Flinders University
School of Education
Professor John Halsey
Sidney Myer Chair of Rural
Education & Communities
Room 4.45
GPO Box 2100
Adelaide SA 5001
Telephone +61 8 8201 5638
Mob: 0417 886 896
Facsimile +61 8 8201 3184
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www.flinders.edu.au/education/rural
“Helping Ordinary Souls Expand into Splendid Forms”
Frontier Services Centenary Celebration Keynote
Professor John Halsey
Sidney Myer Chair of Rural Education and Communities, Flinders University
September 2012
Introduction
Thank you for the invitation to speak at your Centenary Conference- it is a very real and very
special honour and pleasure.
Before moving on to my presentation, I would first like to congratulate all associated with
Frontier Services for achieving so much, for being so much to so many in so many diverse
ways for 100 years.
I would also like to acknowledge the founder of the Australian Inland Mission, the
forerunner of Frontier Services, Rev John Flynn, who had the vision of a mantle of safety for
all who dwelt and laboured beyond the reach of services and support as known and
understood in 1912.
This presentation is necessarily selective; technology, health, communications, family
structures and immigration to list a few matters, while all very important looking forward are
not considered other than by implication or association.
Framing
Remote Australia is an evocative naming of place, of location, and still today
notwithstanding mass communications and the speed of travel, for many it is of ‘other’, is
‘out there’, is unknown, is exotic.
For some, Remote Australia is home, has always been home, is the centre of life and
opportunity, is neither margin nor marginalised.
For others, Remote Australia is mystical, is spiritual. David Tacey in his book Edge of the
Sacred captures something of this when quoting from Les Murray, one of Australia’s finest
poets:
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the sheer space and size of this country is ‘one of the great, poorly explored
spiritual resources of Australia’ since ‘in the huge spaces of the outback, ordinary
souls expand into splendid forms’ (p.25)
Truth is also that ordinary souls can shrink and shrivel when confronted with the sheer scale
of the Outback.
What then might be ways for Frontier Services to help “ordinary souls [of all kinds] expand
into splendid forms” over the next century?
I offer you 5 thoughts as you reflect upon your 100 years of service and begin the journey
towards the next 100 years of service milestone.
Vision
A vision that is ‘bigger than life’, that speaks to everyone, that is fertile in the sense of readily
generating stories which illuminate and nurture life, that transcends fashion and fads, that
shapes policies and programs, that enables distinctions to be made between dross and the
durable, is a critical resource for an organisation like Frontier Services.
Highlighting vision is not to suggest you do not have one- either at corporate, community or
individual levels. Rather my purpose is to remind you, to remind myself, of the great Biblical
injunction, “where there is no vision, the people perish” (Prov 29:18).
Vision is essential for cultivating humanity.
Martha Nussbaum (1997) of Chicago University suggests 3 capacities (and more) are
essential to the cultivation of humanity:
the capacity for critical examination of oneself and one’s traditions- for living
what, following Socrates, we may call “the examined life”
an ability [for citizens] to see themselves not simply as citizens of some local
region or group but also, and above all, as human beings bound to all other
human beings by ties of recognition and concern
narrative imagination… the ability to think what it might be like to be in the
shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that
person’s story, and to understand the emotions, wishes and desires that
someone so placed may have (pp. 9-11).
Most often I would suggest, a vision statement is essentially interpreted as an ideal,
something meant to provide direction and coherence, something which is linear in the sense
of moving from the present out into the future.
There are other ways of thinking about the nature and purpose of vision. Meg Wheatley
(1992) has engaged with the quantum world and from this has thought extensively about
what might be instructive for organisations and critical features of them like vision.
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In the quantum world, space is not a void but is filled with invisible structures- fields- “field
theory developed … as an attempt to explain action-at-a-distance” (p.48).
In short, fields fill space, invisibly. Think of the mass of electronic messages in space right
now which we capture with our digital fishing lines as an image of invisibly filling space.
Remember also the song from the iconic Australian film, Ballroom Dancing, Love is in the air!
It filled the space invisibly but palpably.
Changing vision from a linear, directional journey to vision as a field enhances the possibility
for vision to permeate all the spaces and places of an organisation.
As Wheatley encourages, “We need all of us out there, stating, clarifying, discussing,
modelling, filling all of space with the messages we care about… fields develop- and with
them their wondrous capacity to bring energy into form” (p. 56).
Context and Sustainability
Secondly, a deep and well informed understanding of contexts has always been critical to
successful organisations and I see no reason for this to diminish, ‘going forward’ as political
leaders are wont to say.
