days in Jakarta  mostly in a hotel marking Irish law student essays with the odd excursion or two into the city and to see some of the surrounding attractions.

Back to 2003 and the restaurant. The environmental activist leaned over the table. He confided that my 1999 paper had a critical impact on an emerging movement for FOI within Indonesia. However given its Australian connections it would be better for that link to remain unacknowledged.

Leaf 38 Late March 2010, seminar class in Administrative Law, Hobart

A magic moment:  thirty-five minutes into a fifty minute seminar with 24 students and apart from the initial instructions, I had not spoken. There was a discernible energy in the room and within each group. The task for the students was to discuss the readings they had done in the first four weeks of the course. The fourth week of the semester and the students are energised by the topic, a good working knowledge of three to four critical readings and they were bandying terms like Ombudsman, reasons for decision, merits review, accountability and citizen participation around like names of old friends. I was thinking that after years of refining, engaging with students and reflecting on the learning process, I had started to be where I needed to be in the student learning process:  on the periphery, influential but almost unnecessary.

Since that moment, my thoughts have often turned to wondering how and when I should exit from teaching. Partly, these thoughts are trigged by the powerful impact of the symbolism in Japanese culture of the cherry blossom: falling away at its peak. Also in part, these thoughts are driven by not wanting to find myself due to age, a lack of empathy, energy or passion simply starting to go through the motions or taking the easy but desolate road of teaching administrative law as, in Whitehead’s terms, a dead or inert subject.

Leaf 39 An ongoing legacy of failure

Concepts and ideas have always come quickly to me, whereas manual tasks or those requiring dexterity, outside of sports, have always caused frustration and often failure. In a talk, lecture, conversation or when reading I want to skip the detailed step by step explanations. My thoughts rapidly compare, contrast and link what I am hearing, reading or seeing with trends or patterns and I am happy to dissolve old patterns into new patterns. Yet my learning history is littered with a failure to achieve dexterity or co-ordination skills including cord cursive writing, neat technical drawing, drawing, touch typing, guitar playing and many others.

By the time I entered matriculation college, if not well before, I had abandoned any attempts at cord cursive writing and had resorted to a free form, or undisciplined, form of printing which to many resembles hieroglyphics. Lower case es, even within the same word, can vary from looking like a 3,6,g and a circle with a dash within it and most annoying for readers is the random mixture of lower case and upper case letters in the same word.

Leaf 40 “Leaving on a Jet Plane” Vancouver Airport May 2002

My family had been left to explore Vancouver while I made a dash to speak at a FOI conference in Winnipeg. I arrived at the counter to check in my bags only to be confronted by “oh excuse me sir but the flight is over booked please go to the Gate counter and see if a seat becomes available.” Despite my seat being booked 6 months previously, I was now at the random mercy of other Canadian travellers.

At the gate I was told firmly to sit and wait and I would be called if any seat became available. Seconds prior to the final closing I was summoned on board and escorted to the back of the plane to an empty middle seat. A man in the aisle seat got up to allow me in. As I went to sit on the middle seat a hostile woman in the window seat pushed me onto the aisle seat and plonked a 3 year old child into the middle seat that she had paid for. After some confusion, I am led from the plane and my protests that I was delivering a speech at a major conference the next day went unheeded. I arrived to a snow covered Winnipeg in the early hours of the morning after waiting in an extremely long compensation and rebooking queue at Vancouver. In between I sweet talked my way into the business lounge to let my hosts and family know about my detour and took a convoluted flight path to Winnipeg via Calgary and Regina – albeit business class .

Next morning at registration, a firm hand grips my shoulder accompanied by the authoritative statement “Passenger 32B”. The hand belonged to a huge, fellow conference delegate who had witnessed the eviction from my original flight.  Later that morning, the large Canadian is introduced on the stage as the Director of White Collar Fraud for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Force. He started “I am a tall man and normally like an aisle seat but after yesterday I was just glad to have any old seat. The guy in front of me, who looked like a wild haired geologist just down from the Rockies was dragged off the plane arguing he had an important conference to speak to.”

