1)	I must strive for my personal development.
	I must fight against my own weaknesses.
	I must set myself ideals as high as I can, as I see them.
	I must accept complete responsibility for my actions.
2)	I must not impose on others the standards I set for myself. Who am I to say what
	others ought to do?	However, if I try to live to high standards, I should, by my own
	example, encourage others to live to high standards.

253
GAINING STUDENT TRUST AND CONFIDENCE.	DANGERS OF COUNSELLING IN DEPTH
BILL PITTY'S ADVICE	MY PRIVATE GUIDE POSTS FOR LIVING

Intensive interaction in the personal lives of others caused me eventually to set down in my journal some notes, which I headed

My Private Guide-posts for Living

1 Problems of right and wrong - problems of morality - must be settled from within my being, not from without. I cannot accept authority but must be an independent person if I wish to be mature.

2 If I wish to be an independent, free person then, in accepting freedom, I must accept responsibility.

3 Since I live in a community, freedom to decide right and wrong for myself, freedom to make my own choice, requires that I accept the consequences of those choices.

4 If I am to accept freedom and responsibility, I must have honesty and truthfulness as my guides. I must have integrity to rely on my feelings for just action, and I must possess courage to act as I see right.

5 Any basis for morals must be something that I know is right without requiring proof because basic proof is impossible.

6 As a basis for morals I can think of nothing more certain than the precept: Do unto others as you would have done unto you.

7 From this there follow four initial guides for living:

[1] Never act knowingly to harm another;

[2] Never act to harm oneself;

[3] Always act for the greatest good to another;

[4] Always act for the greatest good for oneself.

8 Within me there are several possible levels of behaviour. I distinguish simply between animal and human behaviour and from it have a sense of values. I should strive to develop the highest human values. As a human being I should strive to grow as much as possible.

9 Everyone is centred in his own world. I am a selfish person and one aspect of my growth towards higher values must be to outgrow this selfishness, this concern for myself alone. This can never be accomplished, but I can work towards it. To give pleasure to others because to do so gives pleasure to me, although still selfish, is of higher value than seeking pleasure for myself without regard for others. I should endeavour to live usefully.

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10 I can grow as a person through the control of my appetites. This is self control. There is an inner "me", related to my body, as a driver is related to a car. The driver must control the car but can learn only through experience, sometimes this may be dangerous. In exercising self control I must not refuse to live. I must live life fully with experience and learn to live through that experience.

11 Pleasure is not the goal of our aspirations but the consequence of obtaining them. If attaining pleasure is the meaning and end of our existence, then I would find life meaningless.

As an imperfect being, these guides for living are beyond my reach but, like the bull's-eye in the target, they are something to be aimed for, if seldom hit. I must recognise this always and show humility; I must be what I am, not pretend to be what I am not. Although I am weak and constantly fall, I must still hold up the guides and strive towards them.

As I immersed myself in the approach of Carl Rogers, I understood more of what he meant by a counsellor having an “unconditional positive regard” for his client. The first essential element in such a relationship was the value system of the counsellor. The counsellor who believed that individuals were essentially objects to be manipulated for the welfare of the state, or for the good of the educational institution, or “for their own good”, or to satisfy his own need for power and control, would not achieve a growth-promoting relationship. The primary element in the counsellor's value system must be the intrinsic worth of the individual, so that he values both himself and his client. Rogers claimed that the starting point must be the “realness” of the counsellor. He must be seen to be what he is, not someone who hides behind a facade. Such a counsellor encounters his client on a genuine person-to-person basis. The counsellor is open to himself and to his client; The more he can be this, the more he can be authentic, then the more he can listen to what is going on within himself and within his client.

The second important element is the ability of the counsellor to achieve an accurate emphatic understanding of his client's private world, with the ability to communicate some of that to the client. To sense the client's confusion, or timidity, or anger, or feeling of being treated unfairly as if it were his own, yet without the counsellor's own uncertainty or fear or anger or suspicion getting bound up in it, is essentially the type of empathy needed. This kind of understanding of another is extremely rare but, when achieved, enables the counsellor to communicate his understanding of what is only vaguely or scarcely recognised by the client. This helps the client get close to himself and from that to learn, to change and develop.

The third important element is that growth and change are more likely to occur when the counsellor experiences a warm, positive, accepting attitude towards what is in the client. He prizes the client in somewhat the same way as a good parent feels for his child as a person, despite his behaviour at that moment.The counsellor cares for his client in a non-possessive way, as a person with potentialities. This allows the client to openly be what he feels at the moment. It implies a kind of love for the client as he is, in the Christian fellowship sense, and not love in its romantic, possessive or erotic sense. Rogers calls this “positive regard” and is a kind of liking which has strength but is not demanding.

Finally, Rogers believes that the relationship better promotes growth if the positive regard is unconditional: the client is valued in a total, rather than conditional way. He does not make judgments. This unconditional relationship is shown by the best of parents.

255

UNCONDITIONAL POSITIVE REGARD MY DIFFICULTY IN APPLYING IT

This theory fitted my outlook on life but, although I identified with it, I found it difficult to apply. Whenever I developed a deep understanding of a student and became aware of his problems, I became emotionally involved. The following two examples were typical:

Christopher was an eighteen-year-old first-year student in 1964 and was not doing well. He saw me soon after I became Sub-Dean. He failed so badly at the end of the year that, although allowed to repeat the year, he was given a "provisional" enrolment. If he did not succeed in the first half of 1965 his enrolment would be cancelled. I tried to persuade him to discontinue his course, but he was afraid of his parents' reaction, and insisted on continuing. For some months he came to see me regularly; slowly I came to know him and to feel for myself his deep sense of personal failure. He had a complete lack of confidence in himself, an abject fear of other people, including his father, and a desperate need for some success to give him confidence. In the middle of the year he failed his exams and I had to tell him that the Faculty was withdrawing his provisional enrolment.

He could not share his troubles with his parents nor bring himself to talk with John Winfield about a job. He held everything within himself, had no friends, and I could do nothing to help him.

I felt very keenly for this young man. I wanted to help him, but had failed to do so. His insecurity was too great and his fear of his parents overwhelmed him.

-o0o

Before the commencement of the 1965 academic year I attended a “freshers' camp” -a live-in camp during which the freshers - first-time university students - mixed with senior students and learnt something of university life. There, I met Jeremy who had enrolled in Engineering. He said that he needed constant encouragement to work and that this did not come from home. In April, Keith Taplin asked me to keep an eye on Jeremy. He said that his father was a very prominent man in the community, but that all was not well in the family.

Jeremy did not do well in his first exams, so I talked with him. He seemed idealistic and genuine in his desire to succeed, but was introspective and uncertain of himself. Perhaps he was living under the shadow of his prominent father. I told him he could see me whenever he wished and, as the months went by, we established a relationship in which, little by little, he felt safe to explore his feelings. He suffered deep fits of depression, and could not hold any interest for long. He was often disgusted with himself and gave way to strong sexual urges by masturbating while imagining he was having sex with girls. Eventually he told me that his father often called him into the study and, after closing the door, compelled him to have sex with him. He felt very bad after this, and both hated and loved his father. He could not speak to his father about how he felt, while his mother watched television constantly. He had no feeling for his home and family.

Eventually, Jeremy pulled out of his course and went to the Eastern States to get a job, away from his family.

Jeremy discussed very many personal aspects of his life with me, expressing surprise that often, when he started to say something, I completed the sentence, or followed it with a statement that showed I understood how he felt. Because of this, he said, he had opened himself up to explore his feelings in a way he had not thought possible, and that this had been of great benefit to him.

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I was unable to remain emotionally isolated from either Christopher or Jeremy. On 13 September 1965, I wrote in my journal:

I am in a peculiar state of sentiment where I experience deep, unattached emotions - feelings difficult to put into words. Last night with Kay I wept bitterly and this relieved me somewhat. I told her I was soft-hearted and that my heart went out both to Jeremy and to Christopher when I thought how happy I was with Kay, while they stood on the threshold of life, one searching for himself with deep periods of depression, the other, running away from life and himself. Kay said that what I was doing was worth doing in spite of my emotional involvement.

Little by little I learnt how to be more emotionally detached, but I always felt the pain of someone who suffered, and could never completely overcome it. I took it as the price I had to pay if I were to work with people at a deep level.

The Engineering Faculty had always been a male preserve; women never applied to become engineers. In 1964, Alan Billings gave an address at the speech night of a private girls' school. He said that the Faculty would welcome girls “with open arms.” Next year, one girl enrolled; a few more took up engineering in the following year and slowly their numbers increased. In the early years of having women in the Faculty, I once had a succession of boys come to see me. Each came with his “visiting card” - a technical study problem - but each was in emotional turmoil due to a girl, and it was always the same girl, whom I will call Mary.

Some of these boys told Mary of their visit to me, and she eventually came to see me. For the past two years she had made herself one of a gang of eight boys and had been intimate with most of them. However things had not gone smoothly for her and she was very worried. When she found that it was safe to talk to me, and knowing that the boys had already related much to me, she discussed her situation freely.

She told me that she found it very easy to talk to boys and nothing gave her more pleasure than to introduce a boy to his first act of sexual intercourse. ‘But,’ she said, ‘why are boys so complicated? I mean, its just sex; I like to give the boy pleasure, and he likes it too, but I don't want to get involved deeply with him, emotionally.’ Her first intimate relationship had been with Richard; it went well until he wanted to get serious, and she pulled out. Richard took an overdose of drugs and tried to kill himself. Then she had a very intimate relationship with Bob. ‘We seemed so compatible.’ Mary said, ‘I gave him his first sex, and had not wanted it to stop, but he suddenly left me.’ Mary cried and then told me of several more intimate but failed relationships. Her last relationship had been with Ron - but that was a relationship of convenience, which only met the physical needs of them both. She felt nothing for Ron. Where, she wanted to know, did she go from here? Why was life so complicated?

