Interview with Miss Mary Bouquet

From the ANU Oral History Archive
Interview conducted 11 September 1990
Interviewed by Daniel Connell
Edited and transferred to web media by Nik Fominas and Peter Stewart

Biographical introduction: Miss Mary ('Mollie')Bouquet was born in 1920 and was educated at state schools in New South Wales and the University of Sydney.

She was a high school teacher from 1942 to 1951 and then travelled overseas for five years working at various occupations including farming and teaching.

On her return to Australia in 1956 Miss Bouquet applied for the position of Administrative Assistant at the Canberra University College.

Her duties both before and after amalgamation of the College involved the servicing of the academic board and the administration of academic staffing. She was promoted to Senior Graduate Assistant in 1963 and then to Assistant Registrar in 1965.

Miss Bouquet retired from the university in 1985.

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Transcript: Recording duration: 2 1/2 hours (3 tapes) Transcriber: Diana Nelson

BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE A.

          Identification: This is side one, tape one of the interview with Miss Mary Bouquet. The date is 11 September 1990. End of identification.

          Miss Bouquet, if we could go back a little bit, if you could just very briefly fill in some of the details of where you were born and where you grew up.

Well, I was born in Balmain in Sydney in 1920 at a time when Balmain was far from the fashionable suburb it is today. My father was a carpenter and I have no memories of those early days in Balmain. My first recollections are of living in Artarmon and where I began school. Then my parents moved to Yass, not far from Canberra, and I did all my primary schooling there. We moved from Sydney because of my mother's health. She had been born in Scotland. My father had met her during the first world war as an Australian soldier and so I was brought up on stories of Edinburgh, Scotland, and felt very much at home when I visited it many years later.

          Was your father still a carpenter right through that period?

Yes, he was. When we moved to Yass he worked with a builder and unfortunately during the years of the Depression he had four years out of work and things were very difficult for the family. My sister, my only sister, was born in 1931 during the Depression - there were only the two of us. But I think it was very good that we lived in a small country town where everybody knew everybody, and we had a cow and a vegetable garden. But I went away to school in Sydney on a bursary ...

          What school?

Well, first of all to St George Girls' High School at Kogarah, because a sister of my father lived in Brighton-le-Sands and so I went and lived with them and did my first year there. But my aunt and I didn't really get on terribly well and I moved to another aunt and uncle, or actually my mother's brother who had come out to Australia a little time after she did, and I then went - I did the rest of my high schooling at North Sydney Girls' High.

          At that stage what were your ambitions?

To go to university. I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do but I had to get to the university. My father would have liked me to be a doctor but that was completely out of the question with our family finances.

          It's an unusual ambition for a father to have for his daughter in the 1930s. In other words, I'm asking about the attitude of your parents.

Yes, that's true. He had been forced to leave school early to be apprenticed to his father who had .... His father was born in Mauritius and was of French stock, hence the name Bouquet, and he came to Australia as a young man. He had been a ship's carpenter and apparently travelled up the coast of Australia and settled in Australia, which was a pretty unusual thing for somebody of French stock to do in those days. So perhaps he was an unusual person.

          Hugenot or a Catholic?

Catholic, very much Catholic. And he married an Australian woman of Irish stock and they settled in Bega and my father was one of eight children born in Bega. But he was taken away from school as soon as he was allowed to leave and was apprenticed to his father as a carpenter and I think would dearly have loved to have had further education. My mother, being of Scottish stock, was very interested in - was very much of the school that education was very important. And I can remember I used to spend all my school holidays when we lived in Yass with people who had a property at Murrumbateman. And I can remember the old Mama McClung who would have been in her eighties when I was a child saying to my mother, 'What's the use of education for a girl? She'll only get married.' And my mother said, 'But Mama, education is never wasted'. So they were ambitious I suppose for me and I was always very independent minded and quite sure that I would have a career. So I always swore I would never be domesticated.

          The politics of the family, what were the                          politics?

Pretty conservative I would say. We never discussed very much, and whether my father - it could well have been that in his early days he would be more Labor oriented, but certainly as he got older and when he and my mother lived with me they would have been conservative. They would have voted Liberal rather than Labor.

          So you went to high school in Sydney. You wanted to go to university. What were your ideas of university at that time?

I don't really remember. A place where one could continue to stretch one's mind, I think. It's just that I was determined I was going on to further study although at school I ...

          You weren't thinking of employment implications mainly? You were mainly thinking of intellectual˙....

I don't know. I really don't recall. It's just that I had that ambition. No, I'm not sure why it was important to me but I do recall that it was. One of the things I had, I think I was always interested in languages. At school I was one of those people who was a general all-rounder. I tended to be about equal in most things. It wasn't that I shone particularly in any one branch of studies, although I suppose I had a greater interest in languages, and so when I did get entrance to the university, of course ...

          That was Sydney, was it?

That was the University of Sydney in the days when there were fees of course, but I was fortunate to get an exhibition, but it was much more practical to take a teachers' college scholarship which I was offered because it gave me a living allowance. Not that at that stage I was particularly interested in teaching. So I went to university and did French, German, History, not English because I think the classes overlapped with German I think it was, so it was a bit lopsided course probably. That's how I got into teaching.

          You were at university, what, late '30s, early                     '40s?

That's right. I can never remember when I started - '39? '39 I think. At a time of course, at a disruptive time for students and with lots of the young people going into the forces of course when war started. But I was there during the war years and then teaching of course during the war years.

          Moving along fairly quickly because of the concentration we want to make on the ANU. Very briefly, that period of travel that I can see on the curriculum vitae over there you were interested so that fits in with that - what style of travel was it?

By no means luxurious. I'd been teaching for nine years with the New South Wales system, felt that it was important to broaden my horizons to learn, and of course my eyes were all on Europe I suppose because of my interest in French and German, and my Scottish upbringing. I had to go and see Scotland and England. We had friends and relatives there. But the New South Wales Government, the Education Department, was very short-sighted, there was no prospect whatever of giving me leave without pay, although I was keen to do some further study. And so I resigned in high dudgeon and used my little pittance of superannuation money that I was able to take out to pay my ship fare to England in 1951. I travelled with two other very close friends, Australians, two sisters. One of them had been a teacher. We'd met, we were teaching together at Orange and the three of us travelled. And so we moved around. We spent a year farming in the UK because that was a cheap way of getting to see places.

          How do you combine farming with travel? You say, getting to see places.

Well, there was a system in the UK through the Department of Fisheries and Agriculture where students or anybody could go and stay in a camp which were former service camps. This was 1951. And it was clearly unskilled labour, all of it. The farmers in the district .... We worked our way through Kent, Wales, Lancashire, right up to Scotland. And we did about a week at each place and the farmers would say, 'We want two people to lift potatoes, or straw strawberries, or pick tomatoes or peas today', and the trucks would take us out and dump us at these various farms. And so by spending a week there we'd earn money and be fed and housed - terrible food, sort of typical British stodge. But we were amazingly fit and by spending a week at each place we worked our way through the UK, and as I say, Wales, Scotland, as well as England, and made some good friends in the process and it was good. So that was a way of getting around. And then settled each winter - well, we had only two winters together - in London, then we settled down to earn money so that we could travel the following summer. And I taught two winters, relief teaching with the London County Council in south-east London, the first winter. The second winter, partly that and then partly I went to a convent actually in Bromley and taught there for a while so I did teaching.

And then we split up. One of them went off to Canada and I went to France for about nine months and worked au pair with a family in Paris, then was able to do a little more study at the Sorbonne. And then went on to Canada, joined one of the girls there for a month or so before she came home. I stayed in Toronto and taught there for a year and travelled around a bit in the States and Canada. I would have very happily settled in Canada, liked Canada and the people very much, but I decided after five years that if I was going to come home it had to be then because by that stage I was thirty-six and my parents, I think, were beginning to feel that they might not see me again, so I had to come back. And then I felt if I got back into teaching I'd be in it for the rest of my life. I'd been irritated by the attitude of the New South Wales Department of Education and from what I heard their attitudes hadn't changed very much, but it was quite by chance that I got into university administration. I was living in Yass. Came back November '55 and my father drew my attention to a notice in the paper, an advertisement about a job as an administrative assistant at the University College. And said, 'Well, what about that? That would mean you'd be closer to Yass'. There was nothing in Yass and I wouldn't stay there anyway and I'd always enjoyed being in Canberra. I thought Sydney had grown too big.

          You'd only visited Canberra before that?

Oh yes, quite often we'd come across, but also of course I had taught here. I had taught high school here. I taught at the old Canberra High School on two occasions and enjoyed Canberra. It was way back in the early days in the '40s and liked it, enjoyed Canberra life. So this position turned up for an administrative officer and I thought ...

          Had you done anything like that before?

