Australia Revisited: 1973‐1988

Abstract

The author recounts the joys and foibles of 18 months spent as an Acting Director of the Learning Resources Centre in an Australian college of advanced education located in rural New South Wales. It is his contention that both the successes and failures of the project could have been maximized and minimized respectively had there been greater efforts made to bridge existent cultural gaps between the Australian and overseas participants. He further reflects upon some axioms learned in retrospect which might be helpful to others who would consider accepting future overseas assignments. Finally, he had waited with keen anticipation to return to the scene of his 18‐month experience which he describes as having been filled with joy, love, and despair. This reunion took place in July of this year. He is happy to report a total absence of despair, just joy and love.

It was a rainswept night in July 1973 and the passenger terminal adjoining Sydney Harbour was aflurry with activity. Eighteen months earlier, to the day, I had disembarked at the same terminal, filled with the excitement of what the future would bring — a future to be spent, in large part, some 300 miles distant from this thriving capital city of New South Wales. Now the time had arrived when I would once more board a ship and return to my homeland.

The emotions I felt when leaving on that dark rainy evening ranged from joy to love to despair. I was joyful in knowing that, as the ship slowly eased away from the quay, I could see no less than 100 friends who had come to bid me farewell, some from several hundred miles distant. I experienced the kind of love one has for a true richness of experience which one knows will never occur again, at least not in the same meaningful way. That love extended to all who were waving goodbye to me from the dockside, and to many hundreds more people from all walks of life who, while not able to join me in a last farewell celebration, had made the past 18 months for me the most memorable ever, but there was also an intense sense of despair—a feeling that I had not accomplished half of what I had envisaged back in February 1972 when I first stood on Australian soil.

Now, in August 1988, some 16 years after my departure, I was once more headed for that fabled ‘Land Down Under’ and before I did so I wanted to resurrect those cherished memories of 1972‐73. In so doing, I wanted to see if there might be lessons to be learned, ideas that would come to mind which — examined in retrospect — might prove both helpful and interesting to those vast legions of international educators who would follow where I had trodden, not necessarily in Australia but in any country other than that of their birth. That is the intention of this article.