Most of these boys had been to see me and all of them were too disturbed emotionally to study; eventually, they all pulled out of their university course. Mary came to see me several times. She did not know what she wanted in life, and had an unsatisfactory home background where there had been little warmth. She felt empty and unable to make a commitment or a deep emotional relationship with anyone.

I had not expected to be thrown into the role of adviser on human relationships and eventually sought someone to help her. Meanwhile, I had a group of boys unsuccessfully trying to come to terms with themselves. The difficulty was that most of these boys had background troubles of their own.

257

WE ENROL WOMEN STUDENTS PROBLEMS OF LIFE FOR SERIOUS STUDENTS THIS COMPLICATES MY WORK. I BECOME CONCERNED FOR THE WHOLE PERSON

Soon after Bob pulled out of engineering he visited me at my home and talked for two and a half hours. Eventually he realised that he had been pushed into Engineering by his parents, his school and by his friends. It was not what he wanted. The following year he transferred to Economics and graduated in minimum time with first-class honours. Later, he became a lecturer in an Eastern States university. When he came to see me, he was troubled with many aspects of life. This concern with life-issues was typical of thoughtful late teenagers as they came to grips with life.

Although he knew that his failure in Engineering had been precipitated by his intimacy with Mary, he worried about many issues. Why should Australia be sending troops to Vietnam? The morals of that war were complex and confusing. Why should older men be sending young nineteen-year-olds, selected by lottery, to serve in that war, to get killed? A year ago he had discovered that the existence of God could not be proved rationally; if there were no immortality, what was the purpose of living?

Once, he said, he had regarded himself as a superior being - someone who could achieve things, but if one did not achieve anything, what was the purpose of it all? If there were no immortality or purpose in life, then why should he not live life for pleasure? Why should he not enjoy himself sexually as much as he wished?

Bob was confused about politics: did he feel attracted to it because he wanted to manipulate people and enjoy the sense of power that it gave, or did he want to achieve something worthwhile for others? He could not see where he was going in life. Perhaps he would just “bum around the world” for a couple of years. If he completed a degree, he was afraid he would be caught up in a job, get married, have a family and so miss out on what pleasures, excitement and experiences life had to offer. He did not want to find himself looking back at life when he was sixty, regretting the opportunities he had not grasped. For the second part of the evening he discussed sexual relations. How did one decide how to behave towards others? He thought he was a hedonist, and that nothing counted except his own self-interest.

Before he left, I lent Bob a book by a young Oxford philosopher, John Wilson, entitled Logic and Sexual Morality. Indeed, my encounters with students forced me to query all my value systems, especially the rights and wrongs of human relations, including sex. I had been brought up in such a stuffy atmosphere so far as sex was concerned, and conventional society was so uptight on the subject, that I had much reassessment of my own to do. I had discovered in the University Bookshop two books by John Wilson of which the second was An introduction to Moral Education. I read them both carefully, and compared them with other books on the subject and with my own preconceived ideas. Slowly, I educated myself in an attempt to be objective and free from excessive prejudice.

These encounters with young people made me realise that the academic side of undergraduate university was very arid. It concerned itself with exam and essay marks; it did not concern itself with the whole person. I found myself increasingly concerned with the factors that promoted personal and professional growth in young people, and realised that this demanded a much wider view of the whole person: A much wider view than that adopted within the Engineering Faculty.

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5: GANG LIFE - THE YEARS OF EXPLORATION (1961 - 1966)

- XII

I had one last skirmish with the theories of Carl Rogers. At the end of 1964 I occasionally had lunch at the snack bar of the new University House. Sitting at the bar, I became friendly with Ken Walker, the professor of Psychology. One day I told him that I had been reading Carl Rogers and was attracted by his idea of client-centred, non-directive teaching. To me, this was a radical idea. I told Ken that I was thinking of trying it at the beginning of 1965 on a small honours' group of seven students. Did he think it a good idea? ‘Yes,’ said Ken, ‘at least for a term - and tell me how you get on.’ From the tone of his voice I could tell that he was very uncertain about my chance of success.

In the first academic week of 1965, I arrived at the class room where my seven students were waiting. I brought with me an armful of books, and piled them on the front bench. I then took a chair, sat and said nothing. The idea was that all action and all motivation for their learning must come from the students. I abdicated the expected role of “guru” who would dispense the conventional wisdom that they should absorb. I knew all seven students well, and they were all very bright, able people.

The silence grew. Eventually Trevor spoke up: ‘What goes on?’ ‘What have you come to learn?’ ‘Network synthesis.’ ‘Well, there are many books on the subject piled up, and there is the handbook outlining the syllabus. What more do you want?’ ‘You mean, it's up to us?’ This was Brian Molinari, who was particularly gifted. ‘Well, yes, you are the ones who want to learn. I will answer your questions, but why don't you find out for yourselves what you want to achieve. Discuss it amongst yourselves.’

I did not know how they would react to this radically different approach, nor did I know what to expect, as I was new to the game. Eventually the class decided that, if I would not teach them, they must teach themselves. They examined the syllabus and the books and decided that first they must draw up a set of topics to cover. At the second class meeting, after some confusion, they decided that they must structure the class and that each would take a turn at lecturing and leading discussion.

This is what they did. Each week a different student took the floor. The students became very involved in much discussion. Sometimes they went completely off the rails with a wrongheaded notion, or they became bogged down in an unimportant side-alley. According to Rogers, I should not direct their learning, but I found it impossible not to intervene in such circumstances and put them back on track.

At the end of the course they became worried about how it should be assessed. I suggested that each person should give himself a mark reflecting what he considered he was worth, and that I would accept that mark. This was too radical. They insisted on a formal examination but agreed that each person would set one question and that everyone answer every question except their own. They also insisted that I mark the papers.

When it was over, we discussed whether it had been successful. The class was unanimous: It had been very successful, but they had never worked so hard. It would be impossible to run all courses this way, they said, as it would be far too demanding. I also had found it very demanding; I was drained of much nervous energy. Never did I repeat the experiment, but incorporated parts of it into my teaching with small groups, particularly in tutorials.

259

MY EXPERIMENT IN NON-DIRECTIVE TEACHING ACTING HEAD OF DEPARTMENT?

In spite of my preoccupation with Sub-Deanal matters, I was very busy with academic and departmental affairs in 1965 and 1966. I was a member of the Science committee for WA Technical Training Year in 1965 and a delegate to the Pan Indian Ocean Conference on Technical Education and Training in 1966. I attended several technical conferences in the Eastern States. When Alan Billings was away for short periods, he asked me to “hold the fort” for him and then proposed that I take his place as Head of Department while he was on Study leave from November 1965 to January 1967. I planned to take my own study leave in 1967.

‘There is only one problem,’ he said, ‘and that is Keith Taplin. Keith has always held some resentment that he did not gain the Chair, but I cannot appoint him as Head while I am away because his approach is so different to mine. However, you were once a student of his, and I wonder how he would react to you apparently usurping what he considers to be his rightful role. I wonder, too, how you would cope.’

I saw no problem with taking the Headship, provided that I first talked with Keith. The opportunity arose over problems in our departmental workshop. The head technician could not control the constant demands made on him by all members of the academic staff and the research students. Everyone considered their job of highest priority. Keith Taplin had been pushed into a backwater but now proposed that he take over workshop management. Because Keith had an authoritarian, moralistic approach to all matters, I thought that his suggestion would not work - particularly as he would get offside with all the research students. He raised the topic with me and I took the opportunity on the following day to have a frank discussion with him. Later, I paraphrased in my journal the comments I made to him. What follows appears more like a letter than the report of a discussion because I have omitted the flow of conversation between us:

Yesterday, when you spoke with me about the workshop, I hesitated. I did so on several counts because I saw both advantages and disadvantages in your proposal. I want to explore the problems with you as honestly as I can.

You have known me for a long time; you have seen me change and grow. I have observed these changes. I came from a youthful background full of fears and, for many years, I was under confident and uncertain. However, I have grown in confidence and self-assurance. I have come to know my strengths and weaknesses, and with this, I think I have achieved a certain humility of mind - and I mean this sincerely. I know that this has helped me considerably in dealing with students; it has helped me considerably in dealing with people.

Always I have tried to bring sincerity into my dealings with others and to give them my respect. Time and again, this has paid off because, by taking the bother to try to understand people, I have achieved their respect and cooperation. I find that, if I treat students as adults, always respecting their attitudes, although they may sometimes be juvenile, then I can inject my own attitudes with sincerity, for them to be weighed along with others. Invariably I have generated enthusiasm and conditions under which the student could grow. I say this because there are some basic things in which you and I differ, if not about the way we feel about things, then at least in the way we handle them.

Let me not, for one moment, pretend that I do not understand how you feel, at least in some small measure, over the burden of the last few years. I could well understand how you might feel the bitterness of your predicament: As you said yesterday, there is a sense of failure, at least in externals; The problem of changing from the Post Office to the challenge of the University; Your sense of dedication in the early years; The internal frustration and friction; the brick walls up against which you came in trying to find solutions to the problems as you saw them; The task of maintaining one's place in a fast changing technical field amidst administrative problems and responsibilities.

