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).....!!!”

Memoir - Leaves 21-28 Reflections on Education

Leaf 21 “Once a miner always a comrade in arms” Parliament House Canberra 1999

I’ve always considered my veneer of civilisation as being very thin and a constant struggle to retain, largely because I want to preserve the great gifts of my background – a desire for plain talking, a preference for directness over excessive politeness and a capacity to understand or feel what is like to walk in someone else’s shoes. Sometimes, however, switching back to the ‘old me’ is also a very useful tool of diplomacy.

I was sitting in a committee meeting room in Parliament House in Canberra. Before me were several members of a visiting UK parliamentary committee on Public Administration investigating FOI. Most were typical angle saxon genetics - tall, thin and full of misdirection.   However one of the party was a gruff, short, stocky and no-nonsense Labour member, who was very unreceptive to my considered, measured and academic responses. He had the look, sound and temperament of an old time miner/union official. So I let slip that I was from a mining town and had spent time working underground. Bingo. Immediately he was very keen on this “FOI” thing that his newly  found comrade was advocating.

Throughout my professional encounters, I often feel like an emissary from a very different world. I have learnt the mannerisms, customs and speaking patterns of those I mix with but I am always on guard and wary. I understand the necessity for the customs, the social cues and the power in being diplomatic, yet it is often terribly frustrating not to simply call a spade a spade or to cut through the verbiage with a simple ‘bullshit’. I understand all the shortcomings of the class and era I sprung from – the heavy layers of sexism, racism, homophobia and the viewpoint that the rest of the world is filled with idiots because they don’t agree with you. Yet often I yearn for the refreshing bluntness of leaning over the table during a tedious university meeting and simply saying, “fuck, you are an idiot!”

Leaf 22 “College years” Hobart 1974-1975

When I left Queenstown for college, my sister Julie was about 11, my brother Keith was  6, and my sister Donna was 2. Infrequent visits home over the years meant that I missed nearly all the major events in their lives. I don’t know how my parents afforded my accommodation at Hollydene Hostel and while I was grateful for the extra spending money they gave me, it was never very much. Mum and Dad had little idea of what college or university entailed but they were certainly prepared to help me get there. Yet their lack of knowledge about further education meant they never pushed me.  I worked dilligently not to write home and ask for money but it was often difficult.  During one bus trip back to Hobart, I lost the money my parents had given me and things were looking bleak until a teacher offered me a gardening job. Over the next year, I seemed to strike it lucky and got the odd gardening job from two other teachers. In retrospect, I now understand these jobs were gifts and not lucky breaks for a fairly poor and irregular gardener.

By going to College, I started a journey that took me, with every step, deep into a world unknown to my parents or my forbearers. My mother had to leave school in Year 8 and my father never went past the final year in primary school. When Dad was about 12 or 13, his father died leaving behind 12 kids - three girls in high school and the rest in primary school or very young children. Dad’s brothers were sent off to the Boys Home, not a great time for them. We eventually discovered (and the banter about Dad being Nan’s favourite had more bite in it than we realised for many years) the wide scale abuse that occurred in state care during that time. Dad had stayed at primary school until he was old enough to start work at the mine to help support his family. His approach to life has always been a kind of ‘you do what you have to do and there is no use whinging about it or trying to change things’ approach. In many ways, he was an ideal man to take on the responsibility of two step kids in the late 1960s in a small mining town.

Sometime after I finished Grade 2 at East Launceston Primary School, Mum, my sister Julie and I moved to Queenstown to live with my grandparents. We shared a very tiny house in Arthur Street.  I have no recall of my bedroom or if I shared it with my little sister but I seem to recall sleeping on a tiny couch from time to time. 

It was a tiny house on the edge of town, in a small gully, in the shadows of the majestic Penghana – the mansion of the Mt Lyell Mine mangers that sat on top of a small hill.  And Penghana - with it’s secluded, off-limits, large well maintained gardens and grounds dominating the landscape - deepened the foundations of my future political beliefs and attraction to social justice issues. 

Two transformative events changed my life dramatically after moving to Queenstown. First, in Grade 3 I received some help from a government funded speech therapist that made my impediment more manageable. I still had difficulty correctly pronouncing words and tended to speak in monosyllables (later on I loved the liberation Bob Dylan gave me to stretch, twist and create new sounds). Yet the speech therapist gave me a handful of tricks that provided an escape from my self-imposed social isolation. Later, the flexibility and ability to manage the written word completely unleashed my freedom to express myself. To this day, despite two decades as an academic having delivered over a thousand lectures, hundreds of talks, including at international conferences to several hundred people and a few hundred media interviews, I still find the written word a more comfortable, ‘natural’ and effective way of communicating.

The other major change at this time was the entry of Keith Snell into my life. Sometime between Grade 3 and 5 my mother met the only man I have ever called Dad. Unusually for Queenstown, Keith had remained a bachelor till he met Mum who not only had two small kids, but was 4-5 years older than him. 

