LEGACY & PROMISE
50 YEARS OF SOCIAL WORK AND SOCIAL POLICY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA LEGACY & PROMISE
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by TAMARA HUNTER
UWA Social Work and Social Policy respectfully acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Australians, and pay our respects to elders past and present.
Foreword IT IS MY PLEASURE to provide an introduction to Legacy and Promise, a history and celebration of the discipline of Social Work and Social Policy at UWA. As the foundational social work programme in Western Australia, Social Work and Social Policy at UWA has played a very important role in the rich social history of the State and its graduates have made significant contributions. Over the past 50 years, Social Work and Social Policy teaching and research academics have, without exception, been dedicated to the profession, to students and to the attainment of a socially inclusive and equitable society where all its members can prosper. The discipline’s rich history and tradition is well documented in this publication and UWA has been privileged to have been part of its growth and development. We should, however, be equally positive about the future for Social Work and Social Policy at UWA. The world has changed significantly over the last 50 years, and without doubt the pace of change will continue to increase. The discipline is embracing these changes, a fact evident in the ways in which teaching is delivered and the range of spaces in which students learn, (both real and virtual), many of which could not have been conceived of in the second half of last century. Continued growth and expansion of our teaching programmes, enhanced by digital technologies, global recruitment of students facilitating connections across countries, exciting opportunities for research that impacts on policy and makes a very real difference in the lives of our communities and community members, and strong connections and networks with the social work and social policy sectors locally, nationally and internationally all augur well for Social Work and Social Policy going from strength to strength. The demand for highly skilled professional social workers is likely to increase in the future. Moving from Social Sciences to the School of Population Health in 2012 opened up a range of additional opportunities and possibilities for the discipline and our students, and has, I believe, contributed to the prosperity of Social Work and Social Policy at UWA. Ultimately, however, it is the calibre of our graduates that is testament to the quality of our teaching and research programmes. I have no doubts that should a similar history be published for the 100-year anniversary of the discipline, the achievements and accomplishments of our current and future graduates will feature prominently. Professor Colleen Fisher Head of School School of Population Health
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Preface IT IS MY great pleasure to provide the preface to this publication celebrating the first 50 years of Social Work at the University of Western Australia. I want to start by congratulating Tamara Hunter for her creativity and commitment to a range of investigative research activities culminating in this important publication. Tamara has read a wide variety of available documents (both archival and those kindly shared by interviewees) and has conducted hours of face-to-face and telephone interviews with past and present academic staff, graduates, university managers, field educators and current students. I also want to recognise the support and guidance provided by Maria Harries and Dief Alexander throughout the process. Tamara’s approach has been respectful of Social Work as a multidisciplinary activity: she has recognised the strong sense of the changing context of the complex, sometimes conflictual, nature of accountabilities of Social Work both inside and outside the University. There has always been recognition of academic accountability to students and the faculty in teaching and learning activities on campus; there is also a parallel accountability to the professional development of practitioners needing to acquire practice skills and ethical frameworks for future challenging professional work in families and communities. Academic Social Work staff are mindful of the multi-systemic nature of their accountability to the University, to agency employers, to the professional association and to future clients. Legacy & Promise is structured into three sections built around an overarching tree-related metaphor of organic growth and change. This analogy recognises the permeable nature of the selected themes: thus some themes emerge in more than one section. The metaphor has also enabled a selection of nouns and verbs which reflect organic and sometimes unpredictable growth in a changing environment, including seeds, roots and branches, influenced by sunshine, wind and rain and the risk of bush-fire. Amid all of this continuity and change, Professor Laki Jayasuriya has stood strongly – a supportive wall of wisdom for academic colleagues for more than 40 years. Tamara has skilfully obtained a collection of stories based on her conversations with knowledgeable stakeholders who have reflected on their experiences of the Social Work Department (School, Discipline) since 1965. She conducted more than 30 interviews to arrive at this rich understanding of the ‘collective’ stories. One important disclaimer is that the product of this work is almost entirely based on the reported memories and reflections of the participating graduates, academic and administrative staff and university managers. Unfortunately, it was very difficult to find formal documentation to verify these individual memories: even the task of agreeing the list of the years in office of heads of department since Laki’s retirement the early 1990s proved impossible – despite Tamara’s conversations with Laki, Jim Ife, Maria, Sue Young and me! Therefore this Social Work ‘Life Story Book’ of the first 50 years at UWA has been completed without the opportunity to verify information through accessing the equivalent of official records of births, deaths and marriages. The metaphor of the tree continues with the focus on the future opportunities for growth and change for Social Work in the University as we look forward to continuing and sustainable growth and adaptation to the changing university, community and agency practice environments. Congratulations to all those involved with Social Work at the University of Western Australia in the first 50 years – and every best wish for the next 50 years. Professor Mike Clare Adjunct Senior Research Fellow Social Work and Social Policy
