Experiential Learning, Rural Systemic Development and the Hawkesbury Experience - A Conversation with Richard Bawden

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

People talk about experiential learning as it's learning by doing. No, it's not. It's learning by being. And the only way you can learn to be is by being, you know, to actually being conscious of what's happening all around you. That's experiential learning. So an experience is not an observation. It is happening to you. You are central to what's happening around you.

Hi everyone, welcome back to the podcast. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. Someone once asked me, how do we learn what we already know? A lot of so-called innovation is old ideas tried in a different place at a different time and packaged up in new wrapping to seem like a new idea. Whether it's from 50 years ago or 10,000 years ago, there is a huge amount, if we're open to it, that we can learn from the accumulated wisdom of fellow humans making their way and learning in the world. My guest this week is Richard Borden, who led groundbreaking work at Hawkesbury Agricultural College in the 1970s and '80s. At that time and in that place, they were doing some incredible work using systemic and complexity-informed approaches to agriculture as rural development. There is so much resonance with that work that Richard and his colleagues were doing with the changes taking place in educational ecosystems around the world today. Richard was the Professor Emeritus of Western Sydney University and an Honorary Research Fellow of the Office of Sustainability at WSU. He was one of the foundation professors of systemic development at WSU in 1989 and its inaugural Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture and Rural Development. For the decade preceding that, he was the head of the School of Agriculture at Hawkesbury Agricultural College, which was then incorporated into the university. You can find lots of links to papers written by Richard in the show notes, as well as links to the previous episode I did with Professor Ray Ison, a colleague of Richard's at Hawkesbury. Thank you, Richard, just so much. Looking forward to this conversation and really, really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to, uh, absolute pleasure, share the conversation. But I've had Ray Ison on the podcast previously, and I've heard from him some of the amazing work that you all were doing at Hawkesbury Agricultural College in the 1970s, 1980s, and just was always astonished at how forward-thinking, how progressive, how way ahead of its time it was. And so to be able to, yeah, dive in a bit more deeply to that whole story, that whole period with you as the person leading it, is a real honor. So thank you very much.

I mean, we always believed, of course, it weren't before the time, we were on the time, everybody else was behind it.

And still we are, and still we are way behind the times. Exactly. My goodness. So, I mean, maybe just for listeners, if you could perhaps just start by situating historically, I mean, you know, this is, I have to be honest, this is the year of my birth. You were walking into the staff room to make your big speech as the incoming leader of Hawkesbury Agricultural College. So 1978. Perhaps you could just start by laying out kind of how did you get to that point? Obviously, many, many roads lead to that point, but just briefly, and then just why was that such a significant moment in terms of the life of the college and also what you'd been learning to get to there?