I gained not only a father but an extremely strict disciplinarian who insisted on neatness and order and short back and sides/crew cuts (at a time when long hair was fashionable, albeit against school rules). I think my life of clutter is a rebellion against that imposed discipline. You can always tell which is Dad’s car by the high polish on the outside and the look of the engine on the inside. The engines are always painted, sparkle and literally spotless. He has a shadow board for his tools. And even after all these years, away from home, I would be able walk through his house blindfolded. Everything will still be in its prefect place as it has been for the past forty years.

 In exchange for the exposure to discipline, for the first time in my life, I gained an extended family and a new surname. The Snell clan is a wild and rambling bunch.  I went from a small struggling sole parent family unit living on the edge with almost no history or roots, I was aware of, to being, by default, the eldest member of the next generation of a proud and very large family. I went from having a couple of cousins and a couple of uncles and aunties to having over fifty cousins and twenty or so uncles and aunties.  About the age of 8 or 9, I had gained a new name, a new family, a sense of belonging, a new family history and a new home town.  Around the same time I discovered a passion for reading and the treasure trove of the small (but at the time it seemed enormous) library of Queenstown Central Primary School. In many ways my whole life and sense of identity was reforged in this period.

By the time I arrived at College in Hobart I had embraced the persona of a West Coaster, a label I still attach to myself, but the remoteness of my ‘home town’ and the scarcity of other informed West Coasters allowed me to add my own meaning, history and sense of belonging to the name ‘Snell’. My college years allowed me to salvage what I wanted from my past and then allowed me to lock away and neglect the rest for another 35 years.

Leaf 23 “Inspiring families and friends” Mexico November 2008

I had tears in my eyes and gently held a small glass horse in my hands. The figurine had been given to me by Juan Pablo’s brother. The gift was made after I had spoken about my wife and daughter’s love of horses. It had been originally a gift from their father.

I had celebrated thanksgiving with Juan Pablo Guerrero Amparan, a Mexican Information Commissioner, his immediate family and a gathering of childhood (and neighbourhood) friends. Indeed most of the male guests at thanksgiving that day were the members of a neighbourhood band formed when they were young but who still get together to play and had produced a CD the previous year. In my neighbourhood we played cricket, smashed street lights and went bush; in Juan Pablo’s neighbourhood they played music.

I had met Juan Pablo briefly at a FOI and Privacy conference in Edmonton a couple of years earlier. At the end of the conference we had a spare evening and went out for a meal together. Over the meal an easy camaraderie developed. After returning home we shared emails, family photos and kept in touch.

A few months later, my 17 year old daughter Elise visited Mexico for five weeks and lived with this talented family – they all sing or play instruments with incredible passion and beauty. Juan Pablo’s wife, Johanna, is half Dutch and American and their sons speak Spanish, English, French and some Dutch. Johanna said having Elise around was like having a daughter and for Elise, who had her own quarters in a converted two storey stable, with maids to cook and clean for her, it was a very different cultural and social experience. 

During my stay with Juan Pablo I learnt the story of his mother, Lourdes Guerrero, who had died of cancer. She was a fiercely independent female journalist and well known figure in Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s.  She and Guillermo Ochoa had hosted “Hoy Mismo”, a morning program, on Televisa for many years, and before that she had acted in a couple of her husband's movies (Juan Guerrero)  Amelia (1966), Mariana (1967) and Narda o el verano (1970).  Lourdes was hosting on air on the  19 September 1985 when the 8.1 magnitude quake hit Mexico City at 7.19am. As the quake shook the studios Lourdes said “It seems we are experiencing an earthquake…”. (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug8y8DE1xgo) Transmission ceased when a 10 ton antenna bent over and crushed parts of the Televisa studios. Most people ran from the building but Lourdes and another presenter, Maria Victoria Llamas, stayed sheltered under their anchor desks. Lourdes appeared on air the same afternoon broadcasting from another studio.

Leaf 24 “It’s not a house but a home” Queenstown 1973

A few days before the end of the school year, my Grade 9 Social Science teacher remarked that I had failed to hand in any homework for the year. If I brought it in next day he might mark it. I had scored very well in all our class tests, I always finished my class work quickly, in large part because I would be assigned to help some of the prettiest girls in the class finish their work. Yet I was totally slack with homework. I rarely did homework. Like many Queenstown houses, our house whilst huge in my memory, was actually extremely cramped with the six of us almost living on top of each other. Certainly, there was no desk in my shared bedroom and the only work area was the small table in the kitchen. I cannot even recall where I would have put school books except keeping them in my school bag. Any homework I attempted was at recess time in the school library but only if absolutely necessary.

Up for a challenge from the teacher, I sweet talked the girls in my Social Science class into lending me their work books.  I worked throughout the night, at the little kitchen table and on the lounge room floor, and after my first major exposure to endless coffees I managed to hand in, bleary-eyed, an impressive number of homework tasks. Every task was done with different biros to reflect the time period over which they should have been put together. Much to the disgust of the girls, I won the Social Science prize for Grade 9. My only major academic achievement in High School.