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Published on behalf of The University of Western Australia School of Population Health by Premium Publishers Freemasons Hall 181 Roberts Road, Subiaco WA 6008 (08) 9273 3933 Editorial Director Gabi Mills gabi@premiumpublishers.com.au Writer Tamara Hunter thunter@iinet.net.au Designer Cally Browning cally@barecreative.com.au Photographs Crib Creative cribcreative.com.au Original cover artwork Sue Codee
PREMIUM PUBLISHERS LEGACY & PROMISE
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Contents Course Timeline..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................8 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 10
12 PART ONE - ROOTS Chapter one: Early Battles .......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 13 Chapter two: A Letter from Ken Walker ...........................................................................................................................................................16 Chapter three: A Terrifyingly Good Teacher ........................................................................................................................................... 20 Chapter four: On the Smell of a Gestetner and an Oily Rag ........................................................................................24 Chapter five: The Reluctant Academic ................................................................................................................................................................ 32 Chapter six: But WAIT, There’s More .................................................................................................................................................................. 34 Chapter seven: Looking Back: Reflections on Twenty Five Years 1965-1990 .............................. 38 Chapter eight: Areas of Practice and Graduate Achievement ................................................................................ 40 Chapter nine: Dr Marcia Foley .......................................................................................................................................................................................... 46
48 PART TWO - BRANCHING OUT Chapter one: Stage Two .................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 49 Chapter two: Headship .................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 54 Chapter three: Inspirational Teachers ............................................................................................................................................................... 56 Chapter four: Perceptions of Social Work - Do-Gooders and Bleeding Hearts ...................... 62 Chapter five: Celebrating the Profession .......................................................................................................................................................66 Chapter six: The Rise of the Indigenous Unit ........................................................................................................................................72 Chapter seven: In the Field ...................................................................................................................................................................................................... 82 Chapter eight: Research or Bust ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 86 Chapter nine: Prizes & Scholarships .....................................................................................................................................................................96
98 PART THREE - BLOSSOM Chapter one: Aged Care - Moving Forward ...............................................................................................................................................99 Chapter two: Moving on Up: Population Health & Beyond ..................................................................................... 103
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Course Timeline
1965
1975
1984
Course commences as 18-month Diploma of Social Work
Master of Social Work program replaced by: a) Bachelor degree (BSW - Pass and Honours) and b) Masters by Research (MSW)
Restructure of Masters program into two degrees: a) MA by Research; and b) MSW by Course Work
Two-year Master of Social Work introduced
1971
Restructure of Graduate Studies with the introduction of a doctoral program leading to a PhD
1981
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2009 2000 Restructure of BSW into a two-year undergraduate plus two-year postgraduate program, in addition to the 3+2 structure
1988
Introduction of a four-year BSW program
Qualifying MSW program introduced, recommended for provisional accreditation for two years
First students taken in for the professional doctorate approved by Senate in 2005
MSW course fully accredited for five years; course is now solely a twoyear postgraduate course preparing students for entry into the profession at the same time as equipping them with skills and knowledge commensurate with masters-level teaching and learning.
2007
2011
Introduction of Graduate Certificates in Child Protection and Mental Health
•
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Introduction
By Tamara Hunter
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n the garden outside the School of Population Health, a freshly planted tree has been given pride of place amid a collection of smaller plantings. A smooth, circular bed has been carved out for the tree and soon, a bench will grace the area. There, visitors will be able to sit in silent reflection as they gaze upon a tree which may as well be a mirror, for everything about this newly arrived frangipani - a mature specimen some two or so metres tall – and its fortuitous transplantation into the School of Population Health reflects the journey of Social Work: the discipline it now unexpectedly represents. Removed from the Faculty of Arts more than a year ago, the frangipani is a tree that has been waiting for the perfect home. Hardy, resilient and poised to blossom, it sits calmly at the centre of its new surroundings, ready to offer shelter and shade. In time its branches will spread, its flowers will bloom and its fragrance will snake through the windows and doors of its new home. To those who sink into the bench alongside, it will be both a mirror and a tree: a central point reflecting backwards and forwards across the lifetimes of the gardeners who have been, and the gardeners still to come.