Well, let me very briefly repeat what I'm just saying to you. I was brought up on a small farm in Cornwall, 100 hectares, but it had 24 different economic activities, none of them particularly productive, none of them particularly profitable. And when I went to university, we had two themes. One, England needs to be food secure. And we've just been through war and we were not food secure. And that showed, of course, a lot. And we could have all starved to death had it not been for particularly America sending food. So our first brief was to become 100% more productive. I mean, it's double what it is that we'd been doing up till then. And I recognized it was impossible for our farm to become more productive. Just because of the way it was in fertile soils. And the second thing was, what would we need to know if we were going to join what was then the Common Market with particularly their Common Agricultural Policy, which benefited the French by saying that it's really not about farming, it's about rural France and keeping people in rural France. And so it was agriculture written from a perspective of what one might call rural development. And so I was uncomfortable really all the way through. All of that, but recognizing that my future was with that. So somehow or another, I had defined a career that was counter to my original way of being. So I guess if there was a particular foundation of radicalism, that was sort of it without recognizing it or whatever. And then I joined a club, as it were. So I did my PhD in a highly specialized area of biology that was related to agriculture. But concerned with productivity. You know, how do you, in my case, how do you do something about parasites that are concerned in relation to decreasing the productivity of farmanals? I then, as a result of that PhD, eventually got a job at the University of New England as a lecturer in parasitology and recognized very quickly that there was a sort of weird paradox that students, my course was regarded as very difficult because it was complex, the whole issue. And my students did very well and they'd say to me, you are really a course that makes us think. Now that sounds banal, but most agricultural courses then, and probably still, which is to have a choice of subjects, which you do. So it's, it's a form of learning that Aristotle would refer to as scientia. It's just learning by being told. And, and you remember a bit of it and you've done physics today and you'll do soil science tomorrow and you'll do animal production after that. And there's no segue, there's no, no, not even, isn't actually no nexus whatsoever. So you just gotta carry on doing this subject and then you get the exam and that, take that, pass that. So what on earth has that got to do with learning how to deal with what I just described in terms of science really conflicting on way of life? So I had done my science bit. I got to this new university. I started to teach parapsychology. And then became intrigued by the whole process of learning. What does learning actually mean? If I'm telling all students all this stuff, and I was doing it critically, I guess, you know, asking questions of why would this be so? Why would a parasite that was going to cause damage do it from an evolutionary biology point of view? And so I was intrigued by all that. I started to read about learning theory as distinct from education, just learning theory, what actually happens when people learn. How do they learn? And so on. And after about 4 years or so of doing that, I got this wonderful opportunity to join a UN project in Uruguay, in Latin America, to be an experto en parasitología, in which I thought, you know, really, I'm not an expert in parasitology at all. I mean, I've got a PhD in it. And when I got there, my counterparts were all veterinarians and they had studied parasitology. They knew the parasites in Uruguay. They spoke Spanish, which I didn't at that stage. And so I thought, well, what I really wanna do is while I'm here, I really want to explore how you help people who are brought up as reductionist scientists with an objectivist view of knowledge, that knowledge is out there to be known, there is truth. And because I was then also having to learn a second language, I was again rethinking what on earth does all this mean? Because I was learning the language through immersion whilst also reading the grammar and, and whatever, and then watching my children learn faster than me. So I spent 2 years really exploring what I would then come to know as systemics. So I was really interested in the outcome of everything that was done, including ethics. And I'd come to ethics from a job that I had previously where several things created for me an ethical dilemma. How can you, for instance, test drugs in people in Africa where the drug itself was illegal in England? I didn't know how to answer that question. And the director of research said, well, you know, it's a matter of numbers. If people don't have any antibiotic at all, then they'll die. If they have this particular antibiotic, a handful will die, but a whole lot more will live. And I thought, you know, I can't answer that. And the work that I was doing there also brought me into ethical dilemmas about, I I'm working, doing stuff now as a parasitologist, as an experimental one, where I know some of the sheep are gonna die. I know that. And I'm, I'm being cruel to them. You know, why can't you just have one as a control or say, I know there are controls, or what? I mean, I know that's naive in terms of statistics, but it's ethically, it's very disturbing. And so all those early images, I guess, all came together and I'll leave out now a lot of other stuff. When the job came up, I was 40 years old almost, and I had this opportunity to go from a university into a college of advanced education, polytech. Everyone said, you're crazy. You know, why on earth would you do that? And before I had accepted the job, I went to this particular institution, which is historically very old. It was one of the first that was created in what was then New South Wales colony before Australia. 