While my tendency is to preference and privilege local and community contexts when trying
to understand complex issues, it is also essential to read and ‘make sense’ of wider contexts,
especially those perhaps best described as global.
It has been argued that the twentieth century was the century of building knowledge for a
modern, productive world, frequently but not exclusively, through science. Peter Watson in
his ground breaking tome, A Terrible Beauty A History of the People and Ideas that Shaped
the Modern Mind (2000), argues that of all the intellectual pursuits, science in the 20th
century has been the pre-eminent force, “[the twentieth] century has been dominated with
coming to terms with science…which has transformed our lives … [and] in addition to
changing what we think about, science has changed how we think” (p. 3). He also argues that
“any subject, treated historically, can become a ‘humanity’…[and] the narrative form,
properly realised, brings with it powerful authority, showing not only where we are at any
point but how we arrived there” (p.770).
If the big project of the 20th century was building the ‘modern world’, the big project of the
21st century is surely sustaining the ‘modern world’.
By the middle of the 21st century, the world’s population will be between 9 and 10 billion
and Australia’s will have increased from 22.5 million to around 35 million. 2050 is less than
half way to the next 100 year milestone of Frontier Services.
To bring a personal perspective and time scale to the magnitude and impact of these figures,
during my working life of 46 years, the world’s population has doubled.
People are being educated in our universities and other tertiary institutions today and into
the future, many of whom will play a major role in the policy settings of governments,
international bodies like the United Nations, and global private sector enterprises.
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They will be advising and deciding on how ‘best’ to respond to another 40+ % population
increase and all of the pressures associated with raising standards of living for the
marginalised and those in poverty.
What will be the Remote Australia voice?; who will be the Remote Australia voice? What
role might Frontier Services play here?
As well as population growth, Brugmann (2009) and others have argued that by 2050, up to
two thirds of the world’s population will live in urban centres, thus creating novel and far
reaching consequences for global, individual nation and community sustainability. Put
another way, renewable resources and the spaces and places which nurture and regenerate
them have generally been treated as though they are infinite. A brief examination of a
photograph of Earth taken from outer-space reveals a planet that is finite, though imbued
with systems and natural laws that have an apparent inexhaustible capacity for
regeneration—for sustainability.
Is sustainability a new frontier for Frontier Services?
There are at least five fundamental reasons why developing sustainable societies is a critical
imperative.
Food security is really not a choice item. As Jules Pretty has argues, “[w]ithout food, we are
clearly nothing. It is not a lifestyle or add-on fashion statement. The choices we make about
food affect both us, intrinsically, and nature, extrinsically. In effect, we eat the view and
consume the landscape. Nature is amended and reshaped through our connections—both
for good and bad” (2002, p.11).
Second is the issue of energy. Much of what is consumed daily is sourced from remote areas
and the pressure to move from fossil based sources of energy to green renewable sources
continues to grow. Third is water and water management. Cullen (2005, in Barlow 2007)
argues that “[w]ater is the key to living and to economic development in Australia [and
elsewhere]” and that a “sustainable future will entail extensive collaboration between
governments and stakeholders to ensure that the true costs of water use are borne
equitably and accountably in both rural and urban areas” (p.79).
Fourth is the profoundly important matter of arresting the decline of the natural
environment, which includes climate change, and developing new paradigms of valuing it so
that it, in turn, can do what it has always done—sustain life in all its complexity and diversity.
“…an intimate connection to nature is both a basic right and a basic necessity…we have
shaped nature, and it has shaped us, and we are an emergent property of this relationship.
We cannot simply act as if we are separate. If we do so, we simply recreate the wasteland
inside of ourselves” (Pretty, 2002, pp.10–11).
Finally there is managing territorial security in a context of escalating population growth and
likely impacts of climate change. My intention in making this point is not to hark back to the
days of Australia’s ‘populate or perish’ focus. Rather it is to draw attention to the fact that
the combined consequences of world population growth and population displacement due
to climate change (and other events) may result in millions of people having to find
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somewhere new to live or, in a comparatively short timeframe, become water based citizens
of the 21st century because their land has been claimed by the sea.
A Mantle of Relationships
As an observer and someone on the outside of Frontier Services who has opened the door
from time to time and looked around a bit, people and their needs and interests, their
doubts and certainties, their heart-filled and their heart-broken times, their spiritual
embraces and their spiritual rejections and more, are ‘the bread and butter’ of Frontier
Services.
Whatever else Frontier Services does over the next 100 years, I can see no reason for pulling
back on your fundamental commitment to meeting people where they are, for who they are,
for who they aspire to be and become.
I mentioned in my introduction Flynn’s vision of a mantle of safety for those who lived and
toiled in Remote Australia.