Memoir - Leaves 29-34, Mexican beaches, Vietanmese Kitchen, Tax Man, Premiers and Pakistan Calling

Leaf 29 Margaritas, white sands, trade winds and a star filled sky. Cancun Mexico February 2005.

Just a few feet away, the Caribbean lapped on white sands.  Round dining tables had been set up on the beach at the water’s edge.  Never ending margaritas were available by simply raising an empty glass. Around my table, was a rich mix of government officials and activists from several countries and continents. We had gathered in Cancun for the 3^rd Annual Information Commissioner’s Conference. The budget for the event was approximately two million dollars. Over 450 delegates gathered for the 3 day conference opened by the President of Mexico, Vincente Fox. I had flown halfway around the world to speak to a gathering of about twenty people in a parallel session. I learnt that at similar conferences, whilst the formal talk was important, it was the exchange of ideas, information and analysis in discussion forums and at informal events like the one at the beach that were critical. 

Meanwhile, back in Tasmania, other staff filled in for the first two lectures in Introduction to Law and Administrative Law. I have always fretted about the trade offs involved in palming off my direct teaching involvement for the opportunity to engage in these types of international events. In recent years, however, comments in the students’ reflective journals suggest that the impact of having an internationally recognised guest teacher enlivens their experience and engagement, so a worthwhile trade off for me, also benefits the Law School and students.

The next day in Mexico, after the late night of margaritas and sand, we had lunch by a pool overlooking the ocean. I was introduced to a young woman, Vanessa Diaz Rodriguez, sitting next to me. Vanessa was a researcher at UNAM , the National University of Mexico. At the end of our meal and conversation we promised to stay in touch. It came as a bit of a surprise later that year to receive an invitation, arranged by Vanessa, to attend an FOI Conference in Mexico City. Over the next few years we kept in touch.  Later she joined UTAS as one of my PhD students.

Leaf 30 “The blow in kid from along the road” Greens Beach, Northern Tasmania 1966 or 1967

I could have been in Grade 1 or 2. We were at Greens Beach in Northern Tasmania. Almost 46 years later, that name brings back memories of happy smells, sounds and a sense of fun. A school mate, name forgotten, who lived along Elphin Road had taken me on a family trip (can’t recall if a day, weekend or longer). I think his father was a doctor. I don’t know the arrangements made or any of the details. It seemed to me at the time and especially in the occasional faint recall in latter years, that this was a magical moment for me. I was happy, the pressure of scanning, being alert, judging my environment seemed to have switched off. It wouldn’t be until we settled into our new life in Queenstown a couple of years later that I would get another experience of that sort. At least that second time it would last.

Leaf 31 “Johnny’s in the basement I’m on the pavement thinking about the government” Dylan. Salamanca Hobart mid 1999

I was at the Vietnamese Kitchen in Salamanca.  This meeting attracted coverage in the Tasmanian Parliamentary Hansard both in 1999 and 2002. The Tasmanian Attorney General, Dr Peter Patmore, and his senior advisor sat opposite. I had presented my wish list of FOI reforms to a relatively cool reception. I was still slightly annoyed because when I had been in Ireland teaching for the first part of 1999, a friend emailed me to say that the State government was delaying its long overdue whistleblowing reforms until I returned from Ireland and could be consulted. It seemed that the government hadn’t discovered email. In reality, my absence was being used to justify the non-action of the Attorney General.

 Over the meal I turned the discussion to the idea of a Law Reform Institute based on the Alberta model linked to the University of Alberta Law School. The Attorney General seemed interested in the idea. Previously I had managed to get the Greens to insert the idea into their 1996 election platform.  I suggested he approach the hierarchy of the Law School with the idea. Subsequently, after much negotiation the Dean of Law and the Attorney General launched the Institute in 2001. It was and still is an innovative first for Tasmania. 

Leaf 32 “Tax Man” Hobart 1980s

The mid 1980s was a frustrating time for me. I spent most of it attempting to escape the Australian Tax Office.  I joined the ATO in late 1982 because they offered me a job. The job was offered because I had sat the Commonwealth public service exams and was placed near the top of the list,  I sat the exam only because my flatmates wanted a job and dragged me along one Saturday when I had nothing better to do. 