1891, and it had this long, long tradition of teaching farmers, I guess, a bit of science, but mainly technology of the day. And my experience in Uruguay, in addition to recognizing complexity, was that what modern agriculture was doing, and this, you know, wasn't rocket science, but quite obviously in a rural context, it was rural undeveloped. So as you developed agriculture through the use of machines, of chemicals, of pesticides, of using a lot of water and so on. From this rural development perspective, agriculture was really not what everybody said that it was. And in Australia, of course, most of our agriculture goes for export, 70 to 80%. And a lot of that in those days was wool. So one product. So, you know, it was on one side extraordinarily simple. Sheep farming is not that difficult. But in terms of rural development, as farmers turned to more and more cropping because it was more profitable, then they started to use machines and started to buy their own. So we finished up with fewer and fewer people out getting jobs because it was now mechanized. So there was rural undeveloped in terms of rural society and so on. So I, when I arrived, I said, okay, two questions. One, what do we mean by agriculture? Because most agricultural courses was just learning the science, which was just doing what we'd always done and what was clearly not doing good, you know, in a systemic perspective. So if we looked at agriculture systemically as the whole, as rural development, then it was not good. And so the radical idea was, okay, let's, because we can't know the future, how can you teach the future? So what we can do is why are things concerning me? Like what it is I've just looked at, all my faculty and I have looked at over 30-odd years. So we look retrospectively at what had happened. What we really need for our students to know to be able to deal with a better future. How could we change the development of this really, really complex issue where 90-plus percent of the world rely on? We all eat and most of it is grown somewhere or another in one way or another. And so it wasn't agriculture itself. It was the issue of complexity itself that said, okay, so how do we help students learn how to deal with complexity? And it was a lovely statement by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was a 19th century jurist in the United States, who said something, and I paraphrase, I don't care a damn for simplicity on this side of complexity. What we really need to do is to understand simplicity on the other side of complexity. So how do you get there? You don't get there by saying, this is complex, so I'll just grab this little bit, which is simple, and I'll fix that. So let's grab the issue of parasites and say, well, they're causing a problem. Let's just look at parasites. Rather than saying, well, there are all sorts of things to do with parasites that are involving social, natural, economic, political, technological issues. So how do you deal with all of that? And I didn't have the answer, but I said as a faculty, That's what we're gonna do. And the board of directors gave me a promise at my interview when I said, this is what I wanna do, and it's very radical. And the chairman in particular said, go for it because this college is now dead, essentially. Formed in 1891, it's been taken over by everything else since. There were 24 institutions offering degrees at that stage, and we were only offering diplomas. And they wanted to be, and their phrase was university-like. Which meant degrees and, and so on. We were a college, so we were state-funded, not federally funded. So we didn't get money for research. We didn't get money for graduate students. And we just had these students who came along because their fathers went there or, or whatever. And they had this image of the old Oxford, just traditions, bit of theory, a lot of technology and a lot of practice, day or week out there on the farms. So what I was saying, we will forget all that, literally forget all that. Because you can't jump across this chasm with two steps, you know, you really seriously, we really got to think as radically as we can using that word radically in the right sense of the word, i.e., root, like we got to go down to the basis of A, what is agriculture? B, what is learning? Learning is actually transforming experience into knowledge for action. That's a definition that we got from one of the books that we follow deeply. And so we started out day one, some people called it problem-based learning, which it wasn't, it was experience-based learning. And so we put students day one into real experiences on the farms in groups of 8 with, you know, then they different genders, of course, and different backgrounds, some rural students, some urban students, and immediately they would disagree about what they were seeing in terms of what was wrong, what was actually happening. And What would you need to do to improve it? Not necessarily solve it, because in creating a solution, you're actually creating another problem, of course, for whatever reason. So if you've got weeds in wheat and you want to spray it, then you have a new problem because you've now got pesticides in the food and so on. And lots of things happened early on. Students started to disagree. Excellent. Why are you disagreeing? You're saying, yes, we should. Spray it. You are saying no, we shouldn't. So why are we disagreeing? And this whole idea then eventually matured into the idea, not just of different opinion, but of different worldview, different constructions of reality. So after about maybe 6 or 7 years, we then read an extraordinary paper from an American woman at Sagesbrook Institute who effectively said, unless you have particular intellectual and moral maturity, there's really no point in trying to learn so-called systems approaches. You can't, you do, it's like suddenly trying to speak, talking to someone who doesn't speak English but speaks Greek. Everything's wrong from a point of view of an English speaker. And there's no point in shouting. This is a good metaphor in terms of what we do as a matter of fact.