No. I had about three months working in an office in Toronto with a Registered Nurses' Association, Ontario, and thought that was a bit of a scream, working in an office. But no, I had no background. And when my father, as I say, drew my attention to it I thought, 'Well, I've got no qualifications for this. I don't know whether I'm interested'. He said, 'Well, give it a go'. So I wrote in. I was reminded actually recently by - the letter back saying that, 'You would have noticed that the letter is for a male administrative assistant but we will consider your application nevertheless'. I don't know what happened. I think, I don't know whether that job actually was filled but I came over to Canberra for an interview with Tom Owen and it was a hilarious interview because we were both very laid back as they say. I always remember this. Of course I didn't think I was very interested in it and I think he felt they were wanting, I suppose, a young man whom they could train. And I was by this time already, as I say, thirty-six, and had been a teacher and had no administrative or really office background, but we finally decided we'd give each other a trial and he put me on for three months as an administrative assistant.

          I'll come back to that letter later because it in a sense is a good introduction to that major theme of the role of women in universities. But I'm just wondering whether we could at this stage of the interview just go through your career and get you to outline the various functions that you had in the various positions, and then we can come back and discuss themes that stretch across those different positions. As an admin. assistant what did you do?

Well, it was a very small set-up of course in those days in the University College. I think we had probably no full-time students. They would have been all part-time people who had come up from Melbourne, in the Public Service, were doing degrees part-time. They were beginning to enlarge the full-time staff, academic staff I mean. But there was a registrar, there was Theo Keith who looked after more the students' side. But it was a very, very small full-time administrative staff and what I found interesting about it, this was January 1956 I joined the College, that I had a very wide range of jobs. So there was a tremendous challenge and I enjoyed that, I found it exciting and I enjoyed that very much. And I don't remember all that I did but I looked after .... I mean, I'm not able to type or do stenography or anything like that, but I took notes, attended the meetings of the Council of the University College, the Board of Studies I think it was called. I was involved with the appointments and everything relating to academic staff, but very little relating to students apart from the Canberra Scholarship Scheme which was the precursor of eventually the National Undergraduate Scholarships.

          What was the involvement with students that came from that?

Well, these Canberra scholars were people who had done particularly well, were offered Canberra Scholarships and because our facilities at the College were so small most of them went to other universities to do their degree but were supported by the University College to enable them to do this. So I did the administrative side of this, getting in touch with them, and keeping up the records in relation to them, seeing how they were going. And there was a committee which decided the awards in the first place, whether those scholarships should be continued and so on. And that was my involvement with them. Another thing I remember I did was, we had a College gazette, a sort of newsletter, and I did that as well, as I say, without any background editorial experience and learnt to proofread and so on. So it was a very wide ranging set of jobs really which made it interesting. And the thing that always had interested me was the contact with people. In any job I did I had to be with people and this contact, particularly with academic staff, I found very interesting.

          Just talking about some of those names for the moment. I think Manning Clark was there and Fin Crisp and A.D.˙Hope, Arndt. What were they like?

Absolutely marvellous people to work with. We were all located together in the old Childers Street buildings and everyone had morning, afternoon tea together, so it really was that family atmosphere and one got to know people really well. And I remember at my retirement dinner many years later I had to say a few words and when I'd been thinking about that before the dinner and I thought, 'I suppose they'll call upon me to say something', and the word that came to my mind immediately was 'privilege', that I really had been extraordinarily privileged to just have a fleeting contact but I'd get to know well people like Fin Crisp, Heinz Arndt, Manning Clark, then some of the names you perhaps wouldn't be so familiar with: John Fleming from Law who's now went to the University of California, Berkeley; Hans Bielenstein who was in Asian Studies and went eventually to Columbia - people who were really very distinguished in their different fields and to get to know them well was an enormous, and has remained, an enormous privilege. And of course I've maintained a close contact with quite a number of them.

          The person you were in closest contact with, perhaps, was who, Tom Owen?

Yes, well Tom was my immediate boss and I can always remember that he had a certain reputation for being not so easy to work with and I used to see a funny look pass over people's face when they say, 'Who are you working with?' and I'd say, 'With Mr Owen'. 'Oh!', and there'd be no further comment.

          Why was that?

I think that he was known to be perhaps a little difficult to work with.

          I mean, there are a number of ways in which people can be difficult. They can be very exacting in their demands or they can be unpredictable or ...

Well perhaps, demanding in some ways and - just perhaps not so easy to work with. But in fact he and I got on very well and he could, say in being demanding, also I suppose be, use - I wouldn't say he was a bully by any means - but he'd use tactics to get results and he learnt very quickly that that was no good with me.

          What sort of tactics?

Just sort of slightly bullying tactics. I'd say I could always be guided and encouraged but never driven; so that we understood each other and I learnt a great deal from him, I really did, and we got on very well. I worked closely too, with, say, Fin Crisp is a name that is always very dear to me because he was very active and I worked closely with him. The other person I suppose who played a very large role in those University College days was Joe Burton, the Principal of the College, and he was a marvellous person to work with. I learnt a great deal from him too, and treasured the relationship we had.

          Well, if you could expand on that a little bit because we're collecting information about personalities, there's something that isn't in the files but it's an important part of the history. If you could tell me a bit more about Joe Burton.

Yes. He was an economic historian and I'm not quite sure why - well, I suppose he was the first, was he the first Professor of Economic History at the College, I can't remember whether he came as that and not as the sort of principal, the equivalent of a vice-chancellor as it were. I don't quite remember. What made him come from Melbourne to Canberra at a time when it was very small and the College was small although of course the College had been staggering on for a long, long time if you go back to the '30s, and these are times that, say, Tom Owen could tell you about, I don't know what brought him to Canberra. He was a Rhodes Scholar, was Joe, and a widely read, cultivated man. So I don't know what brought him. Just the challenge of getting the University College going? I suppose in those late '50s particularly, the College did suddenly begin to burgeon at the time I came. This is another reason why I found it so interesting, that things were beginning to move and we were making more and more full-time staff, academic staff appointments and getting some really tiptop people.

          Had he been there a long time?

I can't remember when it was he joined the College. I'm not quite sure. He was well established there certainly when I came. So he was a very wise man I think. Gentle in many ways but with a good background of steel, lining of steel perhaps. A person of great warmth and integrity, very much.

          It was a very difficult role, in a sense, being in charge of the Cinderella.

Absolutely. And probably in academic terms would not have been highly regarded by his colleagues in the ANU. There was the Australian National University just up the road. And where rightly or wrongly of course there was the feeling among some of them that those people down in the road in the University College were not really worth all that much. So that Joe, I think, must have found it very, and he was a sensitive man, highly intelligent man. He must have been aware of those currents as well, but was always very discreet in his feelings, well most of the time. I can remember sometimes when he would burst out a little more. Well, perhaps I shouldn't say it on the tape, but I can remember once we went through a stage, perhaps when the School of General Studies I suppose, when the so-called, I suppose, sexual mores of the people were much looser than they had been thirty years ago. And I can remember one occasion where - and this would in some ways cause some difficulties, background difficulties, not necessarily for any moral reason, but just difficulties ...

END TAPE 1, SIDE A

BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE B

          Identification: Side two, tape one, Miss Bouquet.

I remember just the trivial things one remembers of course, and I remember him saying to me in his study up in the Chancelry, 'Molly, I am sick to death of people hopping in and out of bed with each other'. I wasn't quite sure what I was supposed to say to that, just grinned weakly.

          Was this actually carrying through into public lives?

Yes.

          Creating scandals?

Yes, that was the problem, that it was creating, there were times when it was creating problems within the university.

          What sort of problems?

Oh well, making I suppose for disharmonies within departments and so on. Just general, people - what they did privately didn't matter but when it was carried over into their university life it could become difficult.

          The amalgamation, what was his feeling about the lead up to amalgamation? As I understand it in the years immediately before, though it had been discussed before you came in 1954 I think, it went away as a prospect and the University College settled down to the notion of an independent future and seemed to be thriving on it - you've been talking about that a bit. So how was amalgamation thought of towards the end of the '50s?

Well, I think, as you say, it had come up earlier and certainly it was very much in the air when I joined in '56, but also as you said, the College seemed to be settling down and we were making good appointments, getting more students and the University of Melbourne of course was fed up with us. They were no longer interested in us because ...

          What were the problems with that relationship?

Well, I always felt that one couldn't breathe without a University of Melbourne Council minute as it were; that we had to - I suppose any institution trying to run another institution 200 miles away or 300, whatever it was, it makes for difficulties. And particularly where the other institution as we were in Canberra, feeling that we could be independent and go our own way and Melbourne agreed with that completely but it was a question of what was going to happen, and it had to be a Commonwealth Government decision of course. I think perhaps the fact that we had settled down and there was more and more the feeling that we could go as an independent University of Canberra and so it was really purely a political decision on the part of the Menzies Government of the day that ...

          The Murray Report had come in there in what, 1958.

'58, was it? Yes. I couldn't remember that.

          Can you remember either their investigations, if that's the right word, or the impact of their report?

Not really, no, I can't. I should but I really can't. Is it part of the general feeling of, I suppose, upheaval and wondering what was going to happen. A feeling that you wished to goodness we could settle down and really know where we're going. And the strong feeling within the College that it could manage its own affairs and do well as a separate institution. But I don't really remember more than that.