I never stopped to think about what it must have been like for Mum to be housebound in a small mining town with 4 children and unable to drive. Especially after my grandparents moved a couple of hours away to Hamilton.  The winters were long and constantly wet.  Dad built a drying area on the back of the house to help ease the problem with drying washing – a covered roof and the side covered with strips of wood separated by a couple of inches to allow airflow. Yet there was little for Mum outside her domestic role. Mum was an outsider both to the town and to the large Snell clan. Many years later I read Pete Hay’s poems and writings about Queenstown and the West Coast in Vandiemonium Essay. An outsider’s insights, but a sensitive outsider who had taken time to listen and understand. Pete wrote a poem capturing a female friend’s view and also brought to my attention other female stories of a sense of entrapment or living in, Pete Hay’s words,  ‘a barren space for women’.

Looking back I think it was indeed a barren space for my mother, with four young children, a husband who after long hours at work, spent endless hours working in his garage or doing up the house.  In a different world I think mum would have loved to have spent her time drawing, exploring, bike riding and watching movies at the cinema but that was a world that was foreclosed to her until very recently.

Leaf 25 “Whose subject is it:  the teacher’s or the student’s?” Conningham February 2002

A few days before the start of semester 1, 2002, the mid February sun was setting on the Introduction to Law Camp at Conningham. The camp was held every year by the Law Students Society to welcome first year students. I sat with a group of first year students in the twilight, at a large outdoor wooden table overlooking the bay. Late the year before, I had come close to resigning.  Heavy workloads, a very problematic first year student, a white hot angry Dean and budget problems stemming from student attrition, implicitly laid at my feet, and very few sources of positive support had taken their toll. Requests to take up invitations to speak overseas were never refused but were never approved. I had to deal with a ton of grief and stress and realised that career progress from this point might be a long slow road. I had taken most of January off and now intended to just go through the motions, do my job and think a little about my next steps and whether to leave a faltering career behind. A few years before, I had mentioned to Michael Field, a former State Premier and my English teacher in Grade 7, that I had no intention of teaching the same thing in the same way year in and year out just to have a job. It seemed I had now reached that exit point.

I sat listening to the students wondering why I was even there. As the last rays of sunshine retreated, a young blonde girl at the end of the table literally shivered and said “I have been waiting all my life to come to University and my first lecture is on Monday. I can’t wait.” 

My heart sank; I was going to be her first lecturer and my intent was to just to go through the motions. Her first lecture would be such a disappointment.

The conversation continued around me but I sat silent struggling with tears of disappointment.  I had allowed myself to become the type of lecturer I never wanted to be.

I left Conningham in the dark and as I wound my way to the Channel Highway. Struggling to find the dirt road in the dark, I tried to work out my options. I still felt like resigning but didn’t want to end on such a sour note. I decided to put my problems and frustrations to one side and follow the advice of Bruce Springsteen. He once said in an interview – “the fans don’t buy a ticket for next week’s show they have come to hear me play tonight.” I might not have been Bruce Springsteen but there was no reason why this young student or any of the others deserved less than my best effort. At the very least, I could perform my best effort for one last year.  One comment, one student and one refocused teacher.

Leaf 26 “When the subject just belongs to the teacher” Queenstown, Winter 1973.

In the middle of a wild, West Coast winter, the howling wind and almost horizontal rain lashed against and through the open windows of the small classroom. Eight frightened souls, doing French in Grade 9, were wedged up at the back of the classroom shivering near the open windows. At the front of the small class, wedged in the doorway, was the towering hulk of our teacher, a giant of a man with a titanic temper and bellicose attitude. He bellowed and launched his instructions at us. Some have described him as a heavy weightlifter gone to fat.  Yet, for us poor souls doing his subject, he was a walking nightmare. I spent most of Year 9 dreading our next class with him. 

In the future, this man would be my model of an anti-teacher. You were never right, only wrong to different degrees. His students could be seen stumbling around the hallways with a pile of books and other assorted items, at least 30 cms high.  In his class you had to bring every book, dictionary, pencil, ruler and other item he wanted or face a tirade, extra homework or detention or on a whim, a fearsome retribution of all three. If the next lesson was translation you couldn’t just bring the latest translation book you had to bring everything.

I did homework for him - unlike other classes - but I was never certain what I was doing or why and resented every moment.  Trips to the phone box, a few blocks away, to call up the smartest person in the class, who lived in Zeehan, were not helpful; in this class we were all in the ‘Dumb Zone’. There could be a test without notice, homework demanded for a class might not be collected or reviewed, but then we suddenly find that we should have done extra work for this class or brought the homework not collected last week.

In retrospect, I appreciate the unenviable task of teaching French to cultural and working class barbarians on the West Coast. It is a punishment akin to penal transportation for language teachers. But this approach to teaching, linked to my speech hurdles, removed any burning desire to learn another language for a lifetime.

Leaf 27 “Broken words are never meant to be spoken, Everything is broken” Bob Dylan. Sometime, mid 1990s Law School University of Tasmania

I stood in a small law school tutorial room.  Unusually for Tasmania, it was a hot day, and I was conducting a tutorial with over twenty students in a room designed for maybe a dozen. Extra chairs had been dragged in. Two or three broken chairs lay discarded in the left hand corner and may have been there for several weeks. Restrictive covenants was the topic - not the highlight on my property law teaching play list. The students had come confused from the lecture and had done no reading.  This was the last tutorial for the fortnight. Most of the students in the room were there out of desperation, but in the time honoured tradition of desperate students, there was still no need to panic and hit the text books and certainly not enough angst to feel the need to read the assigned cases even though  40% of students had failed the mid year exam, many by large margins.  Assessment was by 80% final exam, The students were unable to discover whether this topic could be avoided in the final exam. I was in teaching hell.