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5: GANG LIFE - THE YEARS OF EXPLORATION (1961 - 1966)

I remember that you wrote to me, while I was in London, telling me that a Chair was being advertised -not that you expected to get it -and yet you said it with some slight hope, knowing full-well that it would probably be given to some bright, young English chap. The following years have hardly been easy for you. In one sense, as you said yesterday, the most difficult thing has been to play a significant role and to make a contribution.

Yesterday I hesitated when we discussed the workshop; you know that it was not the first time that I have hesitated. I hesitated when you confronted George Hondros and me as to whether you were wanted in the Engineering in History course. I don't know what interpretation you put on that: You may have put it down to lack of character on my part, not having the strength to stand up against Alan Billings. But it was not that. In recent years I have learnt not to be afraid of people, and Billings and I understand each other reasonably well. When he asked me to take on the Department during his absence, he pointed out the possible predicament I would be in. I told him that I would accept the job under one condition: That, during my acting Headship, I would not defer to him, but would make such decisions as I felt fit. This perturbed him, but he accepted it. This attitude on my part has helped me in the Sub-Dean's task since the Sub-Dean has no authority except that derived from the Dean. I agreed with Alan on an area of authority and he has since supported whatever decisions I made.

My hesitation over the matter of Engineering in History was not due to deferment to Alan Billings, nor was it a reflection on your own abilities and work in the area, but due to a doubt in my mind as to whether you would engender student enthusiasm for the subject. I believe that the "facts" of the course are much less important than the emotional impact it makes. Sometimes in the past you have engendered student antagonism largely through your insistence on painting your attitudes with a whitewash brush, rather than by delicate touches. Students are often juvenile and immature in their behaviour. But they are not adults and their immature actions are natural, especially if it is a reaction to perceived authority.

Our best defence against this is to surround them with thoroughly adult and mature attitudes, not to lecture them on their immaturity: this simply encourages further immature behaviour and a lack of respect for their lecturer. I disagree with your requirement that students sign an attendance sheet. I do see the difficulty with absenteeism; As you are in charge of the course, and have introduced the attendance sheet, publicly I support you, but I feel that it is psychologically the wrong way to go about solving the problem.

The course is one that strives to establish mature attitudes and an acceptance of responsibility by the students. It seems inappropriate to demonstrate our lack of faith in them by treating them as children. Some students are children; some will absent themselves, but in trying to prevent this by your means, we damage the others.

Perhaps I am saying that sometimes in the past you have appeared to me to see things in black and white with too few shades of grey in between; I believe that most things are grey and that very few things are black and white. In taking up a position in the past you have invariably seen the rightness of your case, and you have strongly believed in it; you have regarded the intentions of your opponents almost as immoral. Invariably, this has brought bitterness into the struggle. Often, for you, every struggle appears as a personal struggle against evil forces intent on your personal destruction.

I feel that there is great danger in such an attitude - although you might regard those who do not express themselves forcibly as chicken-hearted, lacking in courage.

261

FRANK DISCUSSIONS WITH KEITH TAPLIN

However, I feel that it is this particular attitude of yours, more than any other, that has

caused constant difficulty. I do not believe that it has ever helped.

Perhaps the last time we disagreed in this way was when you talked to me privately about the shortcomings of our workshop manager. You painted a picture, far stronger than I would wish, and you employed emotional terms. I knew that all was not well in the workshop and related a suspected but unsubstantiated case of incompetence. Later, at an academic staff meeting when Billings called for substantiated evidence, I did not speak up; you were then outspoken in condemning those who did not have the courage to say in public what they had said in private. My attitude was that you had overstated your case, well beyond the matters you could substantiate. I only had suspicions, not facts. I could speak of these in private, but could not use them in a court of justice. You may accuse me of rationalisation or of quibbling over fine details as an excuse for my "weakness" - but I am strongly opposed to emotional argument. I am strongly in favour of carefully substantiated fact, unemotionally stated. The trouble is that emotion tends to destroy the value of fact.

I do not doubt for one moment your ability to put order into the workshop. This you would do with energy. Unfortunately, your control would be authoritarian. The problem, as I see it, is to organise the workshop so that, in three years' time, when you retire, we will have a working success, no longer needing you. The problem is one of stepping in, redirecting staff and setting up an efficient organisation led by example to a point where there is cooperation and goodwill, which does not depend on an authoritarian structure.

I also see the workshop as a service organisation and not an end in itself. It should efficiently meet the needs of the academic staff, postgraduate and honours' students. All these should possess considerable freedom of action - and in this I particularly include the postgraduate students. I recognise that there are difficulties with them; I know that the workshop manager has often mishandled them. But, if the workshop were under the control of an authoritarian academic, who treated them as juniors and juvenile, matters could well be worse. We need to find a way to balance the postgraduate student and the workshop staff needs.

My actual discussion with Keith took a long time, as we discussed each point that I made as we went along. Because I was frank, and because I was sincere, and respected him, our talk was amicable and he decided not to push for control of the workshop. Later we found another solution to this problem.

I also talked with him about my possible acceptance of the Headship, the problems it might engender for us, and how I would need his understanding and acceptance. He assured me of his cooperation, so I told Billings that I would accept¹⁸. In spite of Keith Taplin's moralistic and authoritarian ways, I always respected him as a person and supported him wherever possible, never denigrating him to others. If I were troubled by something he did, I spoke with him in private. We worked well, and he gave me his full support during my period of headship. It could not have been easy for him. As always, Keith was very good to me. From 1947 onward, when I first met him, he consistently gave me encouragement and support.

This discussion that I had with Taplin was important in my own development and contributed to my self-confidence.

The department now had 10 academic, 9 technical and 2 clerical staff with 12 postgraduate students.

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5: GANG LIFE - THE YEARS OF EXPLORATION (1961 - 1966)

One week before I had my serious discussion with Keith Taplin in June 1965, Alan Billings drew my attention to two Chairs in Electrical Engineering that were about to be advertised. One was at Newcastle in New South Wales, the other at Hobart in Tasmania.

‘I suggest you apply for them,’ he advised, ‘you would be in a very strong position to gain one.’

Others in the Department encouraged me, but David Allen-Williams, the Professor of Mechanical Engineering, who was about to take over the Deanship from Alan Billings, passed a comment that made me think.

He said: ‘What do you really want in life, and will either of these positions help you to gain it?’

In my journal I reviewed my position, and headed it “The Dilemma of my Life”. If I am thinking of applying for these positions, I told myself, I must either be dissatisfied with my present way of life, or I must see a clear advantage in becoming a professor in another university. I looked in turn at my relation with my family, my philosophical outlook on life, and at those aspects of my work that were most fulfilling. Carefully I jotted down the following points:

My Family

I have a wife who loves me and who, without complaint, stands by me in all that I do; she sacrifices much for me. She knows that I often think deeply and introspectively and that this is an area where she finds it difficult to help me. However, she understands me.

I have two growing children, whose lives are important to me.

I deeply love my wife and children, but have been growing away from them. Perhaps I take them for granted. How seldom do I try to understand Kay's needs; how seldom do I share with her the things that are important to her; How little do I give time to the small things of life: that small boat we were going to buy, household projects and the like. Will they ever materialise? How often do we have fun and enjoyment where we can laugh and be happy together? Through my preoccupation with work, have I lost the simple things? Have I been too selfish?

During the past year we have bought a home at Como; a home where we could be happy. But am I helping to make it happy? For a year the children have been asking for a cubby house. W hat have I done? I want to set up a bench in the garage to do odd jobs. None of this has been done. Why? Am I so impractical and selfish that I can do nothing? Am I escaping from life, just as some of my students, such as Christopher, are escaping from life? Perhaps I am.

My philosophy of life

I am searching for meaning in life and cannot find it. Life seems to hold no purpose. What is material success? In what philosophy I do have, it is nothing. I have no religious faith, yet, in this I feel as though I have thrown the baby out with the bath -water. Eventually I feel that some religious feeling will come to me, but I know it will never be rational. Now, I am in the "wilderness". One day, I will come out of it. I know that if I immerse myself in, and give importance to, the material things of life, I shall never find my way.

263

A DILEMMA: DO I APPLY FOR A CHAIR? WHAT DO I WANT OUT OF LIFE?

What gives me the greatest pleasure in my work?

I enjoy lecturing. I greatly enjoy my lectures to both the second-year students and to my fifth-year honours students. I enjoy discussions with students in the laboratory. I enjoy those parts of my Sub-Dean's work in which I discuss problems with students.

What fears do I have in my work? The greatest is the fear of incompetence and, even more, the knowledge of other people that I am incompetent. I fear authority, just as Christopher fears authority. In moments of stress I am inarticulate. I am not a clear thinker. I do not have opinions on matters on which I ought to have opinions. I have fear in the area of research and know that I am escaping from it. There is nothing exciting, imaginative or original in anything I have done. This worries me. I lack self-assurance and spend much time thinking out replies to simple matters, and worrying about them. I have a bad memory.

I have fears in simple matters such as preparing budgets or in answering questions that come from "on high" - such as the Vice-Chancellor. I have fears about my lack of progress in research. However, I have no fears in my Sub-Dean's job. I see things I want to do there, given the time to do it.

I was only half way through collecting my thoughts when I realised that it was pointless to continue. Deep within myself I had decided. Not that I “decided” at all; it just happened: my decision welled up from deep within me. The answer was “No.” I did not want to apply for the positions in the Eastern States.

