Interview with Giles Pickford – academic manager and epicure

Interview conducted July 2011 at Emeritus Faculty, ANU
Producer, Interviewer and Editor - Peter Stewart
Engineer - Nik Fominas

Biographical introduction: Giles Pickford was born in Bombay in 1941 then soon after moved with his family to Albany, WA.   He was educated at Albany High School and the University of Western Australia, graduating with first class honours in English in 1963.  After a traineeship in the Commonwealth Public Service in Canberra, Giles worked in management at a number of universities in NSW and with the Australia Cancer Council.  While at Wollongong University as Public Relations Manager, he was elected an alderman in the Wollongong City Council.  In 1988, Giles joined ANU’s public relations unit where his brief was to promote relations between ‘town’ and ‘gown’.

Since retirement from ANU in 1998, Giles has been a founder member of the university’s Emeritus Faculty (and is its secretary), and an active member of the secretariat of the national Association for Tertiary Education Managers.  He continues his interest in ANU cultural matters as arts patron and philanthropist, and helped initiate revival of the ANU Poets’ Lunch, an annual poetry festival.  He is an active poet and inveterate writer-to-newspapers on matters political and educational.

Interview abstract: Giles Pickford was born in Bombay in 1941, of Somerset parents – a banker father and a diplomat mother.  When Giles was nine years old, the family (by then including Giles’ younger sister) moved to Albany, WA, to become farmers.   Giles and his sister went to Albany High School, and though he was an indifferent student (but excellent rabbiter) in his early school years, Giles came good in his final year to win a scholarship to the University of Western Australia, graduating with first class honours in English in 1963.  He then took a brief sabbatical mustering stock in the Shark Bay area, but was fired for reading books instead of tending the flock.

In 1964 Giles took a traineeship with the Commonwealth Public Service in Canberra, married Cecilia, then began a series of administration posts at New England University, James Cook University, the Australian Vice Chancellors’ Committee in Canberra, and the Australian Cancer Society in Sydney.  He then began what would be a formative decade, as Public Relations Manager with Wollongong University.

At Wollongong Giles threw himself into his university job, and as a logical sideline ran successfully for election to Wollongong City Council.  As an alderman he was allocated roles in development and town planning, cultural development, tourism and the local Chamber of Commerce, all of which contributed importantly to his university responsibilities.  And thus too he became a key figure in mediating relations between the university and the city, creating a partnership of equals.  As a measure of the unnecessary thrall in which the local community held its university, the Lord Mayor once told Giles that as an alderman, he could expect no bribes – “you’re from the university, they’re afraid of you”. 

In 1988, Giles and Wollongong parted company, a natural outcome of an overbearing and dogmatic attitude on the part of the then vice chancellor of the university.  Giles searched and found a more creative and tolerant opportunity as Public Relations Officer at ANU, mentored by Warwick Williams (then Secretary of ANU), Colin Plowman (Assistant Vice Chancellor), and Jim Mahoney (Public Relations Manager).  Over the years Giles then carved out a series of niches, as a skilled manager in public relations and cultural affairs.

Interestingly, and as a measure of commitment to the industrial city that he had made his home in, Giles continued to live in Wollongong though employed at ANU.  He took the 300km-3hr dawn drive each Monday morning, stayed overnight at University House in ANU (enjoying the ambience and companionship of that collegiate environment, and the fellowship of the  then Masters, Ralph Elliott and Rutherford Robertson), then returned to home and family each Friday afternoon.  He thus, importantly for him, avoided perturbing the schooling in Wollongong of his four children.

In his early years at ANU, Giles saw attitudes of indifference towards the surrounding community, like those he’d seen at Wollongong University.  “ANU was international, excellent, remote, and not interested in Canberra” decided Giles, in response to a focus group analysis he conducted in a nearby suburb.  Giles also concluded that ANU needed to grow its undergraduate numbers and provide for them improved learning opportunities and pastoral care, if it was to guarantee any improvement in its repute and respect within the community, and thus its favour in a wider national and international catchment.  And locally, in the light of the then pending changeover to self-government for the ACT, Giles saw “ANU’s local neighbours as extremely important and shortly to become more so”.  To these ends, his first, and most important act, was to propose to ANU Chancelry a university wide ‘open day’, supported by a TV campaign to alert prospective students and their parents in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and beyond of the opportunities offered by ANU.  At a cost of $60,000 (two-thirds to be spent on the TV campaign) certain ANU officers expressed alarm at the cost, while others saw it as vulgar and unpropitious.  But it worked – 30,000 parents and friends came, at a cost of $2 per car seat filled.  “ANU reached not just a turning point, but a point of no return”, according to Giles.  ANU has run an annual university-wide Open Day ever since.