Leaf 28 “Must be somewhere out of here” Bob Dylan. Queenstown 1971-1974

Throughout high school, I threw myself into sports and other physical activity: running, badminton, cricket, basketball, volley ball, bike riding and when I had nothing else to do, I would take my cricket ball down to the South Queenstown Primary School nets and just bowl over after over at the stumps or targets I placed on the pitch. In part, this activity kept boredom and depression at bay; it helped offset the bookworm and four-eye labels; and it allowed my imagination to run riot about future sports glory for me and this town in the middle of nowhere. In retrospect, it also limited, along with availability and money, my opportunities to indulge in underage drinking and made my non-smoking a sensible choice. Even when I did hit the grog underage, the prospect of an upcoming sporting effort tended to moderate my drinking.

When I went on holidays, I often spent many an hour in backyards in Devonport, Whyalla and Hamilton playing solo cricket. I would throw a ball against a wall and then hit it in endless mythical test matches where I played the key role. 

A legacy left to the future me was a liking for sports metaphors and analogies when I started to teach. I often use the idea of a small town sports coach – the primary mission is getting people simply onto the field and engaged. A secondary task, is to work with the talent you have to improve their skills -- helping the uncoordinated press-ganged nerd move from being bowled every ball to being able to block most deliveries that might just give your team the edge. I don’t see the point of leaving it all to your players/students and simply jumping up and down on the sidelines bemoaning the hopeless cretins given to you in the last round/entry. Thirdly, you take those with some skill and help them to the next level, to become local champs or legends. Finally, your job is to find the rare and truly talented ones and encourage them to the next level and a better coach.

In the end, it was not sport but education that led me away from the valley. Unlike sports, the educational path was largely a mystery and seemed either beyond my control or at risk from my own activity: acts of petty theft, vandalism, underage drinking and lacklustre educational performance in some areas. I ended up drifting down to Level 1 Technical Drawing class (there were 3 levels for High School) despite being at Level 3 for all other subjects. My drift was due in equal parts to a lack of interest, a TD teacher who used T-Squares as a form of crowd control, a lack of care in my drafting and little space at home to complete my drawings. Most of the time my thoughts, when they drifted to the future, focused, like nearly everyone’s, on getting a job in the mine either as an apprentice or as one of the five cadets out of a hundred potential candidates each year (clerical staff). Just every now and then the idea of going to that unknown place called ‘university’ popped up. Yet the obstacles loomed large – the need to move away from home, choose a college (qualify to enter) and very few people to talk to about it (even if I had been aware of the questions to ask).

In the late 1970s, when I studied Ethnic Politics during my Political Science course and from my observations of my friends from Greek, Polish and Italian backgrounds, I was intrigued by their families’ focus on tertiary education. My 1850s Irish (mum’s side) and German and Irish (the Snells) background never saw education as a route to a better life. If education was ever mentioned, it was to unfavourably compare it with common sense and hard work. Three decades later, only some of my younger nephews and nieces the next generation have started to follow a route involving further education.

Memoir - Leaves 15-20, Jimmy Carter, Ghanian princesses, Kiwi PMs and failed science projects

Leaf 15 “Hey Ma look it’s Jimmy Carter” Accra Ghana March 2010

In early March 2010, I stood at a conference lectern in Accra, Ghana, in front of representatives from over 20 African countries. I was there at the invitation of the Carter Centre.  Seated smiling in the front row was former US President Jimmy Carter showing, in the deep lines of his face, every one of his many years. Jimmy Carter, after his single term presidency, had set up the Carter Centre, an organisation devoted to work on development projects.  He had just given a spirited talk that in some areas was strongly contrary to the points I intended to make.

 My topic was “The difficulties facing African countries in trying to implement freedom of information legislation”. Unlike most of the participants: activists, journalists, parliamentarians, professional staff of non-government organisations and Jimmy Carter, my task was not to focus on, and advocate for, the positives of transparency and FOI legislation. Instead, my mission was to draw attention to many of the problems African countries would face in trying to achieve effective access to information schemes. Until recently, 95% or more of the law reform effort and resources has gone into encouraging countries to adopt FOI legislation. With over 90 countries adopting some form of legislation, this has been a very successful uptake of a law reform initiative. 

Yet the really difficult task of implementation, especially for post-conflict countries or those faced with crippling combinations of high level corruption, overwhelmed public services and non-existent records management capacity – most African countries - received little or no attention and resources.

This was the second time I had been in close proximity to President Carter. The previous year I had visited Atlanta, Georgia for a Carter Centre conference. In the Atlanta group photo I was in the back row of the 125 delegates: the only academic in the line up of Presidents, activists, parliamentarians and representatives of institutions like the World Bank. 

This time, there was no one between President Carter and me.