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he Perth of 1965 was a small and sleepy capital city of less than half a million people, where goods were still bought with shillings and pence (although not for much longer) and fewer than 6,000 people held a university degree. Sir Robert Menzies was still prime minister (although not for much longer), and conscription loomed as a means of dealing with the grinding
and already long-running conflict in distant Vietnam. In the UK, Sir Winston Churchill had not long passed away and in the US, Martin Luther King was on the march - leading thousands of nonviolent demonstrators campaigning for voting rights to the steps of the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama. Meanwhile in New South Wales, in what would become known as the Freedom Ride, a group of University of Sydney students was touring small towns and highlighting the poor health and living conditions of Aboriginal people in a bid to draw attention to the racial discrimination in Australia’s own backyard. It was a world in the throes of momentous change. Perth, too, was on the brink of transformation. Led by the well-entrenched government of Sir David Brand, Western Australia was experiencing a period of rapid mining and pastoral expansion. Large infrastructure projects such as the Narrows Bridge and the development of suburban
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TAKING ITS PLACE Top, Aerial photo of campus - 14 August 1967 (UWA Archives 3779P). Above, aerial view of the University campus Hackett Memorial Buildings Irwin Street buildings 1954 (UWA Archives 5227P).
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shopping centres were transforming the way the city looked and worked. At the same time, substantial shifts were underway in the care, treatment and control of some of the most vulnerable members of society - including elderly people, children in care and those deemed to have mental afflictions and intellectual disability (the latter of which was only distinguished in law from mental illness for the first time in 1965). Against this backdrop, a seed
NEW DIGS Current building, Population Health. Below, cyclists on campus, circa 1975 (UWA Archives 7278P).
that had been planted 18 years earlier by a small but determined band of women, operating under the banner of the Western Australian Branch of the Australian Association of Social Workers, burst tentatively into life. The Branch had formed in 1946 - at a time when there were only seven qualified social workers in the State and meetings were held around a kitchen table - with a core objective of spreading the knowledge and understanding
of social work in the community and helping the eventual promotion of a course of social work studies at the University of Western Australia. In 1965, UWA finally granted the Association’s wish, establishing a postgraduate Diploma of Social Work to turn out locally trained graduates capable of meeting the growing demand for qualified social workers. The graduates would initially feed into rapidly altering Government departments, not just assisting with, but eventually leading the charge for change across a range of socially significant areas. The Social Work course, afforded a tiny corner of the campus in the temporary Irwin Street buildings, was initially tended by the nurturing hands of course controller Dr Wally Tauss and founding lecturer Margaret ‘Teddie’ Stockbridge. Despite early attempts to nip the program in the bud, the pair – followed by inaugural Discipline Chair Laksiri Jayasuriya and a succession of heads including
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Jim Ife, Mike Clare, Maria Harries and Sue Young – clung on and continued doggedly to lay down roots capable of withstanding the searching inquiry, spells of neglect and sometimes open hostility that have marked much of Social Work’s experience at UWA. Those firm roots would come in handy time and again: over its lifetime the Department/School/ Discipline has been critiqued and examined to within an inch of its life – pulled apart, inspected end to end and made to justify its existence within the University repeatedly. It has had to scrap for resources, for credibility and for a home. Rejected by Arts not once, but twice, it initially lurked as a semi-autonomous body on the fringes of the University’s governance structures. It wasn’t until the early 1980s that Arts relented and begrudgingly gave Social Work a home. It was an uneasy match, with the Faculty never quite understanding or embracing this parvenu program with (some felt) its delusions of academic legitimacy. Through it all, the Discipline dug in – in the process developing a kind of blithe resilience that practiced what Social Work preached. In addition to focusing on the core business of producing high quality social work practitioners, Social Work academics found time to cultivate an increasingly rich postgraduate research program and to help shape the social policies which so deeply affected the interests of those they worked to represent. In 2012, Social Work was uprooted once again: this time out of Arts, off the main campus, and up the road to the School of Population Health. Despite some fears that the move would lead to another uncomfortable pairing, the match has, thus far, proved to be inspired. •
PART 1
ROOTS