No, I mean, it's so interesting cuz I'm just smiling because there's so many resonances in the language of what you're saying. I mean, as I knew there would be, but in terms of the language that is being used now, 40 years later, to talk about the shifts that we need to see in educational spaces now. I mean, this idea of complexity, this idea of all, just so much of what you're talking about, it's just, it's so interesting how maybe how little we've learned or internalized somehow. But I mean, I'd love to touch on that later maybe, but, but just perhaps could we open up a little bit more some of the specific approaches, because, you know, you talked kind of in broad terms about some of those things, and obviously getting to the worldview piece and that kind of maturity piece, I think, is really important. But from what I've understood, there were lots of different elements of the way in which you step towards those things. I mean, the fact that you were even allowing the students to have the possibility to disagree, you know, that sense of autonomy that they were actually not on their own, very much not on their own, but they were allowed the space to explore and find points of disagreement, but also try and find their way somehow. So maybe perhaps if you just— the autonomy piece, I think, is an interesting part of it.

One of the early inspirations, which we haven't published enough about, was there was a medical school at the University of Newcastle here in Australia, and the dean there, who was psychiatrist, had been to Canada and seen what was called then problem-based learning for medicine, where day one students would arrive and be put into a group of 8, which is very significant. And an actor would come in who they wouldn't know as an actor, but was a patient. And I can give an easy example because it happened to me. I went, what's it all happen? When this actor came in as a patient, students were asked to diagnose basically what was wrong with this guy. So they started asking, The obvious primal questions like, you know, does it hurt? Where does it hurt? How does it hurt? On a scale of 1 to 10, you know, and then the facilitator will stop them and say, okay, now you've asked a series of questions, which are really important. When you say hurt, what do you mean by hurt? When you say on a scale of 1 to 10, that's extraordinarily subjective. Each person, each patient will have a different 1 to 10, not a different score, but a different, the whole spectrum of a 1 to 10 is quite different. I'm rural, I'm a farm kid, so I have a particularly high tolerance of pain. And so the patient was then wheeled out and they would have a discussion. And of course, exactly as I've just said in terms of differences, people would say, you know, this is what I think pain is and this is what I think what pain is. Well, why should there be different views of pain? So I'll tell you what, why don't we go away and research pain? And so off they go. The huge advantage they had was the WHO helping them do this problem-based curriculum and given them millions and millions of dollars of resources. So the students could go to the libraries and relatively easy, this is before internet of course, could access pain. And so they then meet again with their new knowledge after a while, maybe a day or two, and come back and have quite a different conversation. And then he'd come in with another patient and so it would keep progressing. Around one of the things that I had learned when I was at University of New England was the idea of spiraling knowledge. So you keep coming back to the origin in terms of the original question or whatever it was, but you're spiraling up to it. And so you are using to go back to that knowledge of being told that there are times when being told, i.e., reading something or learning or being told literally hooks you in your experience.

Absolutely.

The starting point was experience. Wasn't observation, it was experience. Because as the medical course progressed, it got to the stage of certainly ethical issues, but also sordid issues. I mean, really sort of blood and stuff. You know, how do you deal with blood? Well, you can read about that, but until you see blood or you see an operation, you really don't know how it affects you. You know, the experience of that. And we did that in our course by subjecting students to a semester out on a farm somewhere where they, they worked for the farmer for 4 days for their keep. Then for 3 days, they then used their increasing knowledge in terms of, of sophisticated issues of, of how you learn systemically by asking farmers questions that were in the end systemic or ethical or whatever. And the farmers loved it because they were being asked some questions by naive students, not not by experts who they didn't really want to answer, but students. And with them living there, they got to see what it was like. And you said it earlier, you know, in terms of watching a program of really how incredibly difficult it is to be a farmer. You've got all this environmental stuff going on, whether it's socioeconomics with markets and people's preferences and so on through to droughts and floods and everything else. So To get to the essence of Hawkesbury and the change that I want to see in the world is that people learn how to learn from experience. So it's not being told about climate change. It's actually being put into a situation where it is obviously impacting. And then if you deny it, then you have to give another reason why that is so. So if you're living on the coast and the ocean is clearly rising, then okay, argue A, that it isn't, in which case You know, you're, you're denying reality, you know? And so if you want to tell me another reason, then tell me another reason and we can debate that reason. But my reason's pretty good and I've got a whole literature to support me. So again, students were going to other forms of knowledge, other ways of knowing to reinforce what they were learning experientially. And that to me is the essence of learning is what we all do all the time. We experience something. Someone says, you know, here's a computer, you want to know how to learn it. And so the experience starts with lifting the lid and seeing all of a sudden color in front of you and keys in front of you. And, you know, it's naive, but it's, it's true. And a little bit further then in terms of worldview, because people differ and you can get that in, and I'm gonna address the last question you raised to me on the email you sent to me in terms of what would I do now differently from the way I started before. It's to do with Understanding that we do have worldviews, and worldviews are not mindsets. They're actually profound beliefs that we don't know we hold until it comes to a counter worldview. And then we say, why would you believe that? Science denialism is an obvious one. Religion is another one. Politics is another. And we talk about that with our students from that mid-1980s stage with that wonderful woman, Marcia Salma. We started to ask, okay, well, there are 3 basic elements. I would now argue 4, but philosophers and psychologists argue that there are 3, 3 fundamental questions that we never ask ourselves. One is, what is the nature of nature? In other words, what's, what does it mean to be? But it's simple things like, are we part of nature or are we not? And that's the major issue in organic farming. You know, is a farm something that's objective over there to do what you like to in order to get money and be cruel to animals by doing all sorts of things to them, which, you know, you don't really want to do, but you do because you need to. So that's the sort of so-called ontological questions of what does being mean, but in common day language to find a way of taking that deep philosophical idea into everyday. And that's a good way in farming. So there's a big difference. Between conventional factory farming and so-called organic farming.

The separation somehow.

You don't need to talk about farming. You just know that there's obviously two quite different ways of doing things. The second one was the nature of human nature. Why are we concerned at all about issues in terms of morality or beauty? Why should it concern us that you actually hurt animals to make production, you know, shove chicken in a few weeks in a little cage and whatever to produce eggs or put huge cattle into beef lots and feedlots and so on. So that's the second one in terms of ethics and values and so on. And the third one is knowledge. What's the nature of knowing and knowledge, which then takes you to the worldview, which enables you to then access ontology and axiology. So epistemology is this idea of how do we know what we know? And that's where we start off with, where we obviously have different differences, different differences in opinions. But when you get around to different sets of beliefs, then it gets really sensitive. And we as faculty often ask the question, is what we are doing ethical? Our students didn't come here to do that. We don't say that, but we're really trying to say, well, when you do this education, one of the first things is what's your worldview? And how does it differ? And why do you hold the views that you hold? So that question about where would I start, that's where I would now start.

Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, again, just the resonances with now and even with artificial intelligence and how everyone that's kind of inviting everybody to go into philosophy and become philosophers, right? Just as you've described.

Yeah.

I mean, it's, it's again, the thing that I find so interesting about that is that one of the ways in which you surface those very deep beliefs and as you say, worldviews and, and invisible to oneself ideas about how do we see the world and, and even conceive of reality. You surface those actually through experiences.

Yep. No other way.

Again, exactly. And that's one of the traps I think that we are still in educationally is that yes, we're talking, we're increasingly talking about those things you've just described, ontology, axiology, epistemology, but still we're talking about them rather than actually allowing people into spaces where they experience and surface the visibility of those things And the difference that makes a difference, right? To quote Abateson. So, yeah, I mean, I just, I guess, wanted to just kind of double down on that point about experience being so fundamentally important. I still think we don't quite— it's often seen as a nice-to-have, you know, wouldn't it be nice if we could take the young people out into real life, real world experiences as this additional piece? But actually, that is where the learning happens.

Exactly right. I mean, too often, even within associations and societies, and I find that virtually in all of the sandpits in which I play. So people are talking about systems as if they were reality. You know, the world is designed as systems. No, it isn't. Systems is a construct. It's a way of saying, well, we can't exactly— show me a system. You know, you can't, you can tell me what you think is a system and that's just then a notion. So it's this idea of, of constructive, and we, we actually talk about contextual knowledge. So the knowledge you have is contextual according to whatever context you're set in. And yeah, I mean, it's nothing new, but it's still pretty unpopular.

No, no, it's important. Absolutely. But can I ask, also ask, I think one of the things I understood about Hawkesbury was that you were also, I mean, you use this phrase walking the talk quite a lot in the way you've written about it. That this wasn't just something that you wanted the young people, the students coming in to do. This was a kind of an institutional commitment that you were all, and sometimes with some resistance from other faculty, I think, you were all going to embody and enact because it was important. It was just fundamentally important for everybody.

Absolutely. And the farmers that I've talked about. Right. And in their second and third years, the students then had to do real life projects. So the first year was really about stuff on our farms, but tricky things, you know, like the village nearby complaining about smells coming from our piggery. Well, A, we've had a piggery since 1891 and B, pigs smell, you know, and did you have bacon for breakfast this morning? Yes. Wow. There you go. And so they're difficult issues. They're not just sort of, they have levels of abstraction. That are important. And again, there's marvelous differences between the way students think about that. So yeah, it's, people talk about experiential learning as it's learning by doing. No, it's not. It's learning by being. And Aristotle was quite clear about that. I mean, he talked about what people often call as praxis, the Greeks apparently called praxi, but it's this idea of you are learning to be. And the only way you can learn to be is by being, you know, you're actually being conscious of what's happening. All around you. Yeah, right. That's experiential learning. So an experience is not an observation. It is happening to you. You are central to what's happening around you. And if you want to see that as if it were a system, then you are part of that system. It doesn't exist anywhere else. And that's difficult to explain. It's because there is this sort of common view, common parlance of these words that people then therefore misconstrue what it is that we're trying to do.

But that's interesting, right? Because you're, they are unconsciously often making it difficult because they're not as aware of their own worldviews about how they're constructed. And I think that's, again, that's also a key thing that's happening now is more and more visibility and conversation about, but visibility of, where are these biases, whether it's talk about modernity and hospicing modernity and a time between worlds and these kinds of phrases where we're being asked to, yeah, reflect on the deep biases that have been built into a certain set of beliefs about the world, certain worldview about how the way the world works or the way reality is. Still, for a lot of people, that's very unconscious, or they're unaware of those biases. And, and that feels to me such a fundamental part of the educational process is helping people, as you said, become consciously kind of aware or reflecting on an ability to somehow step back from and see their own frames so that they can not necessarily get rid of them, but at least be aware that they're there, right?

Well, I, again, one of the things I've always believed, well, not always, going back to my University of New England days, was that learning is a social process. And so it's very difficult to ask yourself, what do I believe? It's not at all difficult for someone else to say, what do you believe? Right. Or why do you believe that? Which is that third-level epistemic question. Why do you believe that?