As I talked he appeared to listen intently. While at times he nodded at my words, at others, he looked a little discomforted as I took a line that strongly contradicted some of the points he had made. His talk had been a more traditional set piece selling the democratic, good governance and development virtues of FOI.  A thousand different thoughts bumped into each other in my mind as I spoke. While trying to focus on my talk and the whole audience I found it difficult not to try and catch, and gauge, the reaction of the “Former Leader of the Free World,” a refreshing and liberal antidote to the dark years of Richard Nixon and the insipidness of Gerald Ford.  I remembered my university days of studying political science and watching the Carter Presidency attempt to steer the US towards a foreign policy agenda that focused on partnerships, human rights and global development. And there was a little bit of me marvelling that a four-eyed, stuttering geek in a small primary school classroom, on the western edge of a small island, who spent his time looking out on the bare hills of Queenstown would one day find himself delivering a speech in a major African country before a former President of the United States.

Next morning, I shared breakfast with the then Ugandan Minister for Information, Princess Kabakumba Labwoni Masiko, and an investigative journalist from Uganda. A spirited conversation ensued between the two Ugandans that was both intriguing and fascinating for an Aussie academic. I thought of the recent and history of Uganda, where simply to be a journalist was a death sentence, let alone pressing the Information Minister on press freedom issues and allegations of corruption by those in her government over shared jam and toast in the presence of a foreigner. 

Ironically, in December 2011 Princess Kabakumba Labwoni Masiko resigned from her position in the Ugandan Cabinet following allegations of abuse of office, theft by taking, causing monetary loss to the government and conspiracy to defraud government.  Radio broadcasting equipment was alleged to have been stolen from the Ministry of Information when she was Minister and subsequently used in a regional radio station she had a 75% interest in. 

During the first six months of 2010 in the midst of my busiest teaching schedule (two classes with a total of 500+ students) I travelled to Botswana, South Africa, Ghana, Malaysia, US, Canada, Fiji, New Zealand, three times to the UK and a brief stopover in the transit area of Cario’s international airport. A Saturday morning might find me up early to set up my stall at Salamanca Market and the next Saturday I was on the savannah of Botswana petting semi-tamed cheetahs. A Monday morning would find me lecturing to 300 eager young first year law students on judges and juries and later that week I would find myself being picked up by Her Majesty’s Foreign Office to be whisked off to Wilton Park, an isolated conference facility in the English countryside designed for ‘quiet and discrete dialogues’. In June I was criss-crossing Canada while trying to cobble together an application for promotion to Associate Professor.

All of these trips and encounters, no matter how fleeting, with power and position and the sharp contrasts with life outside the conference walls and restricted venues, shape my teaching. I find it impossible to even think about returning to the classroom to confront my students with a pile of inert and dead material for them to regurgitate back in an exam. I want them to have journeys like mine or, at the very least, intellectual journeys. I want them to be able to engage with former Presidents or current Ministers, or wild and passionate Filipinas who want to make a difference if the opportunity presents. I don’t want to burden them with law presented as a series of burdensome, archaic and rigid formula that just leads to a yes/no answer that no one appears interested in.

Leaf 16 “The boys are in Hobart Town – where the f**k is Lenah Valley?”  Hobart November 1974

Dickie and I came out of that classic car chase movie Dirty Mary and Crazy Larry super-hyped. We were at the cinema located near The Mercury Building in Hobart: an ultimate thrill for a pair of Queenstown boys who had recently finished Grade 10. We lived near each other for several years sharing wild adventures in the hills surrounding Queenstown and playing against each other in several sports. He was the better football player and I was a superior cricketer and we were roughly even on the badminton court though he had a slight edge. Dickie was in Hobart because he was pursuing a possible football career. On the field he was a fast, nimble and talented red-haired rover with a terrier like attitude. His father had driven us from Queenstown, in between his work shifts at the mine, but he couldn’t stay, leaving us to catch a bus home. His reasoning was that two, sixteen year old Queenstown boys alone in Hobart were a safer bet than one.

I had tagged along to investigate going to college.  We had the wild idea of sharing a house. In those days, we had no idea how unlikely that scenario was or how unviable. We walked back from the movie to our accommodation in Lenah Valley, the home of distant relatives of Dickie, I think. During the next two hours the initial buzz from the movie drifted away with each uncertain step towards Lenah Valley. Hobart with a population of 150,000 people was certainly no Queenstown, with just over several thousand souls. Queenstown was a small town located in a narrow and long valley that we could run from one end to the other in less than 20 minutes. In contrast, Hobart, in the dark, simply seemed endless to us mountain boys. We were walking past endless rows of, what to us seemed like, mansions. Back home there were only a very small handful of substantial brick houses in the whole town. Here in Hobart every house seemed bigger and more exotic than anything we had encountered previously.

Dickie’s football career didn’t materialise and I lost track of him after I moved south the following February. I was offered a place in Hollydene Hostel – a place brought to Dad’s attention by the owners of Dilger’s Garage in Queenstown, whose sons had gone to Hollydene. As a former guesthouse next door to a hotel, it appealed to a Queenie boy and helped offset the social disgrace of staying at school when everyone else was raking in the money as apprentices in the mine. It was a huge leap into the unknown because no one in the family had any experience of moving away from home for education. It was my first warning of how big and transforming that final departure from the valley would be. 