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CHAPTER 1
Early Battles
directly answerable to the Professorial Board. Provision was made in 1962 for the appointment of a Reader in Social Work. However, when the post could not be filled, responsibility was instead placed with the Head of the Department of Psychology, Professor Ken Walker, who had been among those promoting the establishment of a School of Social Work. Dr Wally Tauss, a colourful, Viennese-born psychologist with a diverse collection of careers behind him, was seconded from the Department of Psychology and named Course Controller - a role he was able to perform with relative administrative autonomy. Margaret ‘Teddie’ Stockbridge - a psychiatric social worker who had been trained in the United Kingdom - was employed as a lecturer and managed to pull together a curriculum in a matter of weeks. Jean Teasdale joined soon after but was employed on a parttime basis only, first as a visiting lecturer and later as a senior tutor. Dr Tauss went on sabbatical leave in August 1967, heading to the University of Sussex where he completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Social Work. In his absence, Teddie Stockbridge, assisted by Frances Donovan, acted as Course Controller. The course, housed in temporary huts on Irwin Street, began with miniscule intakes of six and six (plus a part-time student) in the first two years. The diploma required a continuous 17 months of study, including formal lectures, agency training and a group research
B
y the time it had clocked up its 25th anniversary in 1990, social work education at The University of Western Australia had already undergone an exhausting array of reviews, changes and additions to its course content and structure and had had to battle, on multiple occasions, for its survival and wellbeing. In some ways, the battle was simply an extension of the one which had preceded its existence. It had taken an 18-year campaign by a small group of women from
the Australian Association of Social Workers, and others who saw the value of offering local social work education (rather than sending students interstate to the only available courses), to convince a reluctant UWA to take the course on. After a number of false starts, the course began in 1965 as an 18-month postgraduate Diploma of Social Work. It had been decided, after the Faculty of Arts declined to take responsibility for the course, that responsibility would lie with a Board of Studies which would be
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EARLY SIGNS Top left, one of the Irwin Street buildings located on Crawley campus (sometime in the 1960s, UWA Archives 26902P). Left, portrait of Wally Tauss.
EARLY BATTLES
Women, women, women!
Sir Stanley Prescott
project. Those entering the course had to have completed prerequisites in psychology, economics and anthropology, and had to convince the Head of the Department of Psychology of their ‘personal suitability’. The course had not been going long when it was forced to fight its first major battle for survival, triggered by the State Government’s decision to kick-start a rival social work course at the then Western Australian Institute of Technology. When WAIT’s three-year full-time training course began in 1967, the University Senate considered whether it should terminate UWA’s own course. In late 1968, news broke that the course was not guaranteed beyond the 1970 intake. Dr Tauss and others – including the AASW and a variety of social work agencies and supporters – spent the first few months of 1969 arguing fiercely for the course’s retention. State and national groups wrote a string of concerned and often impassioned letters lamenting the potential move and urging the Vice-Chancellor, Sir Stanley Prescott, to reconsider. The letters
outlined the desperate need for qualified social workers and praised the quality of students already coming out of the UWA course. “I have had the pleasure to be associated with the University’s Department of Social Work since its inception,” wrote Psychiatric Superintendent W.E. Robinson, of the WA Mental Health Services’ Child Guidance Clinic, on January 14, 1969. “I have seen (the students) in action during their practical work placements in this clinic and at the Princess Margaret Hospital, and I have had the good fortune to employ two of them. “I found the students to be highly intelligent, with active and enquiring minds. Far from lecturing them, I ran my contribution as a discussion group and I found it most enjoyable and most stimulating - in marked contrast to the course I have given to people who lacked university training and who were far less responsive and expected to be spoon-fed.” There were numerous similar letters. Sir Stanley – who had himself played a key role in the
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EARLY DAYS Left, Sir Stanley Prescot, former Vice Chancellor 1960 (2918P UWA Archives), expresses his frustration after receiving a letter from the Northern Territory branch of the AASW. Opposite bottom, Social Work graduates July 1968, l-r Jenny Minchin, Libby Lloyd, Diana Silver. Opposite top, staff and first graduates (1966), l-r standing: Karliss Raduzis, Marcia Foley, Ilona Osborne, Marjorie Silver, Jenny Patterson and Peter Gorton. L-R sitting: Wally Tauss, Jean Teasdale, Tim Marshall (Psychology), the late Margaret Stockbridge, and Beth Thompson.