          So in terms of the work that you were doing within the administrative side of the College, were these practical considerations or were they things that were at one remove, that didn't actually affect the discussions and work you were doing?

I think they affected us all. That is to say, because I attended Council meetings and Committee meetings I would not only have to write up the minutes of those meetings but take all the action, or a lot of the action that came out of those meetings. Now the Registrar, Tom Owen - they'd go out over his signature but I would draft reports or draft letters and so on for him to send, and so that we had to whatever action was taken for example, well, whatever decision was made by the Council more or less had to be ratified by the Council of the University of Melbourne so that there was that continual correspondence and everything had to be approved by Melbourne - appointments and everything. So, I mean one could do some things by telephone but mostly it had to be done formally by letter, so we were all directly involved in that. And then when of course it came to the actual decision of amalgamation with the ANU we were given only three months to work out the details and that was a very challenging time because there was just committee meeting after committee meeting after meeting between the University and the College working out the details.

          What sort of details needed to be ironed out?

First of all, I suppose even the simplest thing of what - the name. And of course the thing that had happened also perhaps just before amalgamation was that we had not had faculties in the University College. They came into being as de facto faculties. There was Arts, Economics, Law, Oriental Studies and Science in 1959; they were just de facto faculties. The first science professors were appointed in '59 so they were of course were ...

          Was that suggesting in a sense that you were getting ready to go your own way and be a more ... broaden out the curriculum that you had available?

Well, that would certainly have had to happen. Whatever happened to the University College we had to have these faculties and had to make the appointments appropriate, and particularly the Faculty of Science to - at least we had the broad scope. Oriental Studies of course was special in that we hoped to be the centre for Asian studies in Australia and that didn't really come about and we made some appointments then but that was a big step to make those Science appointments. So the details of amalgamation we had to work out; really the relationship between the .... Well, [inaudible] was going to call the School of General Studies and the Institute of Advanced Studies and what the relationship between the two would be.

          Were there problems like, for example, were salaries for similar positions equal or were they different?

Well, that had to be worked out but from the beginning it was clear, although of course there was some heart-burnings over this, that some professors in the Institute were to receive more than the professors who were teaching. Although ...

          Was it all professors in the Institute who got more than all professors in the University College, or just some of them?

To begin with, yes. I don't think there was any doubt of that, that the scales were different and of course the only titles that were similar were those of professors. All the other titles were different anyway. In the Institute you had fellows and senior fellows and then research fellows which didn't exist in the university. We had to agree that there should be different conditions of appointment for people in the Institute and people in the School of General Studies because in the School of General Studies their conditions of appointment had to be both for teaching and research. They were not purely for teaching. And this was something one had to stress again and again that there they were appointed to do research as well as to teach. In the Institute they were appointed to do research and to supervise graduate students. If they wished they could teach undergraduate students but their role was to research and graduate supervision. So those conditions remained separate and different.

          In general terms, where was the gravity factor within the School of General Studies? Was it pulling towards research or pulling towards teaching? If you could talk about academics in the bulk, by the gross, where were they favouring, which way?

It varied I suppose. I could remember I was involved of course in appointments. I used to service the committees and sat through many, many, many committees - appoint chair committees. We were always careful to have people from outside the university - and of course there remained and I presume remains so to the present day - we always had people from the Institute of Advanced Studies, for example. I mean, an appropriate person in this particular field, say it was Chair of Physics or whatever, we'd have a Professor of Physics from the Institute as well as somebody in the field from the School of General Studies. But also somebody from another university, say, University of Melbourne, or University of Sydney. You'd have a committee of, say, seven or eight people so that you got that expertise. We always sought, of course, reports from people of international standing from all over the world on people.

So for positions in the School of General Studies they had to be, say, a professor or whoever, it didn't matter, a lecturer, whatever, had to be recognised as a good teacher but at the lower, say a lecturer person who had already published and who was interested in research, it had to be a combination. Now, I'm sure that in some fields we'd have somebody who had a reputation as being a great teacher active in research but not necessarily a prolific publisher, and you got people who perhaps were fairly slow to publish but that didn't mean that they were not active in research. We tried always to get away, I think, from the idea that one could be a good academic teacher but not be active in research.

          There were people who pulled in that direction?

Oh yes. I think that would be so people who would find it easier perhaps to ...

          What? Settle into a rut? Use the same lecture notes every year?

That's right, yes. I think there must be a temptation to do that. And you get people of course, depending on one's own temperament; the person who has the rapport with students, who doesn't find it as easy to settle to the different discipline of independent research, I suppose. It depends very much - people differ. People can be equally effective as academics I suppose, and yet be a very different temperament. But I certainly always held very strong views that one could never be a good - even from the sidelines - academic without being an active researcher.

          The process of selection - actually at this stage I guess we're talking about the early '60s, are you still basically working with what used to be the Canberra University College but now no longer has that name or are you a bit more general?

It was interesting I think that on amalgamation what virtually happened was that the two administrative systems, the administrative system of the old ANU and then became the Institute of Advanced Studies, the old CUC which became the School of General Studies - a dreadful name, terribly misleading name, the School of General Studies because in many parts of the world that's the adult education section of the university. I refused to use it. As much as I could I never used it. I talked about the faculties long before it was adopted really. It was a dreadful name. Joe Burton hated it too.

          Well, if he hated and you hated and probably other people hated it, how come it happened?

It was just difficult to find something else that was acceptable to everybody. It was really very difficult. And I suppose in my ...

          Did you feel it was part of the Cinderella status that we referred to earlier? The rather disparaging attitude that your new partner had towards you.

I suppose there could have been something of that, there could have been - but it just had to be accepted by the old CUC people I think. Well, it was difficult. You see the faculties, the actual, the separate faculties were just getting underway, so it was just very difficult to come up with a name that wasn't 'university'.

But as I was saying, the two administrations really continued side by side although we moved into the sort of central administration. We moved into the Chancelry building when it was finished and the system was adopted of having the administration responsible for the faculties being actually out in the faculty buildings when they were gradually established. See, the Haydon Allen Building was opened, what, just on amalgamation I think, about September 1960. That was the first of the buildings. One has to remember of course that those buildings are not all that old.

So we continued really, my work was solely with the School of General Studies and those two administrations continued with a registrar of the Institute of Advanced Studies, a registrar of the School of General Studies and then the top of that, the registrar of the whole university. And it was quite some time before those two vertical lines, as it were, lent over and we got the stratification of one administration. So my work continued with the School of General Studies only for quite some time. I can't remember when we changed over really.

          1967 under Crawford?

Was that when it was?

          I'm not sure.

Yes. We had the name of the Secretary of the University and the Registrar and so on. When we moved up into the Chancelry, I still handled appointments, promotions, re-appointments, et cetera of academic staff and looked after the Board of the School of General Studies.

          I was going to ask about that. I see that there's a number of changes in your titles, and I was going to ask to what degree your functions were changing. You started out as an Admin. Assistant, became a Graduate Assistant, then a Senior Graduate Assistant. What degree were your functions changing over that period?

Interestingly enough I think they were tending to narrow down, still doing a lot of the same things but because they'd become so much more complex and complicated I was tending to drop off things but I suppose, the main role continued on the academic staffing side and the Board and then all the committees that, as it were, ramified from that. So that continued and then when even that got too much I could have continued the Board if I wanted but I felt that I had handled it for so long that somebody else ought to have a go. And so I elected to stay with the academic staff side and by that stage, I suppose, when that academic staffing section built up there were about thirteen of us I guess in the Chancelry but by that stage I was handling academic staffing for the whole university, both the Institute and the faculties.

          The process of recruitment into a university of the style of the ANU is obviously a very complicated situation. It's not like finding people, selecting the best accountant out of thirty similar accountants. A lot of people have different skills and it's a matter of where the university's going and all those sorts of things. Did you find that there were times when personal factors shaped the sort of positions that were created or perhaps the restructuring of departments? That new positions were created to accommodate differences or perhaps departments were split to accommodate splits that occurred within departments?

Oh, I'm sure, yes, that would have happened. And after all I suppose the Head of Department, it was very important that he had as part of his team somebody who would work well with him or her. It was not until very much later that we got into this great business of reviewing. We sort of reviewed everything that moved, I think a little bit overdone. I mean reviews are fine if one has the courage to take the action that's recommended by the review but that doesn't happen very often. It happened on a few occasions I think. So that I suppose you got out of reviews, or just out of general ....

I mean, I can remember going back, perhaps the earlier times, the triennial submissions that, working in the three years submssions leading up to the new triennium for the government of what we were asking for and so on, that involved a great deal of work and that always of course made one think about where the university was going. What did one want to concentrate on? That was an opportunity I suppose for review and for going in different directions and perhaps of creating new departments, of hiving off one kind of activity or amalgamating it with another kind, and of course that has been done to a far greater extent actually since I retired, particularly within the research schools, more so I think than within the faculties, the getting away from the departmental emphasis into centres of study, centres of research.

          That's something that talking to other people I've found is a constant theme of people attempting to organise the university away from departments and yet departments being the gravity pull and units essentially sneaking back into departmental styles of operation. Is this something you commented on, dealt with?

