commitments to postgraduate students I was supervising at Cornell. Then they said that they could hold the job because, of course, they had that wonderful person, Gordon Jones, holding the fort. So I was recruited in July, I think it was, of 1974 but I didn't take up duty until May 1975. And every Sunday night Gordon or Brian McCarthy, the then Registrar, would call me and we would talk about things. I did some recruiting of staff and started on the process of making the College a little more cosmopolitan in the first eight months in absentia.
So I did a lot of work for the College, which I mention because when I did arrive, a day later than scheduled, the then Chairman of Council rather reproached me for being a day late. I had come via London from New York to recruit and interview - I think Paul Thomas was one of the people I interviewed in London at that time - and I thought the criticism was a bit untoward. But the old concept of noblesse oblige was certainly in evidence - so that was my arrival at Kelvin Grove in 1975!
Interviewer: So you had already recruited some staff and had quite a few ideas about how you were going to run the College?
Dr Botsman: When you say "run the College", I suppose identifying needs would be more accurate, in the sense that what I was overwhelmed with at first was the parochial nature of the institution. Having worked in a big international University like Cornell and earlier in Lae (where we regarded it as a plus to have people with a diversity of backgrounds and deliberately recruited from around the world), the concept of having a cosmopolitan mixture of staff bringing different perspectives to bear on a problem was important to me.
The sense of coming back into a very parochial system was almost overwhelming for the first little while. Having said that, I think it is important to stress that that impression - very powerful and depressing - was overcome by the sheer warmth and friendliness extended by the staff at all levels. I found that a very reassuring aspect of the position. With all their, perhaps, shortcomings in terms of lack of opportunities and the rather narrow background on which they drew, they were still very warm,friendly, and gracious people. The position of leader required one to be, on the one hand, sensitive to those aspects and on the other, prepared to stand off critically and say "Where does this institution fit into the scheme of things nationally and internationally?"
Kelvin Grove was a solid and reliable institution but very locally-oriented.
It saw its role as producing teachers for "our Queensland schools". It had that kind of concept.
Interviewer: Had that concept stayed, even though it had become a CAE?
Dr Botsman: Yes indeed, I think that legacy remained. See, it was the oldest teacher education institution in Queensland, the old Queensland Teachers' College. Some people had given twenty and twenty-five years of service in the place and had risen to positions of seniority; and I am sure they found my coming that of the brash newcomer- my attempts to bring in and recruit people with other perspectives was resisted, not directly, but covertly.
There are little incidents that I recall vividly. They had gone to some trouble to fit out the Director's office and showed me the very pleasant room with some pride. I remember asking, "Where's the bar?" - with some calculated lack of" couth" to illustrate that I did not want to be part of the old system and that there were certain things that needed to be done.
Now, alcohol was completely banned on the premises, despite the fact that at student functions the kids used to drink or go out to the Normanby and Newmarket [pubs], as they had done for generations; the reigning attitude was "Shove it under the carpet, so long as they don't do it too obviously, let's forget about it". Well my attitude to alcohol - and to a whole lot of things - was let's bring it out in the open and accept the responsibility for setting a decent example.
Similarly there was a tradition that there was always an assembly on Monday morning. There was a little podium out in the quadrangle- which I think we should have preserved for posterity - and I remember very well the whole College being assembled to meet the new Director when I first arrived. It was almost like the "parade" that they have in the schools. I made it known that I was not interested in having those sorts of things - so in many ways, I suppose, I upset the existing system.
In several areas I tried to bring a more cosmopolitan style to the College. For instance, I brought in a Head of Education from Cornell and some visiting professors came from the US to spend sabbatical leave nt the place. And that was a big shock to the system because instead of saying "Well, we have always done it that way", people had to examine the assumptions as to why something had always been done in a certain way. This was a desirable and necessary stage of transition.
My view was that we should be encouraging all staff to lift their horizons and there are now many people in the College who would not have gone overseas had they not had encouragement to get higher degrees and to get them outside Australia. I must say at that stage I was not particularly impressed by the quality of the higher degree supervision available at the University of Queensland. I encouraged people to go overseas, in spite of the
financial sacrifice, such as mortgaging a house. The younger ones who were less locked into the old traditions were able to do that - so that was one of the quality things I did at Kelvin Grove.
Interviewer: I think one of the difficulties for teachers in this State has always been that they had teacher training at College but no degree to go with it. They then went out in the bush and struggled to get degrees externally, getting by comparison with students who were on campus, poorer degrees, missing opportunities at scholarships, or not meeting standards set for taking higher degrees.
Dr Botsman: I am sure that was the case. The first step was to get staff with the qualifications to l!ft the standard of the courses at the College into a more universal frame and with academic respectability and legitimacy - for example, lifting the standard of College publications.