Two years later I was to face a similar situation. A College of Advanced Education was proposed for Canberra and an Australia-wide search was made for someone to head the college. All Australian Vice-Chancellor's were asked to submit the names of suitable people. My Vice-Chancellor submitted my name and I received an invitation to apply for the position. I seriously considered the proposition, perhaps because of the flattery of having my name suggested. However, I eventually decided not to go ahead with it, as it would cut across what had emerged as centrally important to me.

When I wrote about “The Dilemma of my Life” in June 1965, I did not realise how close I was to resolving my most pressing problems. Two factors brought this about. One was my encounter with students, the other was the extensive program of reading on which I had embarked since 1962. The possibilities of gaining a professorship merely served as a catalyst in the resolution.

It was mid 1962 while we were living in Mill Point Road that there was a knock on the door one night. There stood a man in his thirties who told me that he represented the Encyclopaedia Britannica and that he had a set of books he wanted to show me. I was always interested in books, so I invited him in. He brought a small case and drew from it a rich velvet cloth. This, he almost reverently spread on the lounge room floor. Then he lovingly placed on it several well bound books. These, he said, were examples of The Great Books of the Western World.

With Robert Hutchins of Chicago University as editor, and with the support of Encyclopaedia Britannica, a search had been made for the fifty most influential books of the Western World. An international panel had reviewed many books before making the final selection. It was these, in the area of philosophy, history, literature and science, that had been published in a uniform binding. They started with Homer and ended with Freud.

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Not only did these fifty books represent the basis for a wonderful liberal education, said the salesman, but within them many ideas were discussed. Ideas like Courage, Democracy, Education, Happiness, Justice, Knowledge, Love, Poetry, Progress, Wisdom . . . Each famous writer built upon the knowledge - and so, on the writers - of the past, and thus developed a Great Conversation down through the ages. With these books I could tap into these conversations, because Encyclopaedia Britannica had produced a two-volume Syntopicon of over two-thousand pages, being an index to these Great Ideas. He produced the Syntopicon and showed me that each of the 102 Great Ideas was preceded by an essay on the topic. There was also a ten-volume tutorial-structured guide to special topics, such as the development of political theory and government.

All this, insisted the salesman, came at a specially reduced price, if I signed up there and then. He could offer these books to me tonight. Tomorrow would be too late, they would no longer be available to me.

I was greatly attracted to the books but said that if my purchase of them had to be “now or never”, the answer would be “never”. Neither I nor my wife believed in impulse buying. We would not respond to pressured salesmanship. However, if he left literature with us, and his phone number, we would contact him when we had made a decision. The salesman objected. He did not think that his boss would allow him to sell us the books after tonight. We said, “too bad”, so he left his telephone number. A few days later, we bought the books.

The preface of the introductory volume pointed out that until lately the West had regarded it as self evident that the road to education lay through reading great books, which contained the accumulated thought and wisdom of mankind. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with them. However, in the twentieth century, we had neglected these works, although they were even more relevant.

It is true that in my schooling I learnt nothing of these authors, but now, and over the next few years, I set about rectifying the omission. I started by reading Homer and the Greek Plays. I had heard of, but had never read, Oedipus Rex. Next, I tackled the delightful history of Herodotus, read scads of Plato and Aristotle and dipped into Plutarch's Lives. Thomas Aquinas and Dante I found daunting, but enjoyed Chaucer. After reading The Wife of Bath's Tale, I realised why we were confined at school to nothing more than The Nun's Priest's Tale: Chaucerian ribaldry was not for the delicate ears of young Catholic schoolboys. I looked at the philosophers Locke, Berkeley and Hume, read parts of The Wealth of Nations and some of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Machiavelli's The Prince reminded me of the power struggles that occurred within the University. feasted on Goethe, Charles Darwin and Dostoevsky. Finally, I dipped into Sigmund Freud. Using the Syntopicon, I explored ideas like Democracy, Education, Liberty, Progress and Wisdom. Over the years, I have returned again and again to these volumes.

In hindsight, it is difficult to measure the influence of these books upon me, but it was great. They opened for me a world of ideas closed through my concentration on narrow, technical studies. They gave me a new feeling for what was “man”, and complemented other reading that had been triggered by Arthur Ellison¹⁹

¹⁹ See page 183

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I embarked on a truly prodigious program of reading and learning. In 1962 and 1963 I concentrated on the Great Books and on the volumes that I had brought back from London. Nineteen-sixty-four saw a surge of reading new material. Bronowski and Mazlish's The Western Intellectual Tradition supplemented Russell's History of Western Philosophy and became dog-eared from use. As Sub-Dean, my interest in, and need to understand, human behaviour increased dramatically. I bought and read books on the psychology of adolescence, I discovered and devoured volumes of Carl Rogers. Two small paperback volumes, Towards a Psychology of Being by Maslow, and The Transparent Self

by Jourard influenced me.

Maslow suggested that there was a fundamental ordering of human needs: man's needs arranged themselves in a hierarchy that ascended from the most basic biological requirements to the quest for self-actualisation and fulfilment. These, from lowest to highest, he listed as:

1 Physiological needs (hunger, thirst, sex) 2 Safety and shelter 3 Love 4 Esteem 5 Self-Actualisation.

He said that an unmet need on the lowest level was ordinarily the one that commanded the individual's primary attention and effort. Unless the needs for food and safety were reasonably well met, behaviour would be dominated by these needs. With their gratification, however, the individual was free to devote his energies to meeting his needs on the next higher level. This made much sense to me.

Jourard discussed self-disclosure. In a related book by Mowrer²⁰ I read a chapter entitled You are Your Secrets. He claimed that if a person did a good act but kept it secret within himself, telling no one, then he built up internal “credit” that contributed to his sense of well-being and completeness. However, if he told others of his good deed, or bragged about it, he spent his “credit” and made no lasting contribution to his well-being. Conversely, if he did a bad act, and told no one, it remained within him, festered, and diminished his inner security. If he could tell a “significant other” - that is, someone important to him, whom he respected - of his bad deed, then its negative effect would be nullified. In short, you became your secrets.

A client of Mowrer's explained it like this:

W hat you seem to be saying is that when we tell or brag about some accomplishment or favour we've done someone, we exchange the “credit” for immediate satisfaction, that is, we “spend” it. And in the same way, when we confess an evil, something we feel guilty about, we likewise get rid of it, dissipate it . . . like those things I did and thought I wasn't ashamed of but was. Now that I have admitted them, they aren't really a part of me any more -they just don't seem very important. By admitting these things, I have "spent" my guilt. And now the same principle seems to work also the other way around. Just as the wrong kind of "credit," if accumulated, will eventually destroy you, so will good "credit," if not used up, give you strength and inner confidence. The net effect is that you are, in any case, what you keep back, save: strong and self-accepting if what you hide and keep back is good, and weak and self-hating if what you keep and hide is bad.

Mowrer, O.H., The New Group Therapy, Van Nostrand, 1964. Chapter 6, page 65, You Are Your Secrets.

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This also made great sense to me. I recognised that true confession "was good for the soul", but I had never been attracted to the Catholic ritual of confession²¹ - because it seemed so artificial.

²¹ see pages 43 and 110

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This new interpretation had nothing to do with religion or God: It simply reflected practical human experience. I saw it at work within myself, and I saw it at work within the students I encountered in depth.

Several years after this, in 1968, I was persuaded to attend a workshop held by the Ecumenical Institute. About twenty-five people drawn from various faiths and those like myself, without faith, spent a weekend together. We worked as a team examining papers written by such theologians as Rudolf Bultmann. Our leader took an existential approach. He told us to spend ten minutes only reading the thirteen paragraphs in a paper and to write down one keyword for each paragraph. On the blackboard he drew thirteen columns. At the end of the ten minutes he asked who was prepared to write on the board the thirteen keywords they had chosen.

No one had sufficient time to absorb the paper; We had worked at speed, and under pressure, and all of us felt that we could not possibly have written down appropriate keywords. No one knew, for sure, that what they had written made sense. We were all uncertain, and yet we were being asked to expose ourselves to the others. When we all hesitated, our leader pointed out that this was what life was about. We never had enough facts to be sure of ourselves; We were always uncertain. Yet, we had to act and thus, expose ourselves. ‘At this moment,’ he said, ‘you are all suffering anxiety and tension. Being willing to act, in spite of the angst, and well-knowing that you may make a mistake, is what responsible living is about.’ I, along with all the others felt the tension of anxiety, so his practical point was well made.

Eventually someone plucked up courage and wrote his keywords on the board. The leader then filled in the board with keywords that others had written. Finally, we looked at all the keywords for the first paragraph and interpreted the meaning of the paragraph through them. We discovered that, although no one person had grasped the paragraph in its entirety, between us we had a far greater depth of understanding than anyone would gain individually from an hour of reading. We saw the value of working cooperatively, and of pooling our respective insights.

Although I learnt something from exercises of this kind, I came away from the workshop with one abiding awareness that made great sense to me, and which has lasted all my life. This was a psychological interpretation of those religious terms “sin” and “grace”. I knew that sin was something we did that was wrong, but I was never happy with sin as something that displeased God, or grace as something pleasing to Him. To “find grace in the eyes of the Lord” was for me an empty phrase, because the concept of “God” as a person always seemed contrived in human fashion.

By the end of the weekend I had a new understanding: Sin is separation, and grace is unity.

Sin is separation of man from himself - as when part of him is at odds with another part. When I am separated from myself, I am not at peace with myself. I do not have a feeling of well-being, and I suffer psychological pain and feelings of disquiet and guilt. Sin is separation of man from other men. Man is a herd animal and he gains strength and meaning from his association with others. When he is closely related to others, his life is enriched. When he is separated from others, he is lonely and unfulfilled. Finally, sin is separation from nature and what man takes as the ground of his being, interpreted by some as “God.” We have all experienced the beauty of association with nature, with mountains, clouds, running water, the sea, music . . . Most of us know what it is to feel “at one” with nature. Separation from all this is sin. Sin is not defined as an immoral act or breaking the rules, but such acts causes separation, and that is sin.