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establishment of the course after witnessing the value of social workers during a spell in hospital following a near-fatal coronary - wrote soothingly to some. He told the local branch of the AASW on March 20, 1969, that they had nothing to worry about and that if they were prepared to wait about eight weeks for an announcement ‘there is nothing more we need do’. However, handwritten notes jotted onto other letters of protest reveal his increasing exasperation at what he suspected was a ‘campaign’. On a letter sent by the Northern Territory branch of the AASW on April 5 expressing deep concern at the reported closure, he simply wrote: “Women, women, women!” He didn’t even bother replying to a letter from the Association of Teachers in Schools of Social Work in Australia, noting on their letter, in part: “I have not replied to this letter, because it annoys me.” On April 9, a sub-committee of the Professorial Board backed down, saying it had had a chance to discuss both the nature of the social work course and the demand for social workers with Dr Tauss and others, and was now convinced that it was in both the University’s and the community’s interests to retain the course. While the recommendation to continue the course was a relief, in the same breath the Board signalled yet another potential hump: the appointment of a sub-committee led by the late Professor Gordon Reid to examine where the course sat within the University, the form it should take, and the qualification it should give. This led to a tortuous review process which lasted well into 1970, requiring yet more strident advocacy from Dr Tauss and others as the case was made for and against various undergraduate and postgraduate course options. At the same time, Arts was being
wooed as a potential home and attempts were being made to virtually abolish the majority of pre-requisites for entry into the course (something committee member Professor GC Bolton, who was one of those advocating a relaxation of prerequisites, acknowledged as a ‘terribly tender issue’). Dr Tauss argued strongly for the retention of strict prerequisites, saying it would be ‘professionally irresponsible’ for the University to mount a course in Social Work which was based on inadequate grounding in Social Science subjects at the undergraduate level. A recommendation to limit the prerequisites to two units of psychology was subsequently rejected. Meanwhile, as options
I found the students to be highly intelligent, with active and enquiring minds ~ W.E. Robinson
were tossed around for a new faculty home for Social Work, Dr Tauss briefly suggested the degree could sit within the Faculty of Economics and Commerce. Eventually the sub-committee recommended, controversially, that the course should be upgraded to a two-year postgraduate Master’s degree beginning in 1971. An ‘unhappy compromise’ – as subsequent head Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya would describe it – was reached regarding prerequisites, with a range of requirements retained. The move to a Master’s degree invoked the displeasure of employers, who had strongly supported an undergraduate degree structure. However the University, among other things, was concerned such a structure would attract students without the required personal and intellectual maturity for the kinds of responsibilities they would face. They were also concerned about the potential failure rates in the early years of a four-year undergraduate course, and worried it could duplicate the type of course provided by WAIT.
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While some employers were put out by the Master’s development, on the plus side Social Work at UWA suddenly had a more definite shape. The Professorial Board had decided that the upgrading of the course from a diploma to a degree was an appropriate point to establish a Department of Social Work. The Faculty of Arts – unhappy with the proposed Master’s degree and leery of a Department that didn’t have undergraduate students – had again rejected responsibility for Social Work studies, so the new Department was instead established as an autonomous body under the direction of the Board of Studies. Having successfully secured the immediate future of social work at UWA, Dr Tauss was appointed inaugural Head of Department at the end of 1970. Sadly, he had barely had time to toast his victory when he passed away on January 21, 1971, aged just 48. Founding lecturer Teddie Stockbridge acted as head until, later that year, a new era began with the appointment of Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya. •
CHAPTER 2
A letter from Ken Walker
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n an August 2007 letter to long-standing Social Work and Social Policy Head Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya, former psychology chair Ken Walker pondered the early days of Social Work at UWA and his own role in its beginnings. Referring to an earlier missive in which he had laid out his recollection of events, he offered to provide an edited version entitled: Planting the Acorn of the Mighty Oak of Social Work at UWA. The tree analogy is apt. Many since have spoken of the seeds planted by those who fought for close to two decades to establish the Discipline at UWA and by those who taught in its early years. Others refer to the friends later on whose nurturing hands
ensured Social Work’s survival and continued growth at times when it might easily have withered – including former Executive Dean of Arts John Jory and former Vice-Chancellor Alan Robson. Professor Walker, who was described in an obituary following his death in February 2009 as one of the last of the grand professors at UWA, was the inaugural Chair in Psychology (19521966). Having played a key role in Social Work’s establishment at UWA, he took initial responsibility for the diploma course. Here, he gives an insider’s view of the course’s establishment at UWA, and of his subsequent role in Professor Jayasuriya’s arrival in 1971 as the new Head of the Department of Social Work.