A few months after I started at Tax, my friends who had dragged me to the test were offered jobs in other departments. I met Esther, my future wife at the Tax Office – a rare highlight. She started work on Valentine’s Day, but from her account, she was less than impressed by the mouthy guy who sat behind her.

Put simply, the Tax Office and a free thinking legally trained, union orientated, punk rock and Dylan aficionado were not a match made in heaven. At that stage in the early 1980s, university graduates at the regional level were a novel experiment and while economics (Esther) and accounting graduates slotted in very well, only a particular subset of law grads fitted smoothly. Law graduates who liked to research, confirm the law, play devil’s advocate and who bridled against the ease with which the organisation cracked down on blue collar workers, welfare beneficiaries and mum and pop savings accounts and who queried how difficult the organisation found dealing with professionals and other elites, were simply in the wrong place.

I scored some firsts whilst doing my time in the ATO. I was one of the first male staff to take leave to look after a young baby, while his wife returned to the office and one of the first full-time male staff to be granted permanent part time status to study at university with permission to tutor (and run a stall at Salamanca Market) and then leave for 3 years to tutor at law school. I was probably the only staff member to wear, without approval, a lava lava, a traditional wrap around dress worn in the South Pacific and on another day King Gee overalls to assess tax returns. I am convinced that my immediate managers knew I would come to no good.

Leaf 33 “A visit to the watchtower” Premier’s Office Hobart 2008

I made my way through the Premier’s office in the Murray Street building. I sat in the Premier’s suite with a single advisor present, enjoying the view looking over the Derwent River. The Premier, David Bartlett, new to the office,  talked about reform, accountability, trust and making government more transparent. A few days later, the Premier released his 10 point plan on improving trust. At our meeting we didn’t discuss this specific plan but I like to think a little bit of my intellectual DNA found its way into a couple of points.

Legal academics involved in law reform often have trouble either accounting for their activity or receiving some recognition for their contributions. Invitations to sit on advisory committees or the citation of a law reform submission are the most common forms of this recognition. However, often it is the far more intangible contributions that are more important but unable to be flagged in resumes or promotion applications. A conversation over a meal, a quiet discussion at Salamanca Market or a discrete emissary sent to take a sounding are often just as, or more influential, than the more formal and public involvement. A quote in a newspaper or a perception that you might make an adverse media comment can also influence the reform process. In the late 1990s, two senior officials from the Tasmanian Justice Department visited me at the Law School to show me a confidential draft of two pieces of legislation to allow administrative decisions to be challenged in Tasmania. Both drafts had no provision for the provision of reasons for decisions. My simple response was that I could live with most of the contents of the drafts but would have to publically oppose the omission of reasons. When the legislation entered the parliament, the two bills contained provisions for reasons but no footnote.

Leaf 34 “Send lawyers, guns and money” Warren Zevon – changing places and times.

I am often invited to places where the University is reluctant to send me – probably more for insurance purposes rather than anything else. The invites are often pitched as ‘can you fly tomorrow or the next day to China, Afghanistan etc’. The problems with these invites are first, trying to get a visa; and second, navigating through the University’s slow approval process while my over eager hosts usually want a definite answer within hours.

My most unusual invitation was to fly to Afghanistan in 2008 to present a seminar to the President, “possibly.” The word possibly was used due to security reasons; his attendance could never be certain or confirmed in advance. Putting aside the advisability, feasibility or even suitability of Afghanistan worrying about a legislative FOI scheme, the whole process was problematic especially for someone, who when I had visited Pakistan earlier in 2008, was greeted by Pakistani shopkeepers, with wry senses of humour, as either a wandering jew or Osama bin Laden’s long lost Australian cousin.

Surprisingly, the University eventually approved the travel to Afghanistan as long as I promised to go straight from airport to conference and back to the airport. However, the trip would hinge on getting to Dubai and transferring in only a 120 minute window, with the next flight being several days later, and getting an approved visa application to and from Canberra in 48 hours which was just too uncertain to attempt.