Is another challenge for Frontier Services as it commences its second century of service
building and nurturing a mantle of relationships for all who live and work in Remote
Australia?
Likely increases in the exploitation of resources for an ever growing world population with
greater and greater consumption patterns, will I suggest, test relationships between
individuals, in families and communities, between local and multi- national enterprises,
between those who want to maintain the status quo and those who want change at any
price.
Is a special gift Frontier Services can bring into being and sustain for Remote Australia,
relationships?
Research conducted about reforms in Chicago schools by Bryk and Schneider, led to the
development of a series questions designed to progress relational trust which is integral to
relationships (Otero, 2003).
While born out of a context that could hardly be more unlike Remote Australia, I think they
resonate well with the idea of building and nurturing a mantle of relationships for Remote
Australia.
Respect
Q1 Do we acknowledge one another’s dignity and ideas?
Q2 Do we interact in a courteous way?
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Competence
Q3 Do we believe in each other’s ability and willingness to fulfil our responsibilities?
Personal regard
Q4 Do we care about each other both professionally and personally?
Q5 Are we willing to go beyond our formal roles and responsibilities to go the extra mile?
Integrity
Q6 Can we trust each other to put the interests of [others] first, especially when tough
decisions have to be made?
Q7 Do we keep our word?
Education
Perhaps no-where are relationships more important than in education.
Education in Remote Australia is the fourth area I would like to briefly reflect upon in terms
of challenges and opportunities for Frontier Services for the next 100 years.
From the perspective of Indigenous Peoples living in Remote Australia, their experiences of
Western/Modern education have been at best, patchy- in terms of provision, in terms of
access, in terms of quality, in terms of outcomes, in terms of deep engagement with
traditional ways of knowing and being, in terms of leading to fulfilling life pathways. Hugh
Brody (2000) observes that “‘Education’ for many indigenous people has been the means of
enforcing the things that Europeans believed in and getting rid of the things they did not”
(p.183).
For others, accessing education has at times been a struggle patching together distance
education, face to face instruction, boarding away from home, and hiring help for the home.
It also needs to be acknowledged that education in and for Remote Australia has also been
at the leading edge of innovation and has epitomised the qualities of dedication, persistence
and resilience.
In 2000, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission of Australia conducted a
national enquiry into rural and remote education. In the main it found there was a gap
between urban and rural and remote educational opportunities and outcomes.
Consequently the Commission argued a 5 way test (my term for what HREOC argued) for
rural and remote education- it must be “available, accessible, affordable, acceptable and
adaptable”.
Time does not permit a full consideration of each of the tests, so I will focus briefly on oneacceptable and in so doing, suggest it may inform what Fortier Services might focus on as it
moves forward.
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Acceptable is a word that speaks of standards or a standard to be met, to be assured, but it
also has come to mean in everyday language, near enough, even near enough is good
enough. Neither of these latter two understandings is good enough for children, students
and families in Remote Australia or anywhere else for that matter.
The Australian Curriculum has been heralded by many as a national break-through, a major
step forward in ensuring that all, no matter where they live, no matter what their
circumstances, will receive a ‘world class education’. Were it that straight forward!
Ensuring those who live in Remote Australia can access the best quality education and other
essential human services has to be acknowledged as a very big and on-going challenge for
governments. That said however, there is a tendency to try and sweep all of the challenges
up into one tidy bundle of solutions like an Australian Curriculum for all.
Research done by the Sidney Myer Chair of Rural Education and Communities shows the
Australian Curriculum may well squeeze out very valuable locally developed teaching and
learning which deeply engages students and serves communities well. In curriculum theory
language, place based learning is being marginalised. This in turn raises fundamental
questions like whose knowledge and what kind of knowledge ought to be preferenced when
reforms are being contemplated.
What role does balance play in the formation of compulsory learning for the nation’s future
citizens? Is there a ‘voice’ here for Frontier Services?
Another topical matter in school level education is funding.
The Gonski Review of Funding for Schooling has been released and is currently navigating
and negotiating the political highways and by-ways, as well as the cul-de-sacs, the dirt and
dead-end tracks and so forth.
One of the challenges I have taken on with the Gonski Review has been to try and create a
rural and remote voice amongst the many competing demands for more money and for a
different allocation of it. I share it briefly here with you in the hope that it may suggest to
Frontier Services something about where it may direct some of its future effort.
Education like health services from a resources perspective, is the story of finite funding
being pursued by infinite demands for expenditure.