01.08.07 Dear Laksiri What a pleasure to receive your letter, so many years after we met in Sri Lanka. I had not forgotten you, and I had heard on my grapevine you had got the Social Work chair and later, that you were a great success in the post, even though you were not trained as a qualified social worker. Congratulations on the honorary doctorate. As for my help, I simply told UWA that you were a very strong candidate even though not professionally qualified. I told them of your academic brilliance and stressed that your English was perfect and that you had experienced Australian university life, and that your knowledge of and experience with foreign students at Sydney was an asset. I told them of your extensive work in community development in Sri Lanka, which Bill Ford had told me about when he suggested we should meet there. I told them that I personally thought you’d make a fine member of UWA’s academic community and the Perth community, and stressed that your wife (Rohini) also had excellent English, and had lived in Australia and would adapt readily to Perth. Some of these points I put in because UWA had had problems with some foreign students with poor English and with wives of British professors who found it hard to adapt. I knew that my views would be taken seriously because the committee would have known that I knew what I was talking about when it came to social work, because I was responsible for its establishment at UWA with the professional degree and postgraduate diploma I proposed. I don’t know whether you were told of my role in the establishment of social work at UWA and that I was nursing it in my psychology department when I left, with a senior lectureship (Mrs Stockbridge), as I had done earlier with Anthropology until I could persuade the university to make it into a separate department with a Chair. I expect you met Ron and Catherine Berndt. Given your interest in UWA’s history . . . you may be interested in how I managed to get social work established at UWA, so I shall outline how I did it. Please forgive me if you know all this. The story begins in 1940-41, when I was the lecturer in psychology and social economics at the newly established Department of Social Work at Sydney University. Like Melbourne and Adelaide, it gave a non-graduate diploma. So I met a number of social workers and learned about their work and their supervision of our students’ practical work. I read 2-3 social work textbooks and became aware of the various current approaches. I also read a lot of sociology. I was doing anthropology in the Anthropology Department. I met Hicks, the director of the NSW Department of Social Welfare, who had persuaded the NSW Government to give the money to establish the Department of Social Work.
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He established a cadetship scheme, so we had six students each year on cadetships. When I became professor in Perth, I inserted my interest in psychology and circumstances of old people into our curriculum by extending our second-year course in developmental psychology to a lifespan course. I also directed a research project on ‘Old Age in WA’ which was a survey(s) project and institutional research. We published several mimeo reports. I contacted the president of the WA Social Workers’ Association for advice on our project, and offered to give them copies of the five or six monographs (mimeo) that we produce. Our work confirmed her statement that there was an acute shortage of social workers in WA. She said it was because only a few could go east to be trained, for financial or other reasons. The WA Government invited Hicks to advise it and he wrote a report (you probably know it) that recommended that the Department of Social Welfare establish a cadetship programme. The Government accepted his report, but couldn’t provide the money for cadetships to the east. The Social Workers’ Association asked me to address one of their meetings and said they would augment their numbers (there were only about 10) with other people who were interested in voluntary social work. I talked about ‘recent trends in social psychology’ and cooperation between psychologists and social workers (there was an example in the Mental Health Department’s child guidance clinics). Soon after, the president of the Association came to see me and asked me to investigate the possibility of establishing social work training at UWA. I said I would do so. I soon found out that the professorial board and the Senate had decided some years ago to abolish the two non-graduate diplomas (pharmacy and animal husbandry) and not to establish any more. So, I thought it would have to be a postgraduate diploma (analogous to the Dip Ed). Then it occurred to me that we could establish a professional social work degree as well, patterned on the professional psychology degree we had just set up (B Psych). At this point, I needed to talk to the Vice-Chancellor (Sir Stanley Prescott). I remembered that he had told me when he was in hospital after his near fatal coronary that he had been much impressed with the social worker who helped him with his health insurance and other problems. Because I happened to be chairman of the professorial board when it happened, I was acting V-C for nine months while he recuperated and gradually came back to work full time. We developed an excellent professional collaboration and I knew he trusted my judgment. Then fate took a hand. The Vice-Chancellor’s eldest daughter was in her final year of what would certainly be a first class Hons BA in Psych. When we introduced the B Psych, I devised a new fourth-year course for B Psych and Hons BA and BSc students in professional psych. I lectured about the concept and practice of a profession and academic life then invited professional psychologists from all the agencies where psychologists were employed to give a seminar on their work and agency. This course was just over when I was about to approach the Vice-Chancellor. Miss Prescott came to see me. She said the course had convinced her that she really didn’t want to be any kind of professional psychologist. I asked her what she really wanted to do. She said: “Helping people with their practical problems. I’ve done a bit of it at our church.” So I asked if she’d considered becoming a trained social worker and when she asked me I explained what social workers do. I said that the university might establish social work training the next year and suggested she finish her BA Hons anyway. Finally, I suggested she talk with her father about it over the weekend. (It was on a Friday, I was to see him on the Tuesday). She said social work sounded very interesting to her . . . When I saw Prescott, he was full of enthusiasm for my plan. “We’ll sell it like the Medical School appeal – keep your sons and daughters at home instead of marrying a nurse in the East,” he said. He had run the Medical School appeal very successfully. I told the Social Workers’ Association of the plan, and they accepted it. They liked the idea of them supervising the students, passing on their wisdom, and getting paid for it!