On the 6^th June 2008, a Friday, I received an invitation to travel to Islamabad, Pakistan to present a 15 minute FOI seminar at a World Bank workshop on the 19^th of June. I discovered none of the senior university staff needed to approve this travel were available. A previous request in 2004 to travel to Pakistan was ruled out as too risky.  By the following Monday, I managed to gain approval.  The next hurdle was getting my passport to the Pakistan High Commission in Canberra for it to be fast tracked for a visa  and back in my hands before departure at 2pm Monday 16^th June from Hobart. A UTAS law graduate working in the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s office acted as my liaison and hand delivered my passport and collected the completed visa and had it posted as a Platinum Post Express Delivery (guaranteed next day delivery) by 2pm on Thursday 12^th June.  The online tracking monitor revealed that the visa had missed the 8pm, and last flight, from Canberra to Tasmania. A check of the location late Friday revealed my visa was sitting at a depot in Launceston. Monday morning just 5 hours before my flight there was no change on the tracking site. At 11am I received a call from the University Handling Bay that there was a package for me. I rushed to the top end of the campus grabbed the passport with its new visa, returned to the Law School, collected my luggage called a cab and started my journey – Hobart – Melbourne – Sydney. 

At Sydney, my Thai Airways flight to Bangkok was cancelled because the plane had failed to leave Bangkok. I then discovered the joys of working with the World Bank – all the travel was business class. ‘No problem sir come with us,’ I was smoothly and quickly transferred to a Qantas flight – arrived Bangkok – switched airlines to Eitihad and flew to Abu Dhabi – then on to Islamabad, a purpose designed capital like Brasilia or Canberra. On my arrival at Islamabad’s International Airport, I was greeted with sheer chaos. Unnumbered baggage carousels were spitting out luggage everywhere and hordes of Hindi pilgrims in white were streaming past security with no checks or controls.

On my arrival at the hotel, I thought the security arrangements were excessive, yet a similar hotel had been bombed in Kabul the previous year and a few months after my departure a similarly designed hotel and security arrangements were breached in Islamabad. On the afternoon of my midnight departure, hordes of military personnel could be seen everywhere on the hotel grounds. Outside the hotel’s perimeter, every parked vehicle, for several hundred metres, was towed away. My limousine driver explained that a general’s son was getting married that night and the reception would be at the hotel, clearly a tempting target for terrorists and subversive elements within Pakistan’s Byzantium political scene.

The World Bank Workshop in Islamabad only required me to speak for 15 minutes in return for business class travel from Australia, with a hotel room booked for a six hour stop over in Bangkok, 3 nights in a luxury hotel in Islamabad and all other expenses covered. I remembered being frustrated in the workshop because many of the attendees would preface their comments with long statements and convoluted analyses of current events to such an extent that my 15 minutes was finally reduced to 8 minutes. Whilst the benefits for me were numerous including recognition, international travel, frequent flyer points and a brief experience of Pakistani life, the return benefits for Pakistan and the World Bank seemed less clear cut.

During the workshop, my eyes were continually drawn to a woman on the other side of the room. Around her I could almost sense a crackling energy. She was unlike many of the Pakistani women I had encountered in the foyer and cafes of my international hotel and at the workshop. Urbane, sophisticated, stylish women who had clearly carved an exemption from many of the more blatant strictures of a heavily sexist and patricidal culture, think Benazir Bhutto, were very unusual in this part of the world. Yet the small, wiry and elderly woman across the table, Tahira Abdullah, was a very different type of woman. Her eyes flashed with passion and at times her laughter erased the sting from her razor sharp tongue. Yet no-one, honoured invited international guest or senior official, was exempt from her demands for truth. At the time, I saw only her thick glasses, creased skin and grey hair and a strange magnetism that seemed to whirl around her small frame. In a later exchange of emails, this rich mixture of humour, sharpness and uncompromising pursuit of her causes continued to break upon me like a raging river over an elemental force.

Many have labelled me an activist or a freedom fighter, yet in contrast to Tahira, my efforts were insipid, timid and conducted with little risk to my safety, well being or existence. In response to a recent email when I asked if she was as passionate, determined and feisty as ever, Tahira replied “yes, I am so even more - now that I have the dubious distinction of not one but TWO Fatwas on my head - one from the Taliban/TTP (April 2009) and one just recently from the rabid Pakistani Mullah brigade (on speaking out against the Blasphemy laws).....!!!”