At the heart of the Gonski Review are 4 critical statements which are central to improving
educational opportunities and outcomes for children and families in remote, rural and
regional schools:
•
“the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its
teachers” (p.23)
•
“high-achieving and high-equity schooling systems typically invest in
building quality and capability in school leaders and teachers” (p.107)
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•
“excellence in teaching, in all schools and at all levels of schooling, is by far
the single most important factor in achieving sustained improvements in
the performance of Australia’s schooling system” (p.217)
•
“resources alone will not be sufficient to fully address Australia’s schooling
challenges… new funding arrangements must be accompanied by continued
and renewed efforts to strengthen and reform Australia’s schooling
system”(emphasis added, p.xix)
For remote and rural schools and communities, and to a lesser extent regional schools, an
on-going major challenge is attracting and retaining high quality teachers and educational
leaders.
The Gonski Review of Funding for Schooling is a generational opportunity to impact on this
critical problem by allocating funding to change the way leaders and teachers are prepared
and supported for working and living in country schools and communities.
Increasing funding for rural, regional and remote schools without addressing the availability
of top level professionals to staff these schools will not close the gap between urban and,
remote and rural opportunities and outcomes.
It’s time to immerse aspiring remote, rural and regional educational leaders and teachers in
place, and properly fund and support them to deeply engage with real issues, a diversity of
contexts and relevant, challenging theory- in short, a ‘hands, heads and hearts full on’
approach to profession preparation, before they are appointed.
It would be considered absurd to claim to be training pilots to fly planes but never let them
take to the sky- place- so why persist with the formation of teachers and educational leaders
without a substantial experience in and with remote and rural place?
As referred to earlier, The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity National Inquiry into Rural
and Remote Education recommended:
All teacher training institutions should require undergraduates to study a module
on teaching in rural and remote communities, offer all students an option to
undertake a fully-funded practical placement (teaching experience) in a rural or
remote school and assist rural communities in the direct recruitment of new
graduates for their schools. (HREOC, 2000, p 44, emphasis added).
For more than a decade, the recommendation has languished as outcomes of country
students (with few exceptions) have consistently been lower than urban counterparts, and
meeting the core requirements for quality schooling have arguably increased in complexity
beyond metropolitan and a handful of very large regional contexts in Australia.
Kotter, a Harvard academic (2002) summarises his findings on change as “people change
what they do less because they are given analysis that shifts their thinking than because they
are shown a truth that influences their feelings” (p.1, emphasis in original).
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Might Frontier Services help progress a greater role for remote and rural place in the
formation of human service professionals during the coming decades?
Hope-full
Fifthly, I would like to briefly focus on hope, and specifically, Frontier Services as a hope-full
organisation.
I commenced with a question- what might be ways for Frontier Services to enable and
nurture “ordinary souls [of all kinds to] expand into splendid forms” over the next century?
I want to suggest that one of the profoundly important things Frontier Services could be
throughout its next century- could continue to be- is a champion of hope.
Hope is both a straight forward and a profoundly complex phenomenon, simultaneously. It is
integral to the great religions of the world and is often coupled in the Bible with love, with
faith, with charity, with the search for meaning and connection to something more to life
than daily routines and predictable patterns.
Mary Zournazi (2002) in her book of conversations on hope, sheds some light on the
‘character’ and power of it:
Hope…[is] a space opened for something else to begin… hope lies in the rhythms
and the sounds that come to mind when you hear a word or a phrase- it’s the
possibilities offered… through exile you realise how necessary but elusive hope
is…hope is the other side of despair… (pp. 30, 79, 83)
To have real hope doesn’t mean that you’ll ever be satisfied…it doesn’t mean
that once you achieve wealth, or even a revolution, that the struggle is over. But
rather one has to be constantly fighting to develop and push and make things the
way you want them to be (p.84)
If …there is to be any hope for us…it resides in what I would call care…[diverse in
nature]…there are many different kinds of attentiveness and courtesy which are
frequently forgotten in a society more concerned with performance and
productivity…[hope] is about renewal (p.66)
…hope may be that force which keeps us moving and changing- the renewal of
life at each moment, or the ‘re-enchanting’ of life and politics- so that the future
may be about how we come to live and hope in the present (p.274).
Hope is more than optimism. Jonathon Sacks (2002) captures the distinction well between
the two in the following quotation from the concluding chapter of his book, The Dignity of
Difference How to Avoid the Clash of Civilisations:
Optimism is the belief that things will get better. Hope is the faith that, together,
we can make things better. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one. It
takes no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to have
hope… hope does not exist in a vacuum, nor is it available to all configurations of
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culture. It is born in the belief that the sources of action lie within ourselves…
hope is the knowledge that we can chose; that we can learn from our mistakes
and act differently next time… (pp. 206 & 207).