The second step was to set about curriculum development and the introduction of new courses, particularly those at the graduate level, so that people would not leave the College with no career path for them to follow - so the beginnings of the BEd and the Graduate Diplomas and the course accreditation work was very important. Fortunately at that time I carried the dual role of being Principal and Chairman of the Academic Board and in that way I think I was able to influence the quality of the programmes we put forward, aided and abetted by Gordon Jones.
Before 1982, I think, we had built Kelvin Grove CAE up to being regarded as one of the better Colleges of Advanced Education for teacher education in Australia, not just in Queensland, to the point where we were starting to gather people who were coming to Queensland to study in Education at Kelvin Grove. I well remember James Porter, who was at that time writing a column in The Times Education Supplement, and who was sponsored by the British Council to visit colleges all over Australia starting in Perth.
When he went back he said that the College that impressed him most by its vibrancy and its dynamism and its forward direction was one of the last visited - Kelvin Grove.
I had no intimation it was going to happen whatsoever, and then it came out that I was to be Director, with other Directors and four Registrars answering to me. We had to sort a lot of things out. We were given about six months.
From July of 1981-I got a small team together and we set up office in what was the old library at the Brisbane Kindergarten College across the road and started planning to bring these four Colleges together; it really was a dreadful business because I did not even know the people on the other campuses. I still saw myself as having an enormous job to do to build the
image of Kelvin Grove in the world, as well as the Australian and Queensland communities.
In 1972 when the College became a CAE it was freed from the Education Department. The then staff were given a choice of staying with the College or returning to the Department. Most of them stayed and the conditions, the salary levels, particularly with my emphasis on making them more cosmopolitan, meant that there were more opportunities for travel and conference going and a much more liberal approach in the Colleges. People who had stayed with the Department became extremely resentful of this and this was a really depressing aspect of the whole thing. I saw the need for a lot of work to go into trying to build new relationships with the Education Department and a lot of work to be done getting Kelvin Grove to full academic status - when suddenly we got lumbered with this blasted amalgamation that made Brisbane CAE.
The decision was made in Canberra that this is what had to happen and we were stuck with it. There was no way we could get them to change one iota - and when one went and tried one was told that the State Government had passed a cabinet minute setting the decision in cement. Had I known what I know now about the way cabinets and politicians generally work, I would have resisted a lot more; but I had been an academic and didn't know about politics - and still don't know too much. I have had, as you know, the last two years working with Brian Littleproud on this latest round to try and resist the worst experiences of what happened in 1982.
There was still such an awful lot that remained to be done about lifting the standards and encouraging people to research and publish. We had made good progress but there was still a lot to do and I think everything went back about five years with the amalgamation because one had to shift one's focus from professional development to administrative and financial things.
One of the things that people don't appreciate is that we had to run that operation with a lot less money than the four institutions had as individual aggregates. They arrived at that decision, not by looking at what was important, but just by slashing money off the top - at the same time as increasing our enrolments. Even with four institutions that appeared to have the same set of criteria for balance sheets, when you looked at the line item and the balance sheet for Mt Gravatt they would interpret it, quite legitimately, in a different way from North Brisbane - and Kelvin Grove and Carseldine would be different again.
Of course, the hardest thing for me in this respect was that, having been Director of Kelvin Grove where I felt that I knew most people reasonably
I11e Community Building
well, I then had to distance myself because the other institutions were watching for any semblance of favouritism which would have been absolutely disastrous for the prospect of building a sense of a unified BCAE.
So I bent over backwards in spending a lot of time trying to get to know the people of the other campuses and quite deliberately neglected and stayed away from Kelvin Grove. Sadly, but I suppose humanly, a lot of people at Kelvin Grove resented that.
So I worked for five years to try and make BCAE work, and we probably succeeded as well as any amalgamation has.
Interviewer: I would like to go back for a minute to tlze point where you came into the College. You came in at the end of a golden era of funding for education and for most of your period funding was being cut, wasn't it?
Dr Botsman: Indeed it was. Yes, it was very difficult and quite a challenge.
But I quite enjoyed it because we did some really remarkable things with cut funding. One outer manifestation of the basic problem at Kelvin Grove when I came was that the plant had been allowed to decay very badly, the buildings were awful. Staff studies and the classrooms and the library, I mean the library was a disaster!
So I suppose the other thing of which I am proud is that in that first five or six years - each year there were razor gangs and cuts and so on - I very successfully lobbied and worked to get new buildings and new plant. In that period I think we probably put up in excess of twenty million dollars worth
of buildings - C Block, E Block, F Block, and the new canteen. Do you remember where the canteen was at Kelvin Grove?
Interviewer: No I don't, but I have heard about it.
Dr Botsman: It was a tuckshop down the side there in a little old red brick building that stood on the plateau next to the caretaker's flat at the back of the Science block.