I suppose when the department idea was so deeply entrenched in both part of what we have inherited from the older university systems, why a department tends to become more ossified really than a centre, I don't know. Perhaps sometimes it's a factor of size, that sometimes departments can get over-large so that you get little groups within that department, and they tend sometimes not to know what's .... You know, that where you get overlaps in areas of study, that they tend to become too zealous of their own areas so that the smaller, I suppose the centres and groups tend to be smaller and perhaps more willing to reach out to another group. Sort of groups going, you know, make these little nucleii as it were. I don't know. When you look at it there's no real reason why a department should not be as alive, that why they should become rigid but there always seems to be this tendency and to look inwards instead of outwards. So maybe it is just a factor of size. I don't know.

          These sorts of discussions, the distinction between academic and intellectual questions and organisation or administrative questions, it's frequently not quite clear in any given discussion what the relative weight is, is it? It's very hard sometimes to distinguish completely those things and have a situation where academics deal with academic things and administrative people deal with just administrative things and there's no overlapping, there's no conflict about it. That's quite a difficult balance to get, isn't it?

I think, and I used to say it many, many times, that, say we appointed a professor because he was the best person in the field to do the job we wanted. He was, say, in the faculty or [inaudible] he had an international - he or she. When I say he I mean she, I refuse to go in for these feminist terms by the way and I'm using he in the sense of mankind. When we appointed the person because he had a written international reputation and an intellectual stature and the person who was going on and clearly vigorous and so on, he was a good communicator, et cetera, we would appoint him and then we tended to overload him, particularly if he became a Head of Department with administrative chores - absolutely crazy - but we'd been forced to do this particularly by the whole government thrust, the increasing bureaucratisation of universities.

And that I think is something that has been forced on us by governments and I'm sure it's happened both in the State universities which have both State governments and Commonwealth governments. At the ANU we had, perhaps we were luckier in that we had only the Commonwealth government. And it's one of the things that made me feel happy to retire from the university, that we were becoming more and more and more bureaucratic, within the administration itself and forcing the academic to spend much more of his time on pure either management role or just sheer clerical administrative tasks and taking him away.

END TAPE 1, SIDE B

BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A

          Identification: This is side one, tape two, Miss Molly Bouquet.

          Just continuing on that theme for a moment, the relationship between the academic side of the university and the administrative side. Were there times when, say, some of the academics felt you were making decisions or you were involved in decisions that were affecting the way in which they conducted their work?

Very much so. I mean this is always a - it's natural isn't it˙- that people perhaps sometimes are suspicious of what's going on. And if something's going to affect them very closely they want to be involved. After all, if we're brought up in this so-called democratic society, we want to have a finger in the pie. And very true in universities and of course it is what makes for very complicated, not necessarily complicated but time-consuming administration, I think, because when you think of the typical decisions - something is brought up maybe in a department or somewhere or other - or we'll think of it as coming up from that - and then something is raised at a faculty meeting, a faculty board. Now that may have been something that's come from within the faculty, it may be something that has trickled down from the council of the university. They said, 'What about this', or 'this is happening - well, we are concerned about it all. What about this new development?' But it starts off at being fought about at the faculty board meeting. Now they may set up a committee to look at it or they may ask the departments of the faculty, or the groups within the faculty to look at it, so everybody talks about it. Then if it's a committee of the faculty it reports back to the faculty and then there's another discussion. You've got people who may come to a decision quickly ....

And perhaps incidentally I should say one of the most fascinating tasks I had when one year I was Acting Registrar and I was - this is perhaps the School of General Studies, maybe of the university, I can't remember - and my job was to attend all the faculty meetings of the various faculties, and it was fascinating to see how each faculty would treat exactly the same topic. The Faculty of Economics, for example, met in those days at nine o'clock. I remember once being about five minutes late by which time they were on to item thirteen and the meeting was closed in about half an hour - bang, bang, bang.

          Who was in the Chair?

Burg Cameron, Professor Cameron. He was very efficient. One would get to the Faculty of Arts, which did not have compulsory membership in those days so there'd be people straggling in and out, in and out. They would talk around the subject, about the subject, on, and they'd have all different views. After perhaps an hour or so they'd decide to appoint a committee and send it out to a committee to come back on another occasion. The Faculty of Asian Studies would be very difficult to get to understand even what the topic was about.

          Why was that?

Well, you get people who are not English speaking who found it very difficult to comprehend the whole idea of these issues, or would have very passionate views about them certainly. But there were difficulties of understanding of what was going about and have to be talked around and under and over and so forth, so that would stagger on. And the Faculty of Science which had in those days - whether this still persists I don't know - elected membership, so there were about three from each department in the faculty, and they would hammer out something and make a decision. I mean it might take half an hour or an hour but those great scientific minds would be brought to bear on the subject. But it was fascinating to see both the time taken and the outcome of exactly the same topic.

          I think 1966 was the time when you were Acting Registrar.

Was it? Well, that would have been the time that I was doing it, yes, that's right.

          What were the major issues at the time you had that position?

I don't know. I saw my role, I think, that stage, very much as acting and so I didn't get deeply involved perhaps maybe in the way that I should have. I don't really recall what were particular issues. I suppose because, you see whether I was Acting Registrar, just whatever job I was in, we were all very much involved in what was going on so one particular year doesn't stand out. Maybe this was partly because of the people we had. When I go back to the times of people like Colin Plowman, George Dicker, who made a point of involving the Assistant Registrars particularly, so that we did know what was going on. It was good. It was important. So one particular year doesn't stand out in my mind, perhaps as much as it should.

          You were also acting, I think, as Academic Registrar a bit later, '73 to February '75.

Well, I think that again - the titles changed when we were going through these varying time .... The varying titles for what was very much the same job. And again I don't have any recollection of something that was happening then.

          Doesn't that straddle 1974? 1974 was the year of a lot of student turmoil here at the ANU.

That's right, yes. Yes, I guess that was true and again I suppose I was, although Academic Registrar, not so directly involved with the student fracas particularly because my work still tended to be much on the board or the staffing side.

          Weren't they wanting representation on the board?

Yes, we went through all this, one went along with it. Having been, I suppose, a 'schoolie' for so many years recognised that the most rebellious spirits at the age of fifteen, eighteen, nineteen tend to become the most conservative at thirty-five or forty. It's part of the growing up pattern. By and large I think the university handled the student situation pretty well. There are others of course who were more closely involved in the actual demonstrations. I remember particularly, I think it was when Professor Dunbar was Deputy Vice-Chancellor that he had the unenviable job of getting the students out of the PABX and having to take the decision of actually calling the police onto the campus which of course was pretty something - not easy to do.

          Was that something that was discussed fairly widely before it happened or it's something he made as a lonely decision himself?

I don't really recall. I'm sure it had been discussed as to under what circumstances one would have to, but by and large we were very fortunate too that we had very good co-operation from the police always so that they were willing, if there were problems, not so much with student demonstrations but in the wider community, that they would get in touch with us and say, 'Well, so and so, and so and so', and we could handle it as it were. They were happy to let us handle it and not in fact I suppose damage the student's career. This was one of the benefits I suppose of being in a smaller community, that we were able to handle things. And I think that the university didn't have .... We were lucky I suppose, well we didn't even have the numbers, the student numbers were not large, that some of the other universities did. And I was aware of it when I travelled - I was away in 1971 for six months visiting universities in the UK and in the United States - and the trauma that the student uprisings, I suppose one could call them, in some of the UK universities, the trauma remaining from that - and was still going on - was very severe. And I realised really that we had been pretty fortunate. But I think by and large because we handled it - not to say we, but the university - handled it pretty well. I remember things like occupying the council room and those sort of senseless, mindless vandalism.

          In general terms, how would you describe the policy that was discussed, as opposed to just seeing the overt acts as a result of the decisions? What were the principles that people referred to when they were debating what should happen in response to, say, a sit-in?

It varied of course. I suppose there were some people who were worth a far more repressive action, but I think in most cases common sense, as it were, prevailed, that there was a line I guess beyond which one couldn't allow them to go but by and large prepared to listen as much as possible if they would let one listen. And of course there were times when that was very difficult. Listen and accommodate and reason as much as possible, but I suppose, be prepared to take a line, as it was on this occasion when they were trying to get in to the telephone communication system for the whole university and that was impossible so overt action had to be taken. When they occupied the Chancelry on a number of occasions they were allowed to remain in the council room and just everybody else sort of tried to keep it as low key as possible.

          Did you have any personal confrontations with them?

No, I didn't. I can remember an occasion we had a conferring of degrees and there was the Minister for Education - what was his name? I've forgotten now - and he was coming in. They jostled him a bit. He had to be protected and then they got in - it was in the Melville Hall, the degree conferring ceremony, it was a September meeting I think - and they set up this cacophony of sound outside making it very difficult to have the ceremony. But that, directing their venom against the Minister for Education of the day - Carrick, I think it was. And the times when the place was occupied. And the time when Dr Williams was Vice-Chancellor and howling him down a bit, but nothing very much in the way of physical confrontation. Having it when they were sitting in the corridor and just having to pick your way over legs and so forth but, you know, just say 'Hi' as you passed. But by and large I think we did pretty well.