You know, I wasn't planning on asking you this, so I hope it's okay, but I, one of the things that strikes me, given the context that you were working in, in Australia, was in many ways the 40 years that have lapsed between you doing this work and now is a phenomenal amount of time to not learn some of the things that these amazing insights that you were throwing up.

Then.

And also you're working in a context where people have been living as nature, in harmony with nature, for tens of thousands of years on that piece of land, right?

Correct.

And so I just want to kind of bring that into the conversation a little bit because there is a— I can imagine had you sat down with a, you know, a wisdom holder from an Aboriginal community, they would've told you a lot of the, the things that, or they might have supported a lot of the things that you were bringing into Hawkesbury because they were very much aligned with a lot of the kinds of cosmological, ontological visions and, you know, worldviews, beliefs that the Aboriginal communities have. So I just, I don't know what the question is there other than just to, you know, maybe—

I've been given a good answer.

To reflect, yeah, reflect on how important that was as a context in which you were working.

Um, the Aboriginal issue is very interesting from my perspective in that I indeed have sat down with Aboriginal elders way back. I have a musical background as well, which I haven't talked about. And that's a sort of another form of knowing according to a number of people, which is presentational. So you learn, you don't just display what you learn by dancing or singing or whatever, but you learn as a result of doing that. It's like writing, you know, I don't know about you, but when I write, when I finish up publishing, it's nowhere near what it is I started out with.

Right. Absolutely.

As you write. And in one of the papers, the recent papers where I wrote, I actually honestly admitted that and said, you know, here's an emergent insight I have as a result of writing what it is I've just written.

Fantastic.

And I'd never done that before. And I just seemed to be the right thing to do. Anyway, talking to Aboriginals, there is an extraordinarily wonderful YouTube done by an Aboriginal elder. And I saw maybe 15 years or so ago where he talked about, and he didn't use the words because they were not his words, ontology, axiology, or epistemology or cosmology. But he used, of course, words from his language, which I then interpreted and checked with an Aboriginal whether they were sufficiently resonant to each other that it made sense. And the issue that came out of that to me and has retained itself to me is the fact that it is a way of knowing that's important. So people keep talking about Indigenous knowledge. And you know, what we've gotta do is to talk to the Aboriginal people and, you know, get their, I've got Indigenous knowledge, you've got Indigenous knowledge. We farm on our farm the way that it's been farmed for hundreds of years, literally, that's Indigenous knowledge. None of my family knew what science was, literally they didn't. And you know, I've worked in animist societies now enough to understand that it is impossible to actually talk to an animist with this worldview that I've got. And I actually can't do much in terms of helping in that belief set. I can't change it. Why should I? You know, they lived that way for a long, long time and I wouldn't even know where to start. So in terms of, yeah, the Aboriginal issue in Australia, the easy example is to say we should talk to the Aborigines about how they learned how to cold fire, how they had fires that didn't then explode. And burn down whole forests. Well, early on they did because they changed the biology and the botany quite significantly. But then they developed this way of culturing, but the context was so absolutely different. I mean, they didn't have cities to worry about or—

No, sure.

Or grazing or whatever, you know, and their fires are very well thought out and the way they run them. But I argue that that completely misses the point. That devalues the whole idea of how Aboriginals know. So people keep saying it was extraordinarily primitive people. You know, why didn't they develop metal? But you know, here we live in a country of, you know, 50% of it's iron. There was no Iron Age here to put it crudely. So Aboriginals lived the way they did for 50,000, 60,000 years because that's the way they lived for 50,000, 60,000 years. Why would you change? You know, if it was the way you want to live, then live that way. And in terms then of consequences, there are very few, whereas everything we do has got both a moral and a biophysical consequence.

Absolutely.

And they didn't have to worry about that, you know, because I mean, other than the issue of marriage, which they were wise enough to know they couldn't inbreed, so they would do something about that. Other than that, they were there living in their small units the way they always did, always did. You know, for a long, long time. And this again is a terribly important issue in terms of worldview and values. Why are we doing what it is we're doing? And this is an example, one of the examples I use about climate change. People going on about, you know, 1.5 degrees Celsius or parts per million of carbon dioxide. That's simplicity this side of complexity.

Right, exactly.

The issue is how we live our lives. And that sounds a bit too philosophical, but it's, the fact of the matter.