Other dimensions and qualities of hope are explored by Jonathon Lear (2006) in Radical
Hope Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation.
The book “is a work of philosophical anthropology” which deeply considers the statement
uttered by the last Crow Chief, Plenty Coup, when the Crow could no longer live as warriors“After this nothing happened” (pp. 2&7).
Clearly the Crow lived on but not as Crow. “People continued to act practically, but they lost
the rich framework in which such acts made sense” (p.57). But throughout the Crow Chief’s
struggles and dreaming and searching for a future for his people, hope was kept alive,
radical hope.
And what is radical hope?
It is hope “that is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to
understand what it is. Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as
yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it” (p.103).
Radical hope brings resources into play which enable people “to go forward hopefully into a
future that they would be able to grasp only retrospectively, when they could re-emerge
with concepts with which to understand themselves and their experiences” (p.115, emphasis
added).
An organisation that is hope-full is a gift to those who are served by it, to those who are
touched by its passion and tenacity for doing good, to those who need to be reminded of
what the human spirit will aspire to when the needs of others are placed at the centre of
thinking, being and doing, to those who work and belong to it.
Lewis Hyde (2006) writes that “the spirit of a gift is kept alive by its constant donation…[and]
when gifts circulate within a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected
relationships in its wake, and a certain kind of cohesiveness emerges” (pp. xvi &xvii).
An organisation which is hope-full is a gift because the essence of a gift is that it is freely
given away and passed on, around and returns to nourish and move out again… “the gift
must always move” (Hyde, 2006, p.4)
Concluding Remarks
Frontier Services is an iconic Australian organisation, commenced by a person who had an
expansive, inclusive, daring vision.
Or in the religious tradition of Frontier Services, as the Rev ‘Skipper’ Partridge said when he
opened the funeral service for John Flynn at Mount Gillen in 1951, “There was a man sent by
God whose name was John…”, and if I may continue, who caught a glimpse of what it could
mean to bring the Word and comfort to people who lived beyond the city walls.
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One of the best indicators of an organisation enduring is to look to the track record. But as
we know, track records alone do not guarantee steady progress and an assured future.
Witness the fate of apparently unassailable organisations like Ansett Airlines here in
Australia and Kodak in the United States… you can doubtless think of others.
Track record is a great place to start a new century of being Frontier Services but it will need
more to sustain it for another century. There are some obvious, rather instrumental ‘mores’
like money, staff and networks of services.
But there are also other more humanistic, more spiritually oriented, more organic ‘mores’ as
well that will optimise longevity of meeting the needs, interests and dreams of people.
Here I include vision which nurtures a hope-full organisation, a capacity to celebrate and
recognise life lived against a giant, colourful canvas called ‘the Outback’, a preferencing of
the personal touch over the digital touch, a preparedness to engage and stay engaged with
the essentials of a civil society- education, health, the rule of law, recognition of individual
worth and dignity… and more.
What will Frontier Services do, what will you do to help “ordinary souls expand into splendid
forms” over the next century?
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References
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Right to Water. Melbourne: Black Inc.
Brody, H. (2000). The Other Side of Eden Hunter Gathers, Farmers and the Shaping of the
World. Faber and Faber, London.
Brugmann, J. (2009). Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities Are Changing the World.
St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press.
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, “Recommendations”, National Inquiry
into Rural and Remote Education. Commonwealth of Australia, May 2000.
Hyde, L. (2006). The Gift How The Creative Spirit Transforms The World. Edinburgh:
Canongate Books.
Kotter, J. P. & Cohen, D.S. (2002). The Heart of Change; Harvard Business School Press.
Lear, J. (2008). Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press
Nussbaum, M. C. (1997). Cultivating Humanity A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal
Education. Cambridge, Massachusetts; Harvard University Press.
Otero, G. (2003). Conversations for School Improvement: The Value of Relational Learning.
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Pretty, J. (2002). Agri-Culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature. London: Earthscan
Publications.
Review of Funding for Schooling, Final Report, Australian Government. David Gonski (Chair),
December 2011.
Sacks, J. (2002).The Dignity of Difference How to Avoid the Clash of Civilisations. Continuum;
London.
Tacey, D. J. (1995). Edge of the Sacred. North Blackburn Victoria: Harper Collins.
Watson, P. (2000). A Terrible Beauty A History of the People and Ideas that Shaped the
Modern Mind. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
Wheatley, M. J. (1992). Leadership and the New Science Learning about Organization from
an Orderly Universe. Berrett-Koehler Publishers; San Francisco
Zournazi, M. (2002). Hope new philosophies for change. Pluto Press, Australia.
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