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Grace is the opposite of separation: it is unity. Unity within ourselves, so that we feel whole and complete in ourselves; Unity with our fellow man, expressed by sharing, by compassion and love; Unity or oneness with nature and the ground of our being so that we have a sense of belonging to and being a part of all that is. That is grace.

This notion of unity, and of self-development by striving to attain it, was not part of my philosophy in the early to mid 1960's, although I was moving towards it. I had come across the notion in Taoist literature, and was to take a further step in 1965 when I discovered a book by Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, and was led to find in the library another of his books, The Doctor and the Soul. It was also in 1965 that I discovered the books on morality by John Wilson²², bought Martin Buber's book, Between Man and Man, and a host of other volumes on sociology and the human condition. Between 1964 and the end of 1966 I bought, and read, almost ninety books on these subjects, and on religion. No wonder that, with this preoccupation, I was self-centred and neglectful of my wife and family! I was engaged in a deep, inner exploration.

Viktor Frankl was a professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Vienna but had spent three grim years during the Second World War in the German death camp at Auschwitz. He survived and gained his freedom only to find that almost his entire family had been wiped out. To quote part of Gordon Allport's²³preface to Man's Search for Meaning:

Dr Frankl sometimes asks his patients who suffer from a multitude of torments great and small, "W hy do you not commit suicide?' From their answers he can often find the guide-line for his psychotherapy: in one life, there is love for one's children to tie to; in another life, a talent to be used; in a third, perhaps only lingering memories worth preserving. To weave these slender threads of a broken life into a firm pattern of meaning and responsibility is the object and challenge of logotherapy, which is Dr Frankl's own version of modern existential analysis.

In this book, Dr Frankl explains the experience which led to the discovery of logotherapy²⁴. As a longtime prisoner in bestial concentration camps he found himself stripped to naked existence. His father, mother, brother and his wife died in camps or were sent to the gas ovens, so that, excepting for his sister, his entire family perished in these camps. How could he - every possession lost, every value destroyed, suffering from hunger, cold and brutality, hourly expecting extermination - how could he find life worth preserving? . . . .

One cannot help but compare Viktor Frankl's approach to therapy with the work of his predecessor, Sigmund Freud. Freud finds roots of distressing disorders in the anxiety caused by conflicting and unconscious motives. Frankl traces them to the failure of the sufferer to find meaning and a sense of responsibility in his existence.. . . The central theme of existentialism states that to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. If there is a purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in suffering and dying. But no man can tell another what this purpose is. Each must find out for himself, and must accept the responsibility that his answer prescribes. If he succeeds, he will continue to grow in spite of all indignities. Frankl is fond of quoting Nietzche, "He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how." Frankl found in concentration camp, when stripped of all freedoms, that there still remained the last human freedom - the freedom to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances.

²² See page 257

²³ Gordon Allport was professor of psychology at Harvard University.

Logos is a Greek word that denotes meaning. Logo-therapy focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as man's search for such a meaning. Frankl says that the striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man.

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I made copious notes from the library volume of The Doctor and the Soul. Frankl asserted that being Human meant being conscious and being responsible. He insisted that man had freedom: He may have instincts, but they do not rule him; He may have an inherited disposition but can choose to go beyond it; He may be caught in a particular environment, but it is what man makes of it that counts. Man, he said, is responsible to his conscience, and education must be towards the ability to make decisions.

He gave a quotation from Goethe that dove-tailed with the attitude of Carl Rogers and which became a guide to my relationship with young people:

If we take people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat them as though they were what they ought to be, we help them to become what they are capable of becoming.

To become the person one is capable of becoming. What a fine aspiration! It gave me an important goal: To find and then be the person that one truly is, without sham or facade. Frankl stressed the importance of self-fulfilment. Each person, he said, was unique and irreplaceable. No one can replace him. If he has found his true place in the world and has filled it, he has thereby fulfilled himself. This brought me back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs with Self-Actualisation at the top.

In my journal, I copied a few comments that Frankl made on the meaning of life and on responsibility:

The problem of meaning in its extreme form can literally overwhelm a person,

particularly after puberty when the essential uncertainty of human life is revealed to

young people maturing and struggling intellectually. . .

We cannot question the "purpose" of the universe. Pascal said that a branch can never

grasp the meaning of a tree. An animal can scarcely reach out of his environment and

understand the superior world of man. What then of man?

Schleich said: "God sat at the organ of possibilities and improvised the world. Poor

creatures that we are, we men can only hear the Vox Humana. If this is so beautiful,

how glorious the whole must be."

Responsibility is something we face and may sometimes try to escape . . . There is something about responsibility that resembles an abyss. The longer and more profoundly we consider it, the more we become aware of its awful depths. As soon as we lend our minds to the essence of human responsibility, we cannot forbear to shudder; there is something fearful about responsibility. But, at the same time, something glorious! It is fearful to know that at this moment we bear responsibility for the next, that every decision from the smallest to the largest is a decision for all eternity that at every moment we bring to reality - or miss - a possibility that only exists for that particular moment. Every moment holds thousands of possibilities, but we can only choose a single one of these. All the others we have condemned to never-being - and that, too, for all eternity. But how glorious to know that the future, our own, and therefore the future of the things and people around us, is dependent - if only to a tiny extent upon our decisions at a particular moment.

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Man's freedom is not freedom from responsibility but freedom to accept responsibility. Suicide is flight from responsibility. It is like the chess player, confronted with a difficult problem, who sweeps the pieces from the board. This solves no problem. If a man says that life has no meaning for him, that the unique potentialities of his existence are not apparent to him, then we reply that his primary task is to find his proper task. But how can a man find out what he ought to be from what he is? Goethe said, "How can we learn to know ourselves? Never by reflection, but by action. Try to do your duty and you will soon find out what you are. But what is your duty? The demands of each day."

No man can predict his future; he cannot know what value his future holds. No man knows what life still has in store for him, or what magnificent hour may still await him. No man is justified in insisting on his own inadequacies. No matter how discontented with himself a man may be, no matter how he torments himself with brooding on his failings and how sternly he sits in judgment on himself -this very act proves he is not the poor creature he thinks he is. The man who judges himself harshly has caught sight of a value.

Sometimes a man is faced with what is unalterable. From the manner in which he takes these things upon himself, assimilates these difficulties into his own psyche, there flows an incalculable multitude of value potentialities. This means that human life can be fulfilled not only in creating and enjoying but also in suffering. Those who worship the cult of success will not understand such conclusions.

Martin Buber wrote that proper education is concerned with the person as a whole, but stressed that we cannot give instruction in ethics. Only in his whole being, in all his spontaneity, can an educator truly affect the whole being of another. The educator must be wholly himself, wholly alive and able to communicate his being by the way he acts and is, not by what he says. He must have humility to realise that he is but one small element in the fullness of life of another; he must be self aware, have a sense of personal responsibility and gain the confidence of the other.

For an adolescent, frightened and disappointed by an unreliable world, said Buber, confidence enables him to accept the educator as a person. The educator can be trusted; he is not making a business out of him, but is taking part in his life. Confidence is won only by direct, open, innocent and frank participation in the life of the people one is dealing with, and by assuming the responsibility that arises from such participation.

I took all these comments and many others on board and pondered them. Frankl and Buber were right about freedom, responsibility and education. When I had absorbed these ideas, in August 1966 I

25_:

set down their implications for me

1 A fully human being is an individual who recognises the freedom to which he is condemned and who accepts complete responsibility for his own life.

(a) Such an individual does not conform to society for the sake of conforming or because of fear; if outwardly he appears to conform in some respects, the conformity is apparent, not real: it represents congruence between his own internalised value system and the social norm.

²⁵ see previous statements on pages 248 and 253

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(b): Such an individual must therefore set up his own value system that is authentic for him.

(iii) he departs from social norms not in keeping with his value system.

Once an individual has set up a value system he will, in his moral actions, conform to it; if he has no value system, he has a responsibility to establish one; it is immoral not to do so.

2 It follows from this that

(a) I must set up my own value system;

(b) I have no right to force my value system on others. I must respect the value system of others if authentically held.

3 My own value system at present is:

(a): I must strive to become an authentic human being;
(b): I must acknowledge the individuality of others;
(c): I must harm no one through my actions: Every individual must be treated as an end in himself. He must never be used.
(d): I should show moderation in all things.
(e): I must show concern for others
(f): Do unto others as you would do unto yourself
(g): In my concern for others I must strive for their independence, not dependence.

It was to take some years for these understandings to become more than ideas floating around inside my head. Until I had put into practice Goethe's dictum to learn to know myself by responding to the demands of each day; until I had practised the concept of “You are your secrets”; until I had encountered the scary idea of self-disclosure, I would remain a person divided and uncertain. To strive for a sense of unity and fulfilment became a goal and an aspiration, but one that I doubted I would achieve.

Until I became Sub-Dean I had no notion of the meaning of life. After the early inculcation of “meaning”, derived from religious concepts that seemed so false to me, I had put the quest aside as unanswerable and unimportant, but I retained a guilty conscience because I threw religion overboard. However, when I became involved more fully in the lives of young people, there unexpectedly awakened in me a feeling of greater depth; I felt as though I were emerging from a cocoon. Were these amorphous feelings “religious”? I could not tell, but they had some relation to it.