          When you were on that study tour, there are a couple of other things that were mentioned that you took an interest in. One of them was the business of tenured positions versus untenured positions and the other - this is in addition to the student question - was the question generally, which I guess was your fundamental theme, the relationship between the academic and the administrative sides of the universities you were visiting. The tenured and untenured was that a ...?

That has been and still is, I guess, a concern within the Institute section. In those days it wasn't - I was going to say it wasn't a problem within the faculties, but that's not true because we were getting more and more the way of short term lectureships. When you go back to the Murray Report in the '60s when the universities were growing at a tremendous rate, too quickly I think, and I can remember feeling concern at the time that this great opening up of the universities to students making it possible for them to do masters degrees and doctorates and so on which was fine but I think that at that period - I think I'll come back to what you asked me - at that time we, and I think all the universities, accepted students for higher degrees, we shouldn't have and I am I suppose in a way frankly an ‚litist.

I feel anybody who deserves to, who merits in intellectual terms, in capacity, to get to university should be able to do so. But I think there was a stage where the universities were accepting people for higher degrees who really were not of post-graduate calibre. And there's no doubt whatever that appointments were made in the '60s when it was very difficult to get staff that now one wouldn't make, that they just weren't - they were people who didn't measure up to the standards we had tried to set. And of course in those days, particularly within the faculties, one had to offer the prospect of tenure. I mean, lecturers never had immediate tenure, they would be appointed for three years with a renewal or a re-appointment to age sixty-five. It was only a professor who was immediately appointed to age sixty-five.

But then of course the financial constraints began - this was more into the '70s - and then of course all the universities were saddled with people who had tenure to age sixty-five. Some cases who had burnt themselves out, who'd never realised their potential. So other kinds of appointments became more and more important and more and more [inaudible]. So how to both to attract good people, one had to offer perhaps incentives but at the same time protect oneself so that gradually .... I mean, now of course, we're up to the stage where we can offer five-year professorships, or at any level - that is a possibility.

So this was something that did interest me in those days. And of course you got in the research schools where the idea had always been with the ANU that one had a small core of - well, the idea had always been about half tenured and half non-tenured. But then when it became more and more difficult for people ,and perhaps this happened more into the late '70s, the '80s I suppose, research fellows found it more difficult to get tenured position. They would come, say, to the ANU with very good - the possibility of working with the top people in the field internationally - and having good conditions but be on limited tenure, so what was going to happen? They could be re-appointed perhaps for a short period of time but then out into the wide world and that became more difficult. So the tug was pulled from both ways, and something that's occupied the universities and has continued to occupy the universities, the question of tenure and non-tenure.

          When you came back did you find that you had what you might call more advanced views than a lot of the people that you were having contact with?

Not really. One of the things that struck me .... When I went I chose different places, I didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge because I felt they were so different. I chose some smaller universities in the UK, some of the red brick universities. In Canada and the States, in the States I deliberately chose some that were privately supported, some that were State universities, some big, some small, so the whole range. What I quickly realised was how different the ANU was from any really of the other universities and so what one thought would be often a good idea that was working well in such and such a university would be very difficult to make to work in the ANU because of its set-up and because of its history.

In purely administrative terms the old ANU had been always very well supported administratively to get people to come to this country town, these top people in the early days, in to the ANU, one had to offer them better conditions. Better salaries, but also of course the great differences of - no use saying that they could go overseas once in seven years, that wasn't going to help, they had to have more favourable study leave conditions. They had to have more favourable travel conditions, more favourable financial support for equipment, more favourable conditions for housing, particularly in Canberra where it was very difficult to get housing, and at the same time they had to be given time to get on with their own work, so that the administrative support had a much stronger administrative support system than would have been the case in a normal teaching university, another Australian university.

In a way we carried on that sort of ethos to some extent for the School of General Studies and the faculties, I suppose. The fact that we had people out in the faculties, that it was a decentralised system of faculty administration. The people physically located out in the faculties and reporting back to a central, which was .... It used more people. This sort of hands on administration so that the academics and students, I think, became much more used to being very well served administratively. Now, of course, with the financial constraints when the numbers of administrators have been considerably reduced and that coupled with the increasing demands, the sort of bureaucratic demands made on the university by government has hit, as I say, particularly the academic staff very much harder and made it very much more difficult for the academic staff at the ANU to accommodate. So that some of the things I saw in other universities I thought, 'Well, that's a good idea but I know it won't work at the ANU'. It was good for my personal development I think and gave me personal contacts that were useful. I don't know that I was able to bring back startling ideas which affected the future of the ANU.

          One of the divisions that perhaps can be seen within the administration is the division between those people who are servicing directly the academics within the university, obviously the core of it, but also on the other side of it you've got, perhaps you call them the business side of the administration. Was this a tension that developed?

That's an interesting point you've made. I don't know whether you've come across this in your reading at all?

          There's a letter that I'm going to refer to in a minute that you wrote to Professor Karmel.

I suppose because of the more and more complex financial administration in the university I have to admit, with some reluctance I might say, that the business side of the university had to grow. My feeling was that, and perhaps it was true of my colleagues within the academic administration one might say and I'm including the student administration as well, that there was a certain amount of bitterness perhaps, or perhaps just wryness at some stages that the complexities of our work were not fully understood. Not so much by the academics or by the students but by our fellows within the business area or even the straight general personnel area, because you see the academic staffing area was separate from the area which looked after general staff, non-academic staff and they tended to be people who were much more, I suppose in a way one might say without being derogatory, general public servants, and I think there was this feeling that the complexities of academic administration were not so fully understood and a feeling that the business administration was growing and growing and growing and assuming perhaps an importance that was understandable but it did reflect badly on the academic administration.

          The business administration, we're talking about things like what? Catering, the people in charge of building and construction, grounds maintenance, is that ...?

Oh no. When I'm talking about business, I'm talking about the financial administration: the accountant, the people who would run the financial affairs of the university. One has to remember the buildings and grounds area was quite separate. It was always a separate area. When you talk about catering, that was something quite apart. When you would think of the - you'd get the areas like University House or the University Union, there was an oversight on the part of the business people but the actual business areas, the people who were .... I mean, there's the university budget and they made the decisions as to carving up that budget and just running the university - the money, the finances of the university. That's what I think of as the business side.

          That letter that we were just referring to then, I think in 1983 at a time when I think the Academic Registrar, the Assistant Registrar positions, the relationship between them and what were similar positions in the business side was altered. Could you tell me about the circumstances of that particular letter?

Well, one has perhaps to go back a little. It's a question of unionisation within the university and I think one of the - I don't know whether this is still the case - but at one stage, I think someone mentioned to me, we had twenty-two unions within the university which in fact necessitated the gradual establishment of a section of the personnel system dealing entirely with industrial relations. This whole question of industrial relations became more and more time consuming and I'm afraid to an extent with which I didn't have a great deal of sympathy, just as the increasing amount of time that was taken up to some extent with - and of course the industrial relations included the whole business of the status of women, et cetera and I didn't have a great deal of sympathy with a lot of that but it had to be. It was just something one had to recognise.

There was a stage when part of the way in which the whole salary scales of non-academic staff were dealt with. I don't quite recall all the details but there was a period when, at one stage they were linked more closely with public service salaries but then gradually they were linked with the salaries of people doing similar jobs throughout the universities which was much more sensible.

END TAPE 2, SIDE A

BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE B

          Identification: This is side two, tape two, Miss Molly Bouquet.

          We were talking about the ....

Well, back, and I can't remember the exact time it happened but there was a stage when the business managers in each of the research schools and I think they had only one for the whole of the faculties, there was what was called a business manager, the person who looked after the financial affairs, the budget for that particular section. And there was a stage when they and the people, their assistants, there was a long delay in them getting the salary rises that they should have got, partly because it was caught up with - there was a stage I think where government was involved, I don't recall the details - anyway, one of the business managers decided that they would have a sort of middle level union, I've forgotten even the name, what they called it - Administrative and Allied Officers' Association, something like that - this sort of middle level administration and business management, a union to push their demands. And they were very active with this and established it and took it up to the Council and so forth and the Council had agreed that this should cover everybody, whether they wanted to or not. It was not compulsory membership.

I refused to join this. I didn't feel that it was the right way to go at all. I had been a member of the Academic Staff Association from the very early days of the CUC when I was invited to join and perhaps I've never been an active unionist, but I appreciated the invitation again of being part of that team. I appreciated it and it helped I think in my communications with academic staff and just a feeling that I was part of the whole exercise. So I had remained, and in fact there was another member of the administrative staff, Pat White - have you met her?

          No, I haven't.

Well, she looks after council at the university now. She also was a member of the Academic Staff Association, maybe there were some others of us, but we felt quite strongly that this was not for us, so politely I just refused to join that. I said I wasn't interested. These were the beginnings perhaps of some of the tensions.