Giles now perceives a different university, an ANU with a record of learning and research matching the best internationally, and importantly with an increased respect on the part of its alumni, those who become skilled graduates of every kind, and parents of succeeding generations everywhere.

Unfortunately, opines  Giles, the most recent cohorts of undergraduates coming to ANU, and indeed to all Australian universities, will not have the same opportunities that he and his peers had fifty years ago.  Like the university staff who teach, mentor, and manage, undergraduates have become much more time-deprived because governments have increasingly constrained universities financially.  As a consequence, students now have to find more of the tuition fees and administrative charges levied by universities, which means that students must spend more time away from learning and cogitating to pay these charges.  Students simply do not have the time to think beyond the immediate demands of their class work.  There is a high demand at both the student and staff levels for part-time work, which may be very well for national productivity indices, but hardly promotes ‘education’ in the broadest sense of that maligned word.  “No student has enough thinking time to get arrested three times during their course”, an event known to Giles, “there is therefore not enough time these days to get properly educated”.

Since his (early) retirement in 1998, Giles has continued to contribute to professional life, and to the university generally.  He had been awarded an ANU Council Medal for General Staff Excellence in 1997. He was founding secretary of ANU Emeritus Faculty in 1999 and has remained its secretary since then, apart from a one-year sabbatical.  He is an Associate Fellow and has been an office-bearer of the NSW and Canberra branches of the Association of Tertiary Education Management, with a Meritorious Service Award from that organisation in 1998.  On his retirement from ATEM in 2011, the National Council honoured Giles with the President’s Award for meritorious service.

Giles is an active philanthropist, including patron of the ANU Drill Hall Gallery, and has been a Distinguished Member of the ANU Endowment for Excellence.  He was a member (1991-96) of the ACT Cultural Council and chair of two of its subcommittees; member of the Board of Directors of the Canberra Festival (1989-91); and member of the Steering Committee of the Australian Science Festival (1991).  Indeed, these interests nicely summarise Giles Pickford’s values: broad interests focussed through a lens of learning and experience, coupled to the idea of scholarship as a gateway to culture and opportunity.  And the notion that generous support for education and training, whether through taxes or by giving, are essential elements of modernity.

Giles’ cultural and political interests are not rendered passively.  He is a frequent contributor to newspaper and magazine columns, often directed at educational injustice or financial malfeasance.  As a wordsmith with a literary pedigree, he has naturally been drawn to poetry.  He and Colin Plowman resurrected the ANU Poets’ Lunchsome years ago, reviving an activity once graced annually by the likes of Alec Hope, Bob Brissenden, Philip Grundy, David Campbell and others.  Giles is now a poet in his own right, and has won awards from poetry festivals and readings across the Wollongong hinterland and Canberra plains and valleys.  He was persuaded by your correspondent to offer a recent contribution and provided the epilogue, appended below (The Angle of Repose).

Giles younger sister Belinda also followed an academic path, majoring in theoretical physics, winning the Lady Jane Prize in Physics at the University of Western Australia, and soon after joining the faculty at Stanford University where she then worked most of her scientific life.

Giles’ wife Cecilia was born in 1946, in a German prison camp in Bavaria.  Her Polish parents were interned in forced labour camps for most of the war. 

Giles’ and Cecilia’s four children: Peter, Kylie, Michael, and Jenny, were born in the 1960s and 70s, and Kylie and Michael have produced two grandchildren each for Giles and Cecilia.  

As Giles now makes his monthly drive to Canberra from Wollongong, to spend a day scribing for Emeritus Faculty as its secretary, or attending to ATEM business as a member of its secretariat, he has just one regret: that the ANU he once knew has changed in an important way – it has become managerial, rather than, as he first new it, collegial.  A regret which is frequently voiced by those ANU elders who now see Emeritus Faculty as one of their homes.

Epilogue
The Angle of Repose
January 2011

A talus slope achieves the angle of repose
The younger the slope the steeper
The older slope has a much milder incline
Its mildness betrays that it’s deeper

It takes a long time to reduce the incline
Memories go back much longer
Not on the move, the rocks rest in their groove
Immobile, they know they are stronger

Young rivers fly like arrows down their slopes
Impatient to rush through the scattered moraine
Old rivers, unhurried, find what they seek
Meandering carefully all over the plain

To live forever is to know more, not less
To arrive there we must be motionless.