After my final year high school, only five students out of more than a hundred, from three West Coast towns went onto college: two boys and three girls.  Originally it was meant to be six of us heading south. At the last moment Sooty, the son of the Mt Lyell General Store manager, decided to take up an apprenticeship.  The problem of getting to Hobart almost derailed the whole adventure for me before it started. Dad couldn’t get off work.  The only option was the bus and then finding my own way, with all my gear, between two unknown destinations  - the bus station and Hollydene Hostel. My plans rapidly started to shift towards applying for an apprenticeship. Options for nearly all the girls in my class were far more limited.  A few would become typists at the Mine Offices, a smaller number shop assistants and for nearly all, an early marriage before they were 18.

Fortunately, a slightly older relative by marriage, working in Hobart was heading south and she offered me a lift. This trip was one of the highlights of my young life. She had long flowing hair, a bubbly personality and was driving a mini-moke: a young boy’s dream girl in the mid 1970s. It was like a delayed arrival of Woodstock. I still recall the wind roaring through the canvas flaps of the Mini Moke and the two of us shouting to be heard over the noise as we cruised the 150 miles through the wilderness and later farm lands (relatively new sights to this mountain boy). She dropped me off at the front door of the hostel on Campbell Street. The other new students mingling at the front, checking on arrivals, were a little dumbstruck. Who was this West Coast boy pulling up in a mini-moke with a beautiful young woman? I often think back, if the lift hadn’t materialised would I have made the journey or simply opted to stay like Sooty, who still lives in Queenstown and runs a large engineering works.

Within two years it was only Leigh (another son of a local shop owner) and me left to go onto university from the West Coast group. The total West Coast contingent in the whole University were Leigh, the two Dilger boys, plus a couple of the children of mine managers who had been sent away from Queenstown for their high school education: not a great retention rate.

Two factors played a big part in this abysmal retention rate: fear of the unknown; and difficulty dealing with home sickness, or more accurately, losing connection to our sense of place. For most West Coast parents, arranging for their child’s further education, was beyond their experience in terms not only of the mechanics but also in terms of emotional guidance and advice. Despite forming friends at Hollydene Hostel, the Queenstown kids often didn’t go home (a six hour bus ride) for weekends, while the kids from the Huon and East Coast rarely stayed weekends. At weekends, we West Coasters faced the normal hostel curfew and had little money to go out. I spent many a Friday and Saturday night chatting on the phone to one of the West Coast girls who stayed at the girl’s hostel up the road (our only chance to talk as the boys and girls at the hostels went to different colleges). We chatted about what we had been reading, movies seen, records played and hopes (often overly ambitious and rarely realised) for the rest of the weekend.

When we did go home it was to a very different lifestyle, one that was increasingly difficult to adjust to and one that refused to accommodate who we were becoming. The easiest thing to do when stepping off the bus was to shut down the ‘Hobart’ persona and act out a paler version of the ‘Queenstowner’ who we had been. Most of our school friends had jobs as apprentices or office staff at the Mt Lyell Mining and Railway Co. They had it all: access to cars, booze and girls.  No time for long chats in a phone booth or to read novels by authors with strange names. When I was in high school it was difficult to get a girl friend because from about Year 8 onwards you were competing with the 1^st and 2^nd year apprentices who had access to cars, parties, money and their own houses. 

At first the infrequent trips home from College (outside of school holidays) were an intoxicating whirlwind of parties, drinking and hi-jinks. Yet with each trip we returned home a bit more different and the distance between old friends and attitudes started to be unsettling. We came back more book wise and brain refined but penniless and missing 95% of the experiences our friends had shared in the intervening weeks. Visits home were certainly not an opportunity to discuss why I was so taken with Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem Zima Junction and how it resonated with my own homecomings. The best I could hope for was that my gift of the latest Skyhooks, or an early AC/DC album or condoms (the Queenstown Chemist refused to stock these items) kept me in the “not completely weird” category. In addition, if I kept drinking the beers my mates would buy for the ‘poor student bum,’ I was okay.  During those years my reputation was not associated with academic achievement but my return to the cricket pitch for the summer and more importantly my capacity to win bets in drinking competitions for my old school mates. Back at the Hostel it was like returning to a low key prison (controlled hours, study periods, little money, no regular supply of grog and regular surveillance).

Leaf 17 “Prime Ministers, academics and future judges” Wellington, New Zealand, April 1996

In a small elegant café in Wellington in 1996, I sat across the table from my friend, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand. A working friendship had formed after I read his article on teaching administrative law and designed my first course using many of his ideas. We started a warm, but infrequent postal, correspondence in the early 1990s. During a visit to Wellington in 2002, we caught up again when Sir Geoffrey was a very active member of a very small audience for a talk I gave comparing FOI in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. At a later conference in Wellington in November 2008 he lavished praise on my research and analysis of FOI in front of Ombudsmen, FOI Commissioners, government officials, leading NGO activists and academics from around the world. It was praise rarely given from a man more often willing to be a stern and unrestrained critic.