“How can we learn to know ourselves? Never by reflection, but by action.” Now, for the first time, my actions caused deeper feelings to well up, unbidden, from within. They pointed to Love in the

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Christ-like sense as the root of all that is meaningful. Could it be that Love - the seeking of unity really was the mainspring of life? Did this turn me back to Christianity? I did not know. Every young person has gazed at the stars and wondered about the meaning of existence. Religion down through the ages has tried to satisfy man by mythological explanations. The ordinary, everyday world of commonplace things seemed to possess reality, but what was the reality of these deeper feelings? Some people have claimed to have had “religious” experiences, to have sensed transcendent realities beyond the ordinary. The world's great, formal religions had all grown out of such individual feelings by inspired men. Were these notions of religion no more than the wish projections of man craving for certainty?

Thoughts of this kind claimed my attention and, in mid 1966, I decided to put on paper the ideas that had formed within me through my reading and thinking. On the one hand, I said that “higher” or “religious” knowledge beyond ordinary commonplace knowledge could never be established. It could not be proved. But then, what was the nature of our “not knowing”? And, in what sense did we know anything? I came to the conclusion that there was not as much distinction between ordinary and “higher” knowledge as I thought. Pascal had said that “a branch can never grasp the meaning of a tree”. I found this theme very cogently developed in a book by Tyrell, Grades of Significance. I explored this.

At length I produced a rather difficult, 12,000-word dissertation entitled Faith and Life Philosophy²⁶that drew together all these ideas. When I completed it, I felt satisfied. I was still no nearer the truth because intellectual pursuit was the wrong tool to use, but I felt much more at peace with myself. There was no longer a war between my logical, intellectual self, and my “feeling”, aesthetic self. I realised that I was less divided, less separated within myself, and that this was a step towards achieving unity. At last I understood the nature of our “not-knowing.”

Many years later, in 1991, I gave a copy of this dissertation to a former Vietnamese student of mine, Dang Tan Phuc, who had settled in Sydney. He told me that he found it very difficult. ‘I have scanned through it at least five times,’ he wrote, ‘but still find it quite heavy going.’ I replied to him:

In the mid 1960's circumstances threw me amongst people in a new way, and human relations started to emerge as an important value to me. I was very muddled about my rejection of religious dogma and, because of a strict Catholic upbringing, had strong feelings of guilt.

Inwardly I asked myself, “On what can I rely?” As I read ever more deeply, I came to realise that all the things we call “knowledge” were but ways of coping with our daily existence. There was nothing absolute about them. I reached the point where the words in Goethe's poem of Dr Faust “And see there's nothing we can know!” were very true for me. I then realised the profound truth of the Taoist couplet:

He who knows does not speak He who speaks does not know.

So, all that the dissertation did was to confirm for me that, if I were to find truth, then it must come from deeply felt inner experience. Whilst I might hold an inner truth that was meaningful for me, there was no way I could communicate it or verbalise it to others without distorting, and thus destroying, it. In producing the document I leaned heavily on the writings of others; it was a private document in which I sought personal clarification. It was never intended to be read by others, and today I never return to it, as I have gone beyond it.

²⁶ This is reproduced in Appendix D, page 687

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- XIII -

‘How did you enjoy your emotional bloodbath?’ Bill Pitty had a broad smile - almost a smirk - on his face, as he called out to me. It was Wednesday 23 November 1966 and I was on my way to University House for lunch, having just come from the Electrical Engineering Department. ‘You should have warned me,’ I replied, ‘I walked straight into it.’

Four weeks earlier Bill had caught me at the same spot and put a proposition to me: ‘John, I want to interest you in something that is being put on at the Marriage Guidance Council during the long- weekend a couple of weeks from now. ’ ‘Oh yes, what is it? It sounds as though there's a catch, from the look on your face.’ I had known Bill for three years and we were on very good terms. ‘A group of clinical psychologists and professional counsellors are getting together for a sensitivity training workshop. You know, something designed to increase your sensitivity to other people. This is the first one to be held in Western Australia and I thought you might be interested, seeing the amount of counselling you've been doing.’ ‘But I'm not a professional in the area.’ ‘I know, but I think I could get you in. They'll treat you gently.’ ‘Gee, I don't know. What is involved, anyway?’ ‘Well, I believe you all meet at the rooms of the Marriage Guidance Council at five o'clock at night on Friday 18 November, and work in small groups until ten o'clock. It's not a live-in workshop, so you go home at night. You start again at nine in the morning on Saturday and again run through until the evening, and then do the same again on Sunday and Monday.’

I thought for a moment. My immediate reaction to strange propositions was to opt out. However, If I did that, I would never know what the experience could have given me. I reckoned I should be open to new experience even if it scared me, so I said ‘Yes - OK - find out if they will let me in.’

That night I thought of good reasons to attend: I had developed a very genuine interest in what were called “helping-relationships”, and wished to improve my effectiveness. Furthermore, I was curious to see how such a group operated. I would like to see professionals in action. I was also aware of my limited effectiveness when working in groups. I worked moderately well in a one-to-one relationship, and reasonably in an academic tutorial session, because the structure was of my choosing and I had no anxiety, but in Faculty meetings or in any committee with more than three or four people, I constantly suffered from much inner tension and anxiety. Maybe, I told myself, the workshop would help me.

When I walked up the steps of the Marriage Guidance Council building, I remembered the anxiety I felt when Bill had told me that I had been accepted. ‘Don't worry,’ he said, ‘you will all be divided into groups with a leader. We've purposely put you into the group headed by Bob Flecker. You already know him, and he has agreed to look after you. So don't worry.’ ‘That's all very well,’ I thought, as I approached the door, ‘but it doesn't make me feel any better.’

I found that sixty professionals - no, fifty-nine professionals and one engineer - had enrolled and that they were divided into four groups each of fifteen people. Each group operated in its own room, quite independently of the others.

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As we sat in a large circle, I looked at the people in my group. Bob Flecker seemed quiet and confident. He had a co-leader, Roberta Tatom, who was an experienced psychologist in the Mental Health Services. There were in all eight women and seven men, most of whom seemed a little older than I. All were professionals, mostly employed in the public sector. One was a policewoman and another, an Anglican priest. All we knew was that this was to be a “Therapeutic Counselling” workshop with some emphasis on sensitivity training. Leon Blank, the Director of the Marriage Guidance Council, had already provided us with several background papers²⁷. I had read these, but did not know whether they would form the basis of our discussion.

Our conversation was hushed and we all looked to Bob Flecker to provide leadership. In true Rogerian, non-directive style, he refused. Someone asked the others what were our objectives? We talked about the formal language used in the “handout” background papers; We had long periods of silence. Roberta spoke of the embarrassment of silence. Were we embarrassed by it? Always, or only under certain conditions? Someone suggested that it pointed up personal inadequacies. Were we in fear of judgment?

Margaret suddenly broke in, ‘I feel totally inadequate. Looking at the papers, I know that the level of discussion will be beyond me. I don't think I will have anything to offer.’ She fell silent, but later took part as much as anyone.

‘It's no good if we are all silent, or just intellectualise about the theoretical papers.’ This was Grace. ‘We've all got to be open. Why aren't we? It would be much better if we were. There are lots of things in my life that I have not been open about, and time is running out.’ ‘That's all very well,’ chipped in Colin, ‘but you can't relate equally to everyone. Some people will understand, others won't.’

This led us to an intellectual discussion of sympathy and empathy. How did you understand someone? ‘Surely, only through your own experience.’ offered Jan. ‘But isn't there a danger in using your own experience as a guide?’ Joan intervened, ‘How do we know that your own experience is relevant to the other person?’

We spent the evening discussing technique, and worked entirely on the intellectual level; no one got near to feelings or emotions. I made several minor contributions but said to Bob, as we broke up, that I was aware of slight inner tension: I felt like a fish out of water. Bob replied: ‘Others see you more adequate than you see yourself.’

Back home at Como, before going to bed, I wrote in my journal:

Whatever our aims, they will not appear until we accept and trust one another. Our first aim, therefore, is to build trust and acceptance. If sensitivity and understanding are matters of feeling and not intellectualisation, we will only discover them through feeling - so the sooner we get to that level the better. I must risk something of myself to discover whether I will be accepted.

Barrett-Lennard, G.T., Significant Aspects of a Helping Relationship; Weschler, I.R., The Self in Process - A Sensitivity Training Emphasis; Rogers, C.R., The Interpersonal Relationship: The Core of Guidance Rogers, C.R., The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of

Therapeutic Personality Change.

275

MY EMOTIONAL BLOODBATH I ATTEND A SENSITIVITY TRAINING WORKSHOP

Saturday morning we again started at the intellectual level but slowly the talk drifted to personal matters. I became very tense and dropped out of the discussion. My heart began to beat very fast and a pain developed in my chest. I felt most uncomfortable. The workshop seemed threatening, and I thought I could never risk something of myself. During the afternoon, Mark²⁸ tried to say something about himself, but could not. He became very upset, broke down and cried. He said he was not prepared to go further.

I was so taken up by my inner tension and pain that I could not be sensitive to anyone in the group, and certainly not to Mark. Slowly Mark composed himself and said that he did have some feeling for members of the group but, turning to me, he said, ‘I have no feeling for you at all, John. I cannot figure you out.’

Colin rushed politely to my defence, ‘I think that John has given us something of himself.’ But this was not true. I knew that Mark was correct.