And then this idea of classification of positions, this was part of what I was perhaps thinking of earlier when I mentioned the university becoming more and more bureaucratic and I resisted it and just disliked it. It was distasteful to me, but it was accepted that all the positions had to be classified including that of the Assistant Registrars, so our positions were classified. The position I was occupying, in charge of academic staffing, was classified as being lower, for example, than that of the person who looked after the board of the faculties and I found this ironic because I had looked after the board for many years and had said, when they said, 'It's getting too big a job for one person,' and I said, 'I think somebody else ought to be given a go because I've done it for so long,' so I moved across of my own free will to .... So that I was embittered by that and very angry indeed about it, and I suppose I would have been very happy to retire at that stage but when I went to talk to the superannuation officer I found I had to lower my pride very quickly because the last couple of years made such a difference to superannuation because I had come very late into superannuation, and on amalgamation in fact was given, as it turned out, the wrong kind of advice to change from Commonwealth superannuation into which I'd come only on joining the University College, so I'd come in very late to that, and rather than stay with Commonwealth superannuation which would have been very much better for me if I had, I changed over to the university scheme but then found those last couple of years ... so I went on until I was sixty-five. But that was the background to that really.

          What sort of response did you get from Professor Karmel?

They listened sympathetically. Professor Ross, who'd been on the committee which did that part on that classification, I know I was really very, very angry. I don't often get angry but I was very angry and I gave him the benefit of my anger. He listened politely, sympathetically but it just really wasn't politic I think to do much about it, so there it was.

          You mentioned before that you'd seen six vice-chancellors come and go. Let's perhaps review their different styles because I think that's an important part of ....

I have to think back. The first one I would say was Sir Leslie Melville and he was the Vice-Chancellor on amalgamation. I had really no direct contact with him as it happened, so I just had this impression. This person of, rather self-contained kind of person and I'm not sure how much influence ...

          Didn't people like Joe Burton talk about him?

No, not really. I mean, they knew each other quite well and of course in those days the people in the university world, and Canberra generally was small, everybody knew each other pretty well socially. Not really. And although certainly he would have been very active at the time of the amalgamation discussions one doesn't - I have no recollection of him out there brandishing a torch or anything like that, holding .... He always seemed to me fairly low key. What kind of impact that other people would see him making on the university would be interesting but I just didn't have the contact with him at all.

Then after him was Len Huxley, I think, would have been the next one and I began to have more contact with him. He was a very reluctant vice-chancellor really. I don't know really what pushed him into becoming Vice-Chancellor - Molly, his wife, perhaps.

          In what way do you say reluctant? What was the evidence?

He wasn't really happy as a vice-chancellor. He was much happier I think as a professor in his field of, what, theoretical physics, was it? He was basically a shy man. Could be a bit choleric. He had these wonderful ginger eyebrows, quite fierce ones that could really move quite a lot. I remember him losing his temper once in a committee meeting. But basically a shy man who didn't really take easily to being a vice-chancellor of a .... And as I said before the ANU is a very, was and is, a very - one hesitates to use the word 'unique' - but it is a very different kind of set-up. Very difficult being vice-chancellor of it with all the history behind it, with the people who have been with it for a long, long time. Some more difficult than others. Some more set in their ways than others. It's a very difficult role and he came in of course, as always, at a difficult time and when the university was growing rapidly. So in fact I suppose he didn't have the financial problems that later universities did but a man of, a very straight kind of person and a man of integrity. Not a man, I think, would find it easy to wheel and deal. They're to be found a bit older. Good to deal with. I liked him and got on very well with him and I was quite flattered when it was reported to me one day that he said, 'Oh, Molly Bouquet, she's a good egg'. We got on well but I think he didn't find it easy. Not a man, I imagine, of great creativity.

Whenever I think of creativity in this administrative role I think of Ian Ross. I mean, there was a man who was a scientist, a chemist and so on, but who had this extraordinary facility with words, uses words beautifully. Extraordinarily literate and civilised, as I used to tell him, for a scientist. But a flair, an imagination, a creativity which people either have or they don't.

          How would it be manifest?

Well, he'd come up with new ideas, bright ideas, new ideas of let's try this or let's do this and something that was appropriate to the occasion. And this would happen on many, many times. I think he's, perhaps some people wouldn't be prepared to admit it, but I think he's had a profound influence on the university. He was the one who got Anutech off the ground of course. Now, that wouldn't have been a brand new idea, the universities were beginning to have to go that way, but he took it up and it became very much his baby. But this way of looking at things, of looking at them from around every angle and nothing rigid about him, an interesting person. Well, I think Len Huxley didn't have that sort of creativity. That was number two.

          Was it Crawford of Low next?

No. Well, then before that we would have had, Bob Williams might have been the next one I think. I'm not quite sure of the order. He was the New Zealander. And I have to say one just wonders why he was ever appointed. It was not a successful appointment I think.

          [Inaudible]?

Part of this problem of the strange being that the ANU was and is. It's very difficult for an outsider to come in. I mean although it was good that in many cases we did have outsiders come in, but very difficult for them to find their feet in the set-up of the university.

          What were the particular shoals that Williams struck?

Well, of course he was caught up right in the middle of the student demonstrations. Now that was very difficult. And he'd been, I think, was it a public servant in New Zealand? You know, a smaller country, a smaller university set-up which I think suited him. I think he just found it very difficult, I think, dealing with the student set-up, not having even the broader Australia background. Just everything in a way was against him. I'm not sure how deeply he could see into the problem partly because he didn't have the background maybe. I felt in a way sorry for him that he was just hit with everything.

          Did you have much personal contact with him?

Yes, my work tended to bring me quite closely with, often the vice-chancellor would be chairman of a committee I'd be running so that I always had quite a lot of contact with the vice-chancellor. I tended to work more closely with the vice-chancellor, the deputy vice-chancellor particularly and the vice-chancellor more closely than I did with my own registrar. That was the line very, very much more than going through, say, George Dicker or Colin Plowman. Day to day I would see far more of the deputy vice-chancellor than I'd ever see of the registrar and so I got to know them pretty well. So I worked quite a lot with the vice-chancellors as well - preparing things for them, doing drafts and that kind of thing. 'I think it would be an idea if you wrote this letter. Here, what do you think of this?' and so on. So I got to know them all pretty well. But Williams of course didn't, I think he realised that he just wasn't happy in the job and went back to New Zealand into, I think, public service. Then was it Crawford?

          Crawford's a name that I've heard discussed.

Yes. Well, he of course had played an enormous role within the university because of the varying positions he was in, as Director of the Research School of Pacific Studies and of course being involved back in the early days of the .... I mean he must have been involved in the setting up of the - back in post-war reconstruction and that sort of thing. So being in Canberra and very active in public service and so on, so he was very closely involved with the university throughout most of its existence I suppose, and then Director of the Research School of Pacific Studies. Then when he was Fiscal Adviser to the university. It was a term coined specially for him. And then of course when he became Vice-Chancellor. So a man who had a tremendous influence on the way things went in the university. I had a tremendous respect for him and an affection, although I didn't find it as easy to work with him as I did, say, with Peter Karmel or even with Len Huxley. I mean, he was always very easy. Easy to talk to, but I always had something of the feeling of a perspex barrier between us and I don't know whether it was because I was a woman although his relationship - and this never worried me. This is one of the things I enjoyed about in university, that I was never conscious of the fact that I was a woman. It was just, we were all in the team and working together so that this is why I used to get very cross about this whole feminist business and I was never terribly sympathetic to it because I suppose I had .... I suppose I stood up for what I saw as my rights but not because I was a woman really but just as a person.

          We'll come back to that later.

But with Crawford .... He had a, it was a very agile mind, a very good mind indeed, agile and a person of strong convictions but he could manipulate people very well. I don't mean that in a derogatory sense. A person who elicited enormous loyalty. People who worked really closely to him were very loyal. As I said, I always felt to some extent at one remove from him, I don't quite know .... He'd always when he'd see me say, 'Hi, beautiful,' kind of thing but it didn't always quite fit somehow. I remember my very last sight of him and it was sad. He came into the university, by which stage he was really dying, and he had the chemotherapy, he had that little cap on. Of course, as you know he was a small man. And he was no longer able to drive and he'd been driven over to the university and he walked into the Chancelry as I was walking out and he didn't take - by this time he'd lost his hair with the chemotherapy - and he just sort of tipped his cap and he said, 'Hi, beautiful', and I said, 'Hi, Sir John' and that was the last time I ever saw him. But he was a very, a powerful man. Going back to the old days when they used to talk about the seven dwarfs in Canberra, you know, these small persons who had - Roland Wilson and so - such an enormous influence on the government in early days, and Crawford was one of those.

          We'll come back to one of them again a bit later when we finish with the V-Cs, that's Coombs of course. But before we come to Coombs, what about Low?