Absolutely. No, 100% agree. And the thing that I find interesting as well, you know, lots, again, resonance with lots of conversation about indigenous knowledge systems and, you know, I've had, you know, the privilege to speak to different indigenous scholars on the podcast and it's just completely fascinating to me. And holding that with real care and sensitivity around it is also so important because there is to your point about simplicity on this side of complexity, there is a co-opting move that happens really quickly in certain contexts where it's like, oh, they had it right. There's a knowledge there that we can use now to help us in this situation, as though knowledge is something you can almost kind of pick up and move from one place to another. It's utility. It's a utility logic rather than saying this is a way of living, as you say, that has grown up literally from the place in which this was embedded. And some people have been more disrupted in their continuum and their, their place than others. And there's so much richness there in terms of dialogues between all those different, you know, knowledge systems. And Murray Battiste talks about transsystemic knowledge systems, but it's incredibly sensitive to do that with real care and respect for the—

Yes, it is.

For the communities in which those you know, those knowledge systems have literally grown, you know, so there's, there's some—

but again, I think it's just, just changing the word, Tim, you know, if we change from knowledge, which is seen as a product rather than knowing, which is the process, it's like changing from taught to learning. Yeah. That it's a process. And so Indigenous ways of knowing are so profoundly different to ours. When I mean ours, I mean European settlers, let's put it that way. Australia, the very idea of freedom and movement and things like, I can't remember his name, sadly, the guy who did that YouTube. Anyway, he in there says everything that the European settlers did was counter to the Aboriginal way of being, you know, putting a fence down, bringing in foreign animals, literally everything that was done in what, you know, in terms of agriculture was regarded as a sensible thing to do. You know, make boundaries, put fences around things and, you know, look after your stock and waterholes. Why would you do that? You know, there's lots of water. It's the way you are living is the way they lived and that's the way they lived.

I mean, even down to the concepts that come with that of property, for example, you know, private property.

Yes, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

No, I'm fascinated. I'm just conscious of time. I would love to ask you just something about the context in which all of this was happening that I think that I understood from my own learning and reading about Hawkesbury, that there was also just this belief in the values of community that you were kind of engaged in and with and as a way of being. I mean, you've talked about ethics a bit, but the ethic of care and trust and personal relationships. And there was, if I may, there was a beautiful quote which I read from your late wife Diane, where you say you dedicated one of the papers to her saying that she more than anyone else appreciated the power of love and commitment that experience clearly shows is the vital feature of paradigmatic reform. I mean, that just such like really a lovely thing. It just think about the holding of that in the context in which you were doing this work. It feels like such an important piece of the context in which you are working. This is not just conceptual abstracted ideas of let's bring that into a technocratic way of shifting and changing an institution. It was kind of held with care and trust and personal relationship. And so yeah, just feels like such an important piece of the whole puzzle.

Well, I should, I should say, I mean, one of the things that Hawkesbury had before I got there, which was one of its attractions, was it already had an enormous sense of community for all sorts of reasons. And it was, you know, had sort of some bizarre cultural outputs. But yes, it did. You know, it saw itself as a family, as it were, and we lived on the campus. And so I lived there with my family. And then, yeah, the tragedy of, of her life. And one of the lessons that I'm now sharing, when she had cancer, she used to talk early on, I said, you know, we've gotta learn how to live with cancer. And she said, no, you don't. You have to learn how to die from it, which is now where I'm at.

And that's an extraordinary worldview change too, you know, it's, it's, no, but so, I mean, just so important and I, it feels, I did an episode not that long ago on what love has to do with education.

Great.

And yeah, it just feels as a, as a field holding the work that we do in relationship with other humans.

Yeah.

In learning, it feels like it's difficult to talk about sometimes.

Yeah.

But fundamentally important that we do.

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And again, people try to trivialize that, but it is, it's, yes. Why would you do it otherwise? The Greeks told us that. Yeah.

Yeah. There's one historical piece that I'd love to bring in just in terms of some of the reasons and reflections as to why it didn't last. And you know, so I don't want to end on the negative. As I understand it, Hawkesbury was integrated into a larger university after a certain amount of time, and that shifted the dynamic of the work and the space that, you know, the context in which you were working. So yeah, maybe just if you just perhaps briefly reflect on how did the work change there, or what were your reflections on that kind of institutionalizing dynamic around trying to embed some of these approaches?

Yeah, it was unusual in that we were not integrated into existing university. That was one of the options the government presented us too. If you were big enough, you could be a university by yourself and some of the institutes of technology did that. Uh, we were not big enough, although we had 6,000 students by then, but we joined with two other colleges of advanced education. Uh, and they were all on the edge of Sydney. We were on the northwest. There was one at the west and one down at the southwest.

Mm-hmm.