 In 1996 I was in Wellington as the inaugural visiting fellow of the newly launched New Zealand Institute of Public Law. I had contacted the Institute, as I was starting on a project looking at the beginnings of the New Zealand Official Information Act, just as they were trying to find their first visiting fellow. From this serendipitous linking came one of the great friendships of my life. Paul Walker QC, an up and coming administrative and insurance lawyer from Brickfields Chambers, in London had taken leave from his chambers to be the first Director of the Centre for two years. His wife Jo Andrews, a well known ITN political journalist, came with him. She continued to file reports back to the UK.  To my mind, Paul is the archetypal ‘ideal’ lawyer – thoughtful, prepared, diplomatic, considered, engaging with a depth of humanity that I could only envy. During his two years setting up the Centre Paul attended Maori language classes and would begin each of his administrative law classes with a new Maori phrase.  He would go on to be the lead counsel in the Mad Cow Tribunal and later would be appointed as a judge in the UK. Paul started his studies at Adelaide Law School but despite academic success in his first year felt the need for a break. The teaching style of the Law School had failed to grab his imagination. He went to Paris and took up bartending for a few months before moving onto Oxford, met Jo and stayed in the UK. Our families have since become close friends sharing holidays and their home in London and their cottage ‘Longknowe’, in northern Northumberland, has become part of our lives.

On my first trip to the UK, in 1999, I stopped over in London and made my way to Paul and Jo’s house in Camden Town for a beautiful informal meal. They later moved to Tufnell Park and their spare bedroom became a familiar and comfortable base for all of our family when visiting London.  Paul had become senior counsel on the Mad Cow Tribunal and incredibly busy. Jo’s career as a political journalist was also intense. Many nights during my London stopovers I would get back to Tufnell Park early in the evening, catch up with my work, welcome Paul home around 8 or 9 pm, then watch Jo on the ITN Late News at 10pm, share a whiskey and peaceful conversation with Paul, followed by a few words with Jo as she returned from Whitehall or the ITN studios towards 11pm.  Jo would then fill us in with the inside stories of what we had watched on the news.  Jo is well educated, bright, intolerant of fuzzy thinking and capable of dining with the Queen or having breakfast over a billy in the wilds of Northumberland. Her dad went to Oxford and her mother to Cambridge, creating an intense but friendly family rivalry.

In 2001 I learned Paul had testicular cancer and was undergoing intense treatment. I decided to cancel my next stay with Paul and Jo and started to look for alternative accommodation. Jo wrote back saying Paul’s spirits would be lifted by my staying with them. It was a tough few days as Paul was incredibly weak and easily tired but our friendship deepened during that visit.

In 2002 the Snell family descended on Tufnell Park, London. Elise and Lance hit it off with Florence, Paul and Jo’s daughter. Lance, tall and good looking, boosted Florence’s stocks around her friends, Elise and Florence were both horse mad. Esther and Jo had mutual respect for each other’s talents. After a week crammed together at Tufnell Park, we all headed in two taxis to a packed King’s Cross Station on the Queen’s Birthday weekend (not a good time to travel) for a journey to Northumberland and an idyllic stay at Longknowe. Longknowe is a converted pair of shepherd’s cottages located in a remote valley. The farmhouse is rented out during the year but Jo and Paul reserve several weeks to stay there with family and friends.

Leaf 18 “Four Eyes, Four squared and learning to hide lights under bushels” Queenstown late 1960s

Sometime in late primary school I started to fail class tests. Up to that point, test questions had been oral and I aced the tests. Now the tests were written on the blackboard and my desk was at the back of the room and I couldn’t see. I avoided this problem for a while – continuing to fail tests, but I think I was picked up in a visiting eye test and an appointment was made with the local GP. For my troubles I acquired a set of thick heavy framed prescription glasses that burdened me with the problem of being called squared or four eyes. The offset was an improvement in my cricket batting. However, I stopped playing football, almost a sin on the West Coast, to partly avoid breaking my glasses, but also because playing in the rain, a common occurrence, was almost impossible. I kept hoping someone would invent wipers for glasses.

Throughout most of my teenage years I was socially plagued and weighed down by my glasses and in most photos they are absent. Later I overcame the problem of my glasses being sent flying in contact sports by tying a piece of string, or elastic, to the arms of the frames. By the end of Grade 6 I had climbed back up the academic ladder and was one of the top five students and possibly, one of the rare achievers who was not a child of the local elite. Yet the grief directed at me, from the ‘locals’, for this touch of academic achievement taught me to run with the rest of the pack rather than towards the front. So for the remainder of my education, including university, I was content to cruise and just slap together enough to get by. The only motivator I had was that my exam performance was always so abysmal that I put big efforts into written assignments to give myself a chance of passing each course.

Leaf 19 “Canada calling…..” March 2001

On a Thursday morning, about 9.30 am, my office phone rang.  At the other end of the phone was a female with a thick and almost exaggerated French accent. My initial response was is this a prank call when “The Voice” asked, “Is that Monsieur Reeck Snellll …. please hold I have President Madame Delagraveee on the line for you.” On the line was another female: “Monsieur Snelll you do not knowww me but I know of uuuu….” Warning bells were ringing. Was this a Crazy Call from the Kym and Dave radio program? Was it Stefan Petrow or Lynden Griggs, two academic colleagues, with devilish inclinations, trying to hoodwink me? 