We broke for tea. When we reassembled for the evening session, Mark took the chair beside me. ‘I'll see if physical proximity helps,’ he said, and then continued ‘Did you get anything of me this afternoon?’

I lied, ‘Yes, a little.’ I had no understanding of him; he was a blank to me, but I was too afraid to say so. I sat impassively all evening with mounting pain. I knew something had to be done: I could not go on this way. I also knew that I was experiencing an acute attack of the tension that so often overtook me in normal life when working within a group. The tension was an unfocused anxiety and apprehension and had no object. I knew that I had to speak out next day, but how would I do it?

During the evening, Frank - who worked for the Child Welfare Department at Longmore Detention Centre for juveniles - said that he was always guided in his action by fairness; he did not respond emotionally. So, at supper time, I singled him out and told him of my inner tension and of my desire to speak. I judged that it was safe to speak to him. I used Frank as a stepping stone in my time-honoured method of tackling difficult problems. I was determined to speak out on Sunday morning. Since Frank knew this, it would force me into the open.

On Sunday morning someone in the group asked me an innocuous, safe question. I answered it and then realised that I had the floor and that now was the time to take the plunge. I told the group of the all-consuming tension that I had experienced on Saturday and how this had prevented me from truly listening to anyone or what they had to say about themselves. Then I found myself speaking of my childhood fears: I had no friends; I was too afraid to buy anything at the school tuckshop; I was too afraid to buy a pound of butter. I was convinced that, when I held up my tram fare, it would be insufficient, although I had checked it a thousand times. I spoke of my father, how he walked in front of the pram, said that children should be born at the age of fifteen; How he had never shown emotional love for me - and how much I had needed it.

Roberta said, ‘No matter what you offered up in payment to your father, it was never enough.’ This rang true to me and hit me with a jolt. Suddenly, tension drained from me. Someone asked me what events, in particular, had caused change in me. I talked about going to Melbourne, of getting married, and of joining Apex at the age of thirty-three.

Roberta came back into the discussion, ‘All prepubescent boys between eleven and thirteen assert their independence and grow by joining a gang. You missed out on that as a boy. Apex became your gang experience. When you had worked through it and had outgrown the need for a gang, you left it.’

²⁸ not his real name.

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5: GANG LIFE - THE YEARS OF EXPLORATION (1961 - 1966)

Although I was speaking to a group of fourteen other people, I was not conscious of any of them. I heard only the voices of Roberta, Joan and Bob. I spoke of my method of solving problems by setting up stepping-stones, each small enough to be endured but each step, having been taken, ensuring that the next step would also be taken. I spoke of my wife, Kay, and of the tremendous strength I gained through her.

I do not know how long I spoke, but it must have been a long time because, when I finished, we broke for morning tea. Suddenly I felt relaxed and happy. I had taken the step. I had not revealed all my inner problems and tensions, but I had made a start. To the group, I said, ‘I thought I would experience tremendous tension, talking to the group like this but, once I started, the tension simply drained away from me.’

We stayed in our circle and tea was brought to us. Suddenly, Mark, who had been sitting on my left, turned to me and said ‘Now I know you.’ We spoke about superficial matters throughout the tea-break. He said he had been worried about me and had arrived late because he had first hunted for an extra pair of bathers. He had thought of taking me swimming at lunch time in the hope that, through this, he could break through to me. Now, it was unnecessary.

Neither of us noticed that Bob wanted to call the group to order to continue the workshop, but he observed us talking intensely. ‘Mark,’ he called out, ‘do you want to rejoin the group, or do you want to become a little group of two?’ ‘I'm happy as I am.’ Mark replied. Bob, not satisfied, then asked me, and I replied non-commitally. Still not satisfied that he understood the dynamics of our conversation, Bob again asked Mark. ‘I'll leave it to John.’

Suddenly I realised that Mark wanted to continue our conversation. ‘Right,’ I said, ‘we will go outside.’ We left and sat on the lawns outside, while the rest of the group discussed the feelings of rejection induced by our departure.

Within a few moments of sitting on the lawn, we communicated very deeply, although I spoke very little. Mark cried and said that he was living a nightmare of guilt. He had spent several years in Europe and while there had many sexual affairs. In every case, he walked out on the woman. In Spain, the girl with whom he had been living, became pregnant. He just walked out on her and the child. Now, his past had caught up with him.

I do not remember any words that I said. I know that I took his hand and held it tight, later released it but slipped it under his, so it was there if he needed it. Mark said that he felt so worthless that no one, if they really knew him, could accept him. And yet, I accepted him. Had I been a trained psychologist, he might expect that. The trained psychologist might put on a front of accepting him, because that was part of his training. But I had not been trained to accept people, and yet I accepted him.

We rejoined the group after lunch; Mark had regained his composure and I did not speak to him again until after supper when we were going home. I told him that I had problems - as he had guessed from my outburst in the morning, and that I would like him to help me. We sat in my car and I told him of my fears. I told him that Joan had said to me that I must be a person of great courage to have faced my problems in the way I did. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by deep emotion and broke down. I hid my face in my hands and sobbed that the steps I had taken had been so hard to take. Mark replied that now he believed that I did accept him because, he said, you only break down like that with someone who matters.

277

MY FIRST ATTEMPTS AT SELF-DISCLOSURE - AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

When I reached home, I told Kay what had happened, but was too taken up with the events to realise that she was worried because I as so late in getting home. Once we had gone to bed, I told her that, in the car, I had been emotionally involved with Mark, and she cried, because her first thought was of homosexuality. So we both cried together as I told her of the real character of the relationship. Somehow, by the way I spoke, Kay realised that there was no desire or sex involved, and she felt relieved. It was hard on Kay, because she did not see what went on in the group, but only experienced an emotionally distraught husband each night.

I hardly slept that night. At 3.30 am, I woke in an intensely emotional state and started crying. I sobbed, ‘I love my Father; I love my Father.’ Later, just before dawn, I had a brief dream. Mark was a small boy holding out to me a silver platter, and on it he was offering me his life. I looked at the dish, and saw a wholesome feast. Mark looked at the dish and saw a small piece of decayed, maggoty meat. He said, ‘Is it enough?’ I took what he offered and consumed it, because I saw the feast.

I felt immensely tired when I joined the group on Monday morning. Frank started to talk about his own childhood and I saw that this would precipitate Mark. Mark had used me as a stepping stone, and now he struggled to tell the whole group what he had told me. He found it very difficult, often hesitating and crying. I found that I also cried, as did one other member of the group who knew Mark well. I simply sat there, tears streaming down my face, and I did not care what the others thought. During the morning tea break, Mark and I went for a short walk. I told him of my dream, and of Kay's initial fears of our relationship.

Much happened between members on the rest of Monday, but I made only a small contribution. Whereas my silence on Saturday had been due to inner tension, my silence on Monday was a joyous exercise of a new found freedom: I could remain silent, without tension, and “to hell with what anyone thought about it.” This was a new experience for me.

When, on the following Wednesday, I saw Bill Pitty and he asked ‘How did you enjoy your emotional bloodbath?’, I realised that he had described the experience perfectly. Maybe I had not learnt much about being sensitive to others, but I had made some giant steps of my own, and I had also helped someone.

I had taken a step in self-disclosure, and this was a great relief. I discovered that, if one wants to be sensitive to someone else, then one must be free from personal “hangups²⁹.” If someone starts talking about a problem of their own, and I have an unresolved, related problem, then I find myself attending to my own problem rather than that of the other person. However, if I have resolved my hangups, so they no longer matter to me, my experience of them may help me be sensitive to someone with a related problem. I was on the road to resolving some important hangups, so maybe I did learn something about being sensitive to others. For the first time I realised that it was “OK” to be real, and to be myself - warts and all. The theory that I had been reading about striving to be “authentic” really worked.

On the Tuesday after the workshop I attended an academic meeting of ten people in which I became a central participant. For the first time in my life I approached the meeting without tension; I was freely myself and, consequently, my arguments were well expressed. For some days I was on an emotional “high”. I picked up my volume of the poetry of T.S. Eliot and read a poem that I had previously found difficult. Now, I understood it, and became emotionally involved with it.

²⁹ Hangup = an emotional problem or inhibition that prevents free action

278

5: GANG LIFE - THE YEARS OF EXPLORATION (1961 - 1966)

There was another important outcome from the workshop. Mark and I had resolved to meet once a week at his home in Subiaco and go as far as we could in self-disclosure. I arrived at eight in the evening and did not quite know what to expect. I was ill at ease. We sat at opposite ends of his settee and chatted lightly for fifteen minutes before falling silent. It was time to start serious work and I found myself breathing heavily, my mind refusing to come to grips with what I knew I wanted to talk about. Eventually I managed to say that I saw myself as a Jeckyl and Hyde character: I had wonderful aspirations, good intentions, but I was always failing. With difficulty I spoke of my many failings - such as my sexual fantasies. I knew that almost all males had frequent sexual fantasies - that man was poised between the animal and the spiritual, and had trouble reconciling the two. Sex was a constant troublesome topic for almost all my students whom I came to know in depth. I simply accepted this as a fact of life when they told me about their feelings, but had trouble coming to terms with them within myself.

When I returned home, I told Kay of our discussion. Week by week, Mark and I continued our meetings. Some nights we talked about his life and problems, sometimes about mine. One night while driving to his home, I told myself that tonight I would talk about the first time I had consciously told a lie. It seemed a small and not very important matter. However, when I reached the point of telling him, I fell silent. For ten-minutes I said nothing. There seemed an enormous barrier between me and the recounting of this simple, unimportant childhood lie. Eventually, Mark said something that precipitated my thoughts and, bursting into uncontrollable tears, I told him of the lie. Mark was always warm and accepting but, somehow, when I broke down, I could not look at him.