Low. Well, I'd had contact with him of course when he was Director of RSPacS. And a man of great charm and ambitions and easy to work with. Easy to establish a rapport with. Very different, I think, in some ways from Crawford and perhaps that reflected their fields. I mean, Tony is a historian and Crawford an economist and their way in which they went at things and to some extent perhaps the level of penetration, Crawford would perhaps delve more deeply than Low was. And I used to say [inaudible] but friendly way that his wife who kept Tony's feet on the ground, she was a down to earth, practical sort of woman. A man of great enthusiasms and so on. As a vice-chancellor, I'm being frank, perhaps not as effective as some of the others partly because of this tendency to scatter things too widely and the difficulty of dealing with his fellow academics, sometimes it was more successful than others. He was the one who had the idea of the reviews of the Institute and of the institution generally, and it was a good idea though as I say, we tended to get carried away with it a bit I think. But he had the courage to see these through because ...

          They couldn't have been too popular.

No, indeed, particularly in the research schools where some of them, particularly the old, had been some areas where it had become very inward looking.

          Did you ever witness any of the fight-back that might surround those reviews?

I suppose so, on the committees or talking privately to people and so on there would be - and it was something I always treasured of course, that by and large the academic staff could feel that they were free to talk to me. All kinds of things were said within the four walls of my office. And I can always remember saying - on one occasion I had a woman academic who had been under great stress and burst into tears in my office and was terribly mortified - and I was saying, 'Well, you know I always have a big box of Kleenex in the bottom drawer and you're by no means the only academic who's been in tears in my office. I've had big, strong men in tears in my office, too.' She was amazed. That was something that they felt they could speak, I was glad to feel they could speak freely and so naturally there were tensions and where you had people with entrenched positions and so on. There were always those ramifications and there were people feeling badly about things. Just, well, everybody resents change, or most of us do.

          Peter Karmel?

He, I think, was very successful particularly coming when he did at a time of profound financial constraints. He was a man who - and he had the courage, or has the courage, to stand up for what he thinks is the right thing to do. I remember that I felt - he was vocal, highly articulate - and I used to enjoy watching people chair meetings because I went to so many of them, and the different techniques they used or in some cases they would talk too much from the chair. And although Peter Karmel was a highly articulate man with a quick mind, very quick and very good, very nice sense of humour. It was sharp and nice sense of humour, but he, I was always impressed with his chairing of meetings. He would sit there and never lost the thread. Make everybody - this was another point - he would always make everybody on a committee say something, not just sit back and go with the tide. He would make people come up with what they had to say. Sum things up well and then perhaps when things were flagging or getting off track just gently bring them back. Superb chairman, I felt. And able to˙- I would know what he really wanted or what he was interested in but he wouldn't press that. He acted as chairman, he understood his role very well. And I think understood the vice-chancellor's role very well and got on well with his deputies and with all his support. I think he was a very successful ....

          The Vice-Chancellor's role, how would you describe it?

Thought you might ask me that. Very difficult one I think. Again I think extremely difficult in this university. He's the executive head of the university. In a way that's true I suppose in all the Australian universities. I'm thinking of the role of the chancellor in some universities the chancellors have been ....

First of all in some universities the vice-chancellor has been appointed or has been a vice-chancellor for many, many, many years, over a long period. The ANU I think rightly has had the system of five-year appointments with a possibility of maybe another couple of years but not long term appointments and this is why we've had this number of them. I think that has been good when in some other instances, some of the other State universities where a vice-chancellor has been there for donkeys' years and that has not necessarily been for the good of the institution and probably not for the good of the vice-chancellor himself.

You could say it's a co-ordinating role, it's a leadership role, difficult to, this business of first among equals, or academic staff treasure their equality so that it's a very difficult role. It may be the top of the pyramid in executive terms but not easy. He's got to be a persuader and not a dictator, but at the same time be strong enough to say, this is after all where the buck stops, I'm responsible, now having taken this advice and this advice but this is the way it has to go. But by and large because, as I was saying earlier, that long painful process that things take in the university of going from faculty committee to faculty to board to council, maybe back to the board and then to council. This going up the various rungs of the ladder and all going backwards and forwards, either going down or up, you get this enormous time consuming effort that everything takes in the university and this is one of the things ...

END TAPE 2, SIDE B

BEGIN TAPE 3, SIDE A

          Identification: This side one, tape three, Miss Molly Bouquet. End of identification.

          We were talking about that role of the vice-chancellor.

I think I was saying that again the ANU was more difficult than most, I think, for a vice-chancellor to be effective and the role taken by the chancellor of the universities is an interesting one too, where in some cases he's very much a figure-head but in other cases is much more active. [Inaudible] you were talking about Dr Coombs, earlier you mentioned him. He saw his role I think as Chancellor as being a very much more direct role than perhaps some chancellors did in other universities.

          I remember Oskar Spate saying - I think it was Professor Oskar Spate - that when things were happening Nugget Coombs was normally back there somewhere.

That's very true. He did see himself as being very active and he and Crawford, for example, worked very much at, so he was much more directly involved in the affairs of the university than some chancellors were. So that this in some ways would make it perhaps a little more difficult for the vice-chancellor because he had somebody there in the background, not necessarily interfering, but wanting to play an active role.

          How would you describe the approach, the fundamental ideas behind the way in which Nugget Coombs, Dr Coombs, conducted that role?

I find it hard to say. I didn't ever have very direct contact with him. Saw him active on some committees. I was never involved - well, I saw, I suppose occasionally I sat in on meetings of the University Council but was never directly involved in it, and it was usually the Chancellor of the university that was the Chairman of Council and so he played a role in that. I think Dr Coombs, and I'm sure he still does, feels passionately about lots and lots of things, and a man of enormous energy and enthusiasms, and that he'd want to get these - and they were good ideas - academic ideas, they had to happen somehow, and so he'd work through the normal channels. What he saw ...

          How would he work? Would he quietly lobby or would he try and persuade in larger groups, what was his method of operation?

I'm not too sure. I really don't know. I was never very close, or not closely enough to him. I would imagine through the vice-chancellor, through the people he would have known as academic colleagues and through his close associations with government, with senior public service. I think he would use whatever means he thought would .... He had such wide, as it were, avenue to, his contacts would have been enormous. I don't know how he would normally operate. I think probably use all methods.

          Was there, as is always the possibility with powerful, influential figures, a feeling of opposition to him, disquiet in some circles?

I've no doubt in certain areas.

          What sort of areas?

Well, I suppose even perhaps in some areas of the administration there must have been times when he might have been thought of as a continuing nettle, irritant kind of thing. I mean, not being derogatory necessarily to Nugget. Relationships between two people depends so much on just the chemistry, don't they? One reacts to certain people with their temperaments and so on. And a person such as Nugget who has the energies, the enthusiasms, the views, the strong views on all kinds of things would necessarily come across the views of other people. And not a man of infinite patience. I'm not quite sure why I say that but I think he probably .... Well, I can remember seeing him on times being pretty impatient with, say, fellows on a committee, of them being a bit slow to get his point or he wasn't getting his point across although he could be persuasive.

          Do you remember any particular issues that he might have been more prominently involved in than others?

No, not really, I don't. I think, as I say, I didn't have close enough contact in his sphere of action.

          Well going back to the beginning of your involvement with the ANU, that letter of appointment that you got even before you saw Tom Owen in which - I haven't got the exact words - but basically it said, well we haven't got a man at the moment so we'll give you a go. What was your feeling? How did you feel - you've said that you don't like the feminist approach - but how did you feel getting like that at that time?

I don't remember exactly. I think I thought it was a big joke.

          Did you think it was a bit of cheek, someone saying such a thing?

Yes, I guess so. With having been a school teacher, I guess, again I was in a role, in a milieu where it didn't matter whether one was a man or a woman, although I suppose the avenues of promotion might have been quite different for men and women and so on. Certainly I found back in the teaching days that if one was unmarried without a family one was pushed around much more and I was sent all over the place in New South Wales simply because I was unattached but the fact that I was a woman that didn't make any difference. It's just that I didn't have family responsibilities. So that I had grown up always in a .... I suppose my attitude of growing up that, okay, I was a woman, sure, but that I was as capable as anybody else and it didn't matter, my sex didn't matter in performing a job and I had not been disadvantaged in the day to day teaching, I guess.

So when this happened with the CUC, that letter, it didn't worry me at all. I thought it was amusing. The thing that, again, I discovered and I was so unsure that this was really going to be my future anyway that I really couldn't see myself as an administrator. I thought, as I was saying earlier, this interview I had with Tom Owen, we were very off-hand with each other. So when I got the letter, well, I'd give it a try because if I go back into teaching for which I'm trained I'm there for the rest of my life and I would much rather have a go at something else, and it was a good decision. I think when I first came, I think I was on female rates of pay. They would have been public service rates of pay. This didn't worry me too much to start with but then I think another administrative assistant was appointed who had at that stage not quite graduated who was very young and had no administrative background at all, and because he was a man his salary was higher. So I went to Tom Owen. I said, 'I think this is' - and I was having to train him as well, helped him to train him and I'm not sure how long this was after I came ...