I decided to go along with the caller but very wearily. It seemed they were with some Canadian taskforce looking into FOI. I recalled a friend from Canberra mentioning a group of Canadians had visited Canberra a few weeks previously for that purpose. So if this was a hoax, the caller was very well informed. The caller stated she had stayed back at work in Ottawa to make this call,  another bit of attention to detail. The Taskforce researchers had overlooked New Zealand (whose Act is called the Official Information Act rather than the FOI Act – a basic research mistake but feasible) and whilse in Canberra they had been constantly told they should talk with me (their research had missed me, the FoI Review a journal I edited and New Zealand). Someone had given them a copy of my article, “Kiwi Paradox.” that rammed home to them their error both in terms of New Zealand and my thoughts on FOI design.

The taskforce was originally conceived as an internal government review but ironically, had been outed by a series of FOI requests and had now become a fully public review. By the time of the phone call, the Taskforce’s activities were under a great deal of scrutiny and they were now in a bind. How could they make up for their research gap? There was a quick discussion about the possibility of flying me to New Zealand at Easter while a member of the Taskforce slipped out of Canada and visited the Kiwis and me in New Zealand. This option was quickly canned. Ms Delagrave, said they were unable to pay for my travel to Canada (which would alert the press to their oversight) but if I was in Canada the taskforce would be happy to pay my internal transportation costs, put me up in a hotel for a couple of weeks and cover my other costs. At the end of the call I asked the caller to email to confirm the arrangement (still slightly suspicious it might be a hoax). A few minutes later I got my confirmation email from the Task Force and then found their web site. A few weeks later I was in Canada.

 

I stayed at the Capital Hill Hotel. It had plainly seen better days but was still seen as a prime place to stay because of its location in the heart of Ottawa. The Task Force was allocated a temporary suite of offices across the street from my hotel.  When I stay anywhere for a few days I like to find a café I can establish as a base because of the food, service and location. I found a cellar café around the corner that served this purpose for me. My days were spent working with a group of very bright, ambitious and multi-lingual public servants. Often, work place conversations or even sentences would begin in English and finish in French. The circumstances surrounding the Task Force’s creation meant it had a multi-million dollar budget even if it was monitored zealously by the media. At that tim,e the Task Force was responsible for the largest ever set of commissioned research projects into FOI exceeding any previous governmental or academic efforts anywhere in the world.

My role was to be an in-house expert and idea generator and to feed into the process insights I had gained from my comparative work about FOI in Australia and New Zealand. Another part of the task was to provide seminars to a steering group of Deputy Secretaries (like agency heads in Australia). 


The interchange of ideas, insights between my academic, comparative and applicant perspective and the insights fed in from the commissioned research and the bureaucratic experience of the Task Force team led to a number of major conceptual insights about FOI reform and processes. A number of these appeared in the final report of the Task Force and a number of others continued to be refined further in my research, teaching, and work in places like Cambodia, then fed back into the Australian law reform process that led to the emergence of FOI 2.0. Probably the three major conceptual developments were that: first, FOI should be approached as a system (requiring attention to legislation, public service and user culture and areas such as capacity, training etc); second, the emphasis should be on the front end of the process (making information proactively available or determining its confidentiality on the merits of the information removed from considerations of who is asking for it and why); and finally, FOI should be viewed as a system of a number of interrelated parts and relationships (records management, public service capacity, technology capacity, training, demand and supply).

At times - when I find myself having my brain picked by the UK Foreign Office, senior public servants and government ministers in Tonga and Cambodia, academics around the globe often flown at great expense by my hosts – I am struck by the lack of invitations from within my own country and state.

Leaf 20 “If only the Big Bang Theory had been 25 years earlier” Queenstown 1973

Year 9 in high school was a bleak time in terms of my academic growth and development. Earlier, in Year 8, Mrs Shepherd a young science teacher had flamed my interest in science with her enthusiasm.  This association with a teacher’s passion and enthusiasm and an obvious interest in their subject matter continued to be reinforced for me by a very small number of teachers from that point on. More importantly, she had sown the seed that would eventually grow into my decision to leave the West Coast for further education. She talked about how you could pursue science at university, a place I had never heard of.  She mentioned you could even get a PhD (for many years I never knew what this was but the 3 letters had a power all of their own and when people asked what I was doing my answer was ‘I might eventually get a PhD – still to be achieved). 

Mrs Shepherd was the first of a very small handful of high school, college and university teachers who kept my interest in learning alive and inspired me to continue a difficult journey. Yet my interest and skill in maths and science disappeared within a year. Our new maths teacher in Year 9 made maths unclear and boring. A replacement science teacher, just out of teaching school, mumbled and stumbled his way through classes and I lost all interest. About this time my dreams to build a home-made rocket of tin foil and balsa wood and glue literally collapsed and despite devouring every science book, I was never quite able to crack the trick behind storing, compressing and releasing home made oxygen and hydrogen (the making of these gases was simple). The Apollo space program didn’t seem to have these basic problems. My aspirations to win a Noble Prize for Science never left the foothills of Mt Owen.