And they're quite far apart and difficult to, to join up. So in some ways it was a pretty stupid structure to try and start a university with. I had been a dean at University of New England. I knew a bit about what that's like institutionally. We welcomed the idea of university in the sense that this would bring a broader thing. We, you know, we could bring in many more students. We could have many more degrees. We could have many more disciplines. We could bring in medicine and law and those sorts of things, which were important. But we had said at the beginning, we, the 12 deans, at the formation of this had agreed that really we wanted this university to be different. It had to be by and for, you know, the people of, and to go back to the development phase, it had to be co-developing with Western Sydney, which was not a particularly industrial area, but filled with immigrants, very low level of university education and so on. So there was that change, demographic change, but then there was also the fact that the good side, we could bring in graduate students, we could get federal money to do research. Uh, the downside of that was that every faculty was expected to do that. And that was the first major blow because to do experiential learning and have everybody as a facilitator meant everybody had to be a facilitator and that's pretty demanding. So not only are you facilitating particular projects, but you're also facilitating a group of students, including me. I mean, me, I also had a group of students. So we all had 8 students or so who we tried to mentor as individuals. So yeah, the sort of, the upside was that the downside was absolutely the disagreement with, I mean, we didn't have a GPA, we didn't have exams, we didn't, you know, students progressed according to the portfolios they presented to us as a voce viva. And some of them were just unbelievably clever. Gosh, they were clever. I felt quite ignorant when I saw these things, you know, whoa. You learn all that from us.

Amazing.

It wasn't, it wasn't from us. It was through us, you know, and we were, yeah, it's this whole part of being institutionalized from pretty laissez-faire, apparently laissez-faire, but indeed highly structured when you're doing what it is we were doing. It wasn't happen chance. It was an enormous organizational structure to make that all happen and encourage people who didn't want to facilitate or couldn't. To, you know, try somewhere else to do all that. So yes, no, that was, that was, um, you know, the death of my wife killed me. There's this terrible phrase, uh, really sort of affected me so deeply that it all changed, you know, so that, that love element of a marriage of 31 years just was no longer there. And to this day, I, you know, I miss the love that that was, as it were. So that was a major part of it. We did not have a succession plan, which was a major mistake. So I knew lots of people and lots of things that nobody else knew, because I said, you carry on with it and I'll deal with the politics and with the parents and angry farmers, you know, so on. There was then a downside as it happened in Australia in agricultural education throughout all institutions had the same problem for different reasons. So yeah, no, it's systemic. It wasn't just one. Simple thing. It was complicated.

Yeah, no, so interesting, but also systemic in terms of the kind of sociopolitical context, economic context, et cetera. But also very, very local and human in the sense of, you know, you were having your own kind of cares and concerns as a human in that space moving through and as everyone else was in your faculty, you know, just again to try and also remember that the systemic extends out, but it also extends inwards somehow, or so to say, right? It's, it's like remembering that part of it is also crucially important.

Yes.

And that's where actually some of the magic is, I would say, because the idea of a succession plan, of course, is important, but also to try and make programmatic or systematic all the things that are very relational is actually also quite difficult, maybe impossible to do anyway. Not to say you shouldn't have tried with the succession plan, but just with the acknowledgement that there is such an important part of the relational element in the success of some of these things, right?

No, it was, it was most people who survived it. I know people like, like Ray Eisland and you know, I have extremely close relationships between, you know, a dozen or so, including now graduate students and students, particularly the students who said didn't really recognize it at the time, but my God, that was good.

Exactly. I mean, exactly. That's why we are here having this conversation because it was, you know, my God, it was good. Like, this is an incredible decade of incredible work. And I mean, I'd love to just say, you said to me on a previous call that you get contacted almost daily by people wanting to know about Hawkesbury and the experience there.

Yeah. Or at least illustrated, they just read one of my papers. Yeah. And then are interested in wanting to know more. To such an extent that I don't answer them. And that sounds a terrible thing to say, but you know, it would be a considerable proportion of my day. You know, we just spent an hour now in condensing this incredibly complex story. And so I, you know, I might just send them, I'm terribly sorry, but I'm, I'm retired or I'm busy or whatever. No, no.

I mean, you know, when you're a celebrity, you can't answer all the fan mail, right? But no, I mean, that's partly why I wanted to do the podcast just so that we can then, you know, there would be a resource that we can point people to understand a little bit more about the story, because it's just such a, yeah, such a fantastic period. And I just so appreciate everything you were doing there. And obviously, Ray, and the work I've done with Ray since meeting him. And no, it's all just phenomenally rich work. And just thank you so much for doing it.

It was a lot of fun.

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