          1958 I think.

Was it? I went to Tom Owen, I said, 'This is a bit stupid, isn't it?' and to his great credit he said, 'Yes' and so really that was the beginning of there being no differences in rates of pay for men or women in the university administration. Now I think in the old ANU they still had the different rates of pay and the result of it happening in the CUC meant that the ANU had to change. And I remember there was one woman in the staff of ANU who had been on female rates of pay who then went on just the single rates of pay. But I felt it was no great hassle, it was just so obviously logical to me and that when I pointed it out, it was accepted so perhaps I had an easier role in that way, and it was never a big deal.

And I suppose to some extent I never, when later women became much more vocal .... To some extent I suppose I felt with the women's movement at the time that they did themselves a disservice by being too aggressive and I suppose I have never appreciated aggression myself. I've always felt that there were ways of doing things based on discussion and being reasonable, that I've never been a confrontationist myself, so the thrust of the women's movement repelled me because of its aggression and the feeling that I think they did themselves a disservice and other women a disservice by going head on at things. But then I'm speaking from a more sheltered position, that I wasn't subject to the perhaps blatant discrimination that other people were. But I think even if I had I wouldn't have banged my head against the brick wall quite so, as much. I think what has happened is that people have got antagonised by this aggression that has happened.

          The most senior position within the particular strand that you were in was presumably the position of Registrar, would that be right?

Well, no, my substantive position was Assistant Registrar.

          What I was just wondering about was, if you were to be promoted within the university in your area, the registrar would be the one? Did you feel that if you'd wanted that position that you would have got equal consideration with, say, another male who was another Assistant Registrar?

I think so. Within the university I was never conscious of discrimination in appointments between the sexes and tried to get this through to some academic staff when they complained about academic appointments being biased because certainly the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of academic appointment committees I sat through there was never any suggestion, even unsaid, implicit, discrimination, and certainly within my own area - there was occasions when the registrarship was available or was to be advertised or whatever, I had decided I didn't wish to have it and I'm sure would not have been a good choice because I think my, although one could have learnt it I suppose, but I always felt that I hadn't had enough background in the student side of administration to be a good all-round registrar. Although, I mean, actually of course the present Registrar of the university is a woman who came in from outside with only a very limited administrative experience.

But the fact that I was a woman would not have made any difference I think. And among the Assistant Registrars, what, there were about six of us, I think that was the ultimate number, we were about equal. I think there were about three or four women, perhaps more women. In the middle levels of administration, in the academic administration, probably more women than men. Certainly the registrars like Colin Plowman and George Dicker worked equally well with women as with men. There was not discriminations as far as I could tell.

          Going back a couple of generations, it's perhaps fair to say that women who wanted careers had to make a choice between marriage and a career.

I think that's very true, yes. And I think this is where, and I was talking to one of my nieces just recently, and saying this, that I guess in my own case, I suppose there were a couple of factors which meant in the long run - a number of factors I suppose that I didn't marry - because I was very career-oriented, wished to be independent, and certainly when I began - this was the '40s, not so long ago I suppose - it was not easy to combine a career and marriage. It was very difficult, and also of course it was the war years so that I remember my first teaching appointment to Murrumburrah-Harden, the only thing one could do, I bought a bicycle and learnt to ride it. And drive up to the top of the cemetery hill and down at night, that was one's activity. And all the young men of course were away in the services.

Even in university days it was not so easy, so that one's contacts were not as, there were not the normal social contacts one would have had if it wasn't wartime. But I think it is true that in my time it was not easy to combine career and a marriage in a way it is now, and quite rightly the combination now. It makes of course for greater adjustments on both sides of the partnership. I've been watching this with some of my own nieces and nephews.

          The universities - or employers all around the world˙- have also found that there have been changes that have been necessary to make. I mean there are all sorts of things ranging from creches through to working out ways of coping with longer periods of leave without pay, maternity leave and things like that. These would have been issues discussed in your time though.

Oh yes, these were sort of issues with which we were faced and these questions of maternity leave and, as you say, leave without pay; the attitudes changed and I think rightly they had to come in and change. In many ways it was easier for a woman academic to fit in her family responsibilities, or her child-bearing with her academic work because of her greater independence. Lectures could be changed around and I remember one of our members of our academic staff who had, I think, three, four children and she always had them in the long vacation. She was marvellous, the organisation was superb. She managed because the whole lifestyle was much easier.

It was much more difficult of course for administrators, and people used to say in my area, the academic staffing, on a number of occasions where perhaps staff who had to go on maternity leave. I remember sometimes, of course - in later years one could never ask what were their family plans or whatever, one wasn't allowed to ask these questions any more - but I can remember on at least two occasions appointing somebody in the administrative area, not secretarial area, and saying that she couldn't have family for certain reasons and so on and then coming to work with me and immediately becoming pregnant. So I used to go around saying, don't join the in vitro fertilisation program, join the academic staffing unit.

But attitudes did have to change to accommodate this and it was again part of the increasing complexity, I suppose, of management that one did have to have this. And with management of coping with people being away for a time, having to be on leave and so not being able to replace them with somebody permanent. The problems of finance if they were on leave actually with pay, well, then sometimes they couldn't be replaced at all, and this all made for complexities. I can remember one professor who had a research assistant working on a very complicated piece of research with him and she became pregnant and had to go off. Wasn't able to continue, I think, for some reason or other as much as some other academic could, and of course he was outraged. He said he would never appoint a research assistant of child-bearing age again. It certainly has made all over greater problems of management.

          There's also another category of experience which I note in your curriculum vitae, in that you were designated as a moral tutor, I think, in - where was it? Bruce Hall. Yes, Bruce Hall. Could you tell me about that particular job and why you took it up?

Because I think most of the students in halls of residence were out, away from their homes, mostly in those days particularly for the first time. Nowadays where students are often much older or of varying ages it wouldn't be quite as true, but the Warden of Bruce Hall, and I think all the other halls of residence set up the same system of this, what they called moral tutors. They said 'moral' because they didn't mean academic tutors. I mean they could have tutors who tutored in an academic subject. These people were ones who, usually other members of the academic staff, of the university staff rather, would like to have a contact with students, mainly a social one, and offer them hospitality in their own homes or see them on a regular basis and just establish a social contact and I suppose ...

          How many students at a time?

I can't remember. The groups were not large. I think they were probably, maybe seven or eight at a time. Sometimes one would have them together to a place or individually. It was a system, I think, that was very good in theory but very difficult to make work in practice. It worked better with some students where one established a rapport, others I think cherished it in the first year of their being in the Hall, and being very strange to university, and then grew away from it. So that I think its success varied a bit. I think it was a good idea but very, very difficult to make it work properly.

          You also had other contacts with the halls of residence, didn't you?

Yes. Well, I think as one of the tutors I was elected to the governing body of Bruce Hall which was interesting and I think again I felt because my work didn't bring me contact with students and I've always enjoyed contact with younger people, I suppose going back to my days as a high school teacher, I enjoyed that and of seeing how the Hall was working and then I suppose then because of my administrative background, perhaps sometimes being able to suggest an easier way of doing something, and just the contact with my fellows on the governing body.

And then I was asked to be, or was it appointed, elected, I can't remember, the governing body of Garran Hall for a while and I again, for the same reason of I thought it was useful and again to have contact with the students, with the halls of residence. I kept that going for a while I think, maybe until I was away for a time and then felt that it was time for somebody else. I thought there ought to be a turnover of people on the governing bodies, that it ought not to be the same person all the time, there should be a turnover of the old people from within the university, and so gave it away. I've forgotten how long I was on it.

          You were involved with the ANU for about thirty years and you've described a very complicated multi-faceted type of involvement. You've also described some disappointment towards the end there. When the time came to retire, how did you feel about the place?

I had a great affection for it and I think I was saying earlier the feeling of having been privileged to be part of it, mainly because of the contact I had established with other people, both my administrative colleagues and academic colleagues and it gave me great warmth I suppose in my life to have that contact. The fact, I suppose, that it remained always a challenging job. I don't think I could ever have settled down to anything really routine, although I was recognised I suppose as being organised or thought to be well organised and orderly. At the same time I could never have stood a boring routine job, and there were always challenges in the job.

I think, as I said earlier, I deplored the increasing bureaucratisation of the university which brought in its turn, I think, an attitude on the part of people that people became, or had become far more litigious, out for their rights. And I have a number of somewhat difficult, unpleasant experiences of people being very litigious, wanting to sue the university and these very difficult confrontations that had to take place.

          Over what sort of issues?

In many cases, issues that they were not, say, being re-appointed, or not being promoted, or being discriminated against within their areas of work. Often much more trifling reasons, often a feeling of tension between the superior person working above them and below and deliberately making things difficult, and people can get really quite paranoid. But this feeling that one had to stand up for one's rights and it's something that pervades the whole of society now, of doctors being sued, this whole feeling of people being so much more litigious which I deplored. It was always much more difficult. These industrial relations sort of thing that took up more and more of one's time and often took up more and more of the time of people, say, academics who should have been getting on with their own work. So I was pleased to be getting away from that and now when I hear from my colleagues of some of the things that are happening, I say, 'Well, I don't send up a prayer every morning of thankfulness that I'm no longer there, but every second morning'.

          Miss Bouquet, thank you very much for taking part in this interview.

END OF INTERVIEW