He said, ‘Is it so hard to look at me? I wish I could appear more accepting to you.’ I replied between my sobs, ‘I know you accept me but, when you look at me, I do not see you looking at me, I see myself looking at me! That is what is so hard.’

Self-understanding, self-acceptance for a real, but necessarily imperfect human being, is very hard to achieve, but my many visits to Mark contributed enormously to the process. I had thought that this small lie was something not very important to me; However, the emotional problem of revealing it, showed that it was not unimportant at all. It was something of great significance, but that significance had been hidden, unknown, until I brought it out. Once I had spoken about it to someone who was significant, it was no longer a problem. As I write these words, many years later, I can no longer recall the actual lie: it no longer matters. During our meetings I proved to myself the truth that “You are your secrets” and I discovered the cleansing power of true confession. I also discovered that one should not indulge in self-pity. This tallied with Frankl's idea of responsibility: One cannot always choose one's background experiences, but one is free to choose the attitude we adopt to them. Self-pity is refusal to accept responsibility for one's life from now on³⁰.

We continued to meet regularly for a few months until we had gone as far as we could. Mark had helped me come to terms with myself. I had resolved some major hangups. I had helped him in the same way. We shook hands, and each went his own way. Mark eventually married happily, and I resumed my normal life - much to the relief of my wife - that is, if my life could ever be called normal at that stage of my career.

Later, I was to discover two books by Eric Berne. Games People Play, Penguin, 1964, light-heartedly discussed many relationship games that people play to avoid personal responsibility. Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy, Grove Press, NY, 1961 was his classic handbook on the principles behind Games People Play.

279

THE WORKSHOP OUTCOMES SESSIONS TO RESOLVE MY `HANGUPS'

- XIV

The awakening of deeper feelings within me and the realisation that Love was the ground of our being caused me some confusion. I asked myself whether they were religious feelings³¹. Had I “thrown the baby out with the bath-water” when I turned away from Christianity at the age of twenty-one? One of my student's problems touched upon David Allen-Williams, who was a committed Christian and a member of the Uniting Church. When I discussed the student with David in September 1965 he turned to me and said, perceptively, ‘Do you want to talk about yourself?’

I told David about the arousal of my deeper feelings and my concern about religion. When dealing with deep student problems I had experienced anguish, and I had the strange feeling that I was beginning to see God in people.

‘In so far as you do something for the least of My creatures, so you do it for my Father which is in Heaven,’ quoted David.

I also said that, since taking up the Sub-Dean's position, “things” seemed less and less important to me, while “people” had become more and more important. This made me dissatisfied with my current academic position. I thought that my future rightfully lay in working with young people in a much broader educational sense than the narrowly academic.

‘Well, you may or may not know that I am a member of the provisional Council of St. Columba College. Our plans are well advanced, and it may not be long before we build. The College will be looking to appoint a Master. Perhaps, that is the direction in which you should head.’

‘I have thought about Colleges. Some time ago, when I started having these feelings, I noticed an advertisement for the Master of Currie Hall, the University's own student residence. I half thought of applying for it, but decided not to because I was unsure of myself, and felt I did not have the qualifications. Now, the position is closed.’

David encouraged me. ‘Well you should think seriously about St. Columba. You are more qualified than you realise. You have a well-known interest in people: Look at your Apex activities, your attendance at Fresher's camps, and now your success with your Sub-Dean's work. You have great knowledge of the University and all its ramifications, which could be invaluable to a Head of College. You have interest and ability in organisation. I think you should consider it. Over the crucial period of establishing the College, the Council could well favour someone in the employ of the University who could give some time to St. Columba before taking up his formal position.’

I was still hesitant. ‘I am interested, but two things worry me: I have no previous experience of College life; Never have I lived in a college as an undergraduate, or been a tutor; Nor have I taken part in college administration. Also, I am not a committed Christian. I don't know where I stand in that regard. The appointed Master would probably need to be an active member of the Church, or at least someone who upheld the beliefs of the Church.’

Early in 1966, David asked if I were still interested in the St. Columba position. He said that he would mention it to the Council. He also suggested that I might clarify my religious feelings both by attending a church, and by joining in an activity sponsored by the Church.

³¹ See page 270

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5: GANG LIFE - THE YEARS OF EXPLORATION (1961 - 1966)

So, I took part in an Australia-wide Church program, known as The Church and Life Movement. I found myself in a discussion group of six people who had opted out of religious practice. We held our meetings at the home of a young Congregational Minister, and we discussed matters affecting our society and brought Christian values to bear on them.

Kay and I started attending Trinity Congregational Church in the city but nothing aroused me to affirm my belief in the formal expression of faith or the doctrines of the Church. I had trouble with notions of the Trinity, and the ritual was meaningless to me. Try as I might, I felt no emotional response. I realised that church was not for me, and I dropped out.

However, I recognised that the Church was the one institution that actively upheld “Christian values.” That attracted me, but I realised that these values were not especially “Christian”. A good humanist held similar values, as they were no more than an expression of the accumulated wisdom of how to live at peace with oneself and with one's neighbours. They did not depend on a Christian belief in God. God, as proposed by the Church, was too much created in man's image by men, rather than men being created in God's image.

It was not long ago that men saw God everywhere - in the storm, in the earth tremor, in the coming of Spring. He was close and immediate to people and their lives. With the coming of rational science we had reasons for all these acts of nature. We understood why we had storms, why we had earth tremors and why the Spring came. The old notion of God as propounded by the scriptures, and as still propounded by most churches, seemed but a superstition grasped by frightened, childish people who still needed comfort.

I had recently read a new interpretation by John Robinson³², the Bishop of Woolwich, in his book Honest to God, which I found refreshing, but did not see his views operating within the Church. Carefully, I followed the “Honest to God Debate.” I bought, and read, three books on Objections to Christian Belief, to Roman Catholicism and to Humanism³³ but these did not lead me to find personal value in the archaic symbols of the Church. I was not an atheist, but I could not apprehend a God in the simple, personal form as presented by the Church. Whatever lay beyond my consciousness was necessarily inaccessible to me, but that something lay beyond it, I felt sure.

Robinson, J.A., Honest to God. SCM Press, Bloomsbury Street, London, 1963. Robinson was well-known in Britain for his unconventional advocacy of opinions on morals and politics. His book, Honest to God, was a personal confession of convictions borne in upon him by the need to be utterly honest about the terms in which the Faith can truthfully be presented today. He spoke for those who found their integrity strained by the thinking, piety and moral attitudes of the conventional Church. He considered that the Church needed to question its entire `religious frame'. He caused a furore among conventional Church circles because he said of his book that it `will seem to be radical, and doubtless to many, heretical. The one thing of which I am fairly sure is that, in retrospect, it will be seen to have erred in not being radical enough.'

MacKinnon, D.M., et.al., Objections to Christian Belief, Pelican Books, 1965

Blackham, H.J., et all., Objections to Humanism, Pelican Books, 1965

de la Bedoyere, N., Objections to Roman Catholicism, Pelican Books 1966 See also, Reference 16 in Appendix D:

Goodenough, E.R., Toward a Mature Faith, Yale University Press, 1955, 1961.

281

EXPLORING RELIGIOUS FEELINGS MASTER OF ST. COLUMBA COLLEGE?

Reluctantly I let my interest in St. Columba College continue; I lunched with the chairman of Council and was finally rather relieved when their building program was delayed and they decided that the Head of College should be a clergyman. I doubt whether I would have accepted the position at St. Columba College were it offered me because I realised that I had to be true to myself, and my conflict with religion would have meant a loss of personal integrity.

At the end of June 1966, having served in the position for two years, I handed the Sub-Deanship to Baden Clegg of the Civil Engineering Department. In January of that year I had applied to take study leave in 1967, intending to spend most of it in the United States of America, but my outlook on life was changing rapidly. In September I wrote to Alan Billings in Britain to tell him that I had made enquiries about Masterships at both La Trobe University and the University of New South Wales residential colleges. I wrote:

You will appreciate, Alan, that this decision will steer me in the direction of some residential college in the next few years, if not La Trobe or New South Wales. Turning my back on Electrical Engineering as my major interest has several implications, particularly regarding study leave. I intend taking steps to strengthen myself for such a change. If I were to make that change in either 1967 or 1968, I would be ill-advised to take my proposed study leave, as that would morally commit me to the University for a period after I return. I have therefore decided to delay my study leave plans.

I visited both the Universities of New South Wales and La Trobe, but nothing came of these positions. And then, in October when I was walking back to my department after lunch in University House, I passed the Assistant Registrar, George Bartlett.

‘John,’ he said, ‘I want to talk to you. You may know that I am a member of the Council of Currie Hall and that Robin Gray has just been appointed Master. Before his appointment Robin was Head of the Physical Education Department and he was also the Vice-Chancellor's nominee on the Currie Hall Council. Now that he has taken up the Mastership, the Vice-Chancellor wonders whether you would accept the position of being his nominee.’

By the first week of November, I had become a member of the Council.

Little did I know that I was ringing down the Curtain on a period of great exploration of myself, and that, within a few months, I would be living in Currie Hall with my family as a Resident Fellow. The wide range of experiences I had in administration and organisation and in working with young people now had the opportunity of being used within a community. My desire to engage in education of the whole person was realised. I could put into practice my emerging philosophy, and did so with great enthusiasm. I had agreed with the Master to stay in the Hall for one year, but I lived there for twenty years.