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KEN WALKER LETTER
So I set off on the final stages of the campaign, getting my plan accepted by the Faculty of Arts, the professorial board and the Senate. My memories of this phase are spotty. In all three cases, I prepared the ground very carefully and finally Prescott helped with the board and the Senate. My nine years as a bureaucrat in the federal civil service, during and after World War II, had taught me that the best way to influence a committee was to talk to them individually before the meeting. I had found this to be even more true at UWA, because at that time power was so widely distributed. So I did this to everyone I could. People are flattered by your attention and the kick of being ‘in the know’. I took care to include the Dean of the Medical Faculty whose wife had been a social worker in Hong Kong, and the professor of medicine, who was keen on social medicine and had used our reports on old age in WA to show students the importance of knowing a patient’s life situation. I also talked to the professor of child health, who made his students visit the psych department’s child centre (the first in an Australian department), and worked with social workers at the Children’s Hospital. I also talked to three other medical professors I was friendly with (I was a member of the medical faculty). I made the case for the plan in the Arts Faculty, explaining how I had come to learn about social work years ago, and, as in all my ‘pitches’, emphasising ‘the responsibility of the university to the community’. Nobody opposed the plan in the faculty and the board when I made the same pitch. Prescott talked privately with the two surgeons in the Senate and with others. I found that the president of the Social Workers’ Association knew a couple of Senate members (she came from a rich Peppermint Grove family) and two or three other members knew senators. I was a staff representative at the Senate, without vote, but the right to speak so I made my pitch there. I persuaded Prescott to hold a couple of cocktail parties before the critical meeting for senators to meet the members of the Social Workers’ Association. There was no opposition in the Senate. A great strength of the plan was that it was cheap – only a readership and money to pay (only a little) to the supervisors. I hoped to attract a Scottish friend of mine who directed the Singapore Social Work Department at the university there, but although she visited me, she decided to stay at Singapore. We couldn’t attract any good candidate so we fell back on a senior lectureship. We were favourably impressed with Mrs ‘Teddie’ Stockbridge, who had been working in Perth for a year after years of experience in Britain. The president of the Social Workers’ Association was on our committee. So we started with Teddie early in the 1960s and there ends my story. You may have known this history, Laksiri, but if so perhaps my ‘insider’s view’ may have interested you. I wonder whether the degree and diploma set-up we established survived or how it was modified. I should have added that the success of my nursing of Anthropology also played a role showing that this pattern could work well. It is a source of satisfaction to me, Laksiri, that you got the Chair and were such a great success in it. Clearly, I did something right in recommending you! Sincerely,
Ken Walker Ken Walker
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MOVING FORWARD Ken Walker, 1969, above, (UWA Archives 61580P) and left, in 1951, (UWA Archives 61580P). Above left, Sir Stanley Prescott, former Vice Chancellor. (UWA Archives 4644P)
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CHAPTER 3
A Terrifyingly Good Teacher
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full half-century on, the powerful legacy of one of the two founding parents of Social Work at UWA still haunts and guides some of the earliest students to pass through the course. The formidable nature of early lecturer Margaret ‘Teddie’ Stockbridge – who would often leave students hiding in the bathroom and quivering, churning or weeping with fear - is the stuff of legend. Almost every student who fell under her gaze has a story to tell about her piercing eyes, her exacting questions and her smokefilled tutorials. “I can remember being so anxious about those sessions, and I’d go to the toilet about ten times before,” 1972 graduate Jan Stewart said. “You’d go in and sit by her desk, and she was a really heavy smoker. She’d sit there with these foul Navy cigarettes - Senior Service, I think they were called - and the smoke
would wreath up through her hair. She’d look meaningfully at you and ask you what you were doing. It was sort of like a counselling session, in a way.” Current AASW WA branch president Sabina Leitmann, who graduated in 1976, said Teddie, with her fierce intellect, thin elegance and chain-smoking ways, reminded her of a dragon. “I found her totally intimidating, but she was never quite as ruthless with those who were not as strong,” she said. “I think the more she thought you could handle it, the more terrifying she was.” Second intake graduate Brian Wooller, who studied under Teddie and later worked with her after being appointed as a senior tutor, recalled her as a hard taskmaster
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POWERFUL LEGACY Margaret (Teddie) Stockbridge in 1964, above left, and above, a few years later. (62335P UWA Archives).