Peter Karmel was then in charge of the Higher Education Commission and I remember spending days on the phone to him. I was quite deliberately watching the parliamentary movements in Canberra and whenever a federal politician of any rank at all from any State came to Queensland I would insist on bringing them out to the College and marching them through the buildings. You know, we made the headlines with people saying "This is my office" and showing a politician a filing cabinet in a room. Down where E Block is now there was one room for which the students held a wake when it was at last bulldozed - to walk from one end of it to the other was to get seasick because it had subsided in various parts and the floor was literally like the waves of the sea!
I delighted in marching politicians through and asking them to ring Peter Karmel when they got back to Canberra. They would go back, ring him and Karmel would say ~'Oh, I've got another one on the phone this week". I said
"You will get one every Monday, Peter, until we get some money". It worked! We got a tremendous injection of funds and that was fantastic for morale.
Interviewer: It worked on everything except B Block, which is still there.
Dr Botsman: That's right. I had plans for B Block which all went into abeyance. I am not suggesting the job was done, but I make the point that funds were being cut and even in those times we really did succeed in getting a remarkable injection. It transformed the physical appearance of the place and it looked like a College instead of a run down high school. I think that was really an achievement.
But there was much more that needed to be done. I mean, I wanted to push the swimming pool over with a bulldozer in the dark of the night - I wanted to burn down that old E Block building. There were twenty-seven temporary buildings on the campus at one stage and gradually we eliminated them.
Some of them are stuck down the back for pottery workshops and stores and such like to this day.
Interviewer: Were any of the theoretical reasons for amalgamating those colleges reached when they became BCAE? In theory it was going to save money, but were there others?
Dr Botsman: Speaking personally, I think the College, referring to Kelvin Grove, did not progress as far and as fast as it had in the previous five years - and I think you could accurately say the same thing about each of the other elements that made BCAE.
In other words the sheer size of the place made for inertia and cumbersome movement, and, above all, resentment - I think this was a dysfunctional decision - but, "Ours was not to reason why!"
Interviewer: There was a lot of shuffling of staff, wasn't there- staff moved from Mt Gravatt to Kelvin Grove and presumably vice versa?
Dr Botsman: That is what I meant before about having the peer group, a larger group with whom to interact. I thought that in the main that was successful, because I don't think anyone was literally forced to relocate to another campus. We talked to them and said "Look, the critical mass of people in your discipline are here-what about it?" Sometimes we gave them a year or two years to move, because obviously this involved some shifting of domicile - if a staff member lived at Runcorn and was going to Carseldine it just became impossible. Those were the sorts of dysfunctions that one had to face and try to work through.
All in all, however, I think some areas of the creative arts really got a shot in the arm, because we were able to bring them together on one campus rather than having one or two people scattered at each one. Had it not been for that we may not have got successful programmes in the creative arts launched.
The drama and dance courses at BCAE are now amongst the top two or three in Australia. They were a positive outcome.
Apart from that it is very difficult to assess because one must come to terms with the way it hurt careers and plans, and trauma and stress created for people, including myself, I might add (I think it took ten years off my life).
It took some of my best years when I think I could have contributed more in a much more propitious sort of climate. One was using every ounce of energy that one could dredge up to make the BCAE work; it was a patching up of something that was illconsidered and badly conceived from the start.
Really, we were sort of regarded as having done the job as well as anyone.
There were similar large amalgamations in Sydney and Melbourne and they used to say "Brisbane has done it, so why can't you?" So we at least got a little accolade for having done it as well as it could possibly be done - to the
point where, for example, the South Australian College came up here and borrowed our Bursar, John Nelson, for three weeks to try to sort out their financial mess. We had done all that, set up our accounts and got on with
it!
I think on the whole people had said of the Kelvin Grove, Mt Gravatt, and North Brisbane amalgamation, "Wow, they have dragged themselves up from being just teachers' colleges to being a very fine CAE". Whereas BCAE was another kettle of fish entirely - too many dodgy sorts of areas, a lack of cohesion, and so on - one could go on.
Interviewer: Do you think that augurs badly for the current change at Kelvin Grove?
Dr Botsman: Not at all. I think that the possibility of moving into an institution or meld with QUT in the new dispensations is a very positive one. I take some pride in having had a role as one of the architects when the basic pattern was being devised with Brian Littleproud. With the QUT /BCAE development servicing the northside of Brisbane, while Griffith and the Gold Coast service the southside, we have a good system and then there are the two university colleges at Toowoomba and Rockhampton.
The Conservatorium will fit better with the combined QUT/BCAE mix than it would ever have done with QUT, even though it sat literally beside it. It should be part of a University but still preserve some part of its integrity as a separate and discrete entity.
From an interview with Susan Pechey in 1990.