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who once threw an assignment he had rushed onto the floor. “She said, ‘I don’t want to read this crap. You’ve got two choices: I give you nothing, or you do it again.” Later, when they were colleagues and she had become ill with the cancer which would take her life, she asked him: “Brian, why do people react the way they do to me? They appear scared.” “I said ‘Teddie, it’s the way you look at people’, because she used to have these piercing eyes. And she said, ‘well, I’m vain – I should be wearing glasses but I don’t’.” Despite the fear she engendered (intentionally or otherwise), there can be no doubt that Teddie left an indelible mark on social work education in Western Australia and on the individuals to pass through her care. An obituary published in the Australian Social Worker in 1977 following Teddie’s death in 1976 noted: “As a teacher and colleague Teddie was demanding; perfection was something she strived for and wanted. Many of her students would agree that they learnt more of the profession of social work from their close, demanding and at times personally harrowing relationships with her than from hours of formal tuition.” Margaret Stockbridge was born in England on February 16, 1922. She initially obtained a BSc (Econ.), passing with honours in 1948 and then taking work within the mental health system. In 1952, she obtained her Certificate in Psychiatric Social Work from the University of Manchester, before moving into the
31 Amesbury Road Bromley, Kent 5/9/72 My dear Jan, Please forgive this tardy reply to your letter: I’m afraid I have been trying without success to contact someone who might advise me about a second reader for your thesis. Everyone seems to be abroad! I can’t remember whether you sent to Routledge and Kegan Paul or to Allen & Unwin – I think the former and if so it may be that Allen and Unwin are worth trying. I’d be sorry to see it cut down to an article as I don’t think it would do it justice. You might also consult Professor Jayasuriya though as he doubtless has contacts. I was interested to hear your news re: Claremont. Libby Lloyd is now over here on holiday and has brought me up to date – as well since no-one at uni seems capable of putting pen to paper! I’m sure all PhD students get depressed – I certainly do at the thought of trying to write a ? review when I have worked my way through the relevant journal articles which are now becoming harder and harder to find! London is very cold, frost is forecast for tonight so I guess the so-called summer is over! I hope to go to York this month to a seminar on deviance which may restore my flagging morale. I spent yesterday at one of Her Majesty’s Borstals and think our delinquents have it very soft indeed! But then, half the population of British prisons seem to be sitting on roofs! Sorry to hear that Geraldine has been sick – I was afraid Shenton Park was a bit tough. Hope she finds something a bit cosier. The time is slipping by and I shall be back among you in a couple of months. Doubtless all will be unrecognisable. Love to you Teddie ONE OF THE FIRST Jan Stewart, 1972 graduate. Right, letter from Teddie to Jan in 1972.
child guidance clinics established in the early 20th century to tackle childhood ‘maladjustment’ – a condition which encapsulated everything from slight behaviour or psychological problems (such as shyness, thumb-sucking or bedwetting) to juvenile delinquency. Psychiatrists, psychologists and psychiatric social workers worked in teams to assess and determine treatment for a range of childhood
challenges. Teddie left the UK in 1958 to work in Perth’s own child guidance clinic, becoming one of only a handful of qualified social workers in the State and part of an even smaller group of qualified psychiatric social workers. She quickly involved herself in the WA branch of the AASW, operating as president from 1962-1965 at a time when the Association was in
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A TERRIFYINGLY GOOD TEACHER the final final stages of its nearly two-decade campaign to establish a professional social work course at UWA. She is recorded in the branch’s 1965 annual report as saying: “It is with great relief and pleasure, and some awe, that we are able to report the opening in March 1965 of the postgraduate diploma course in social work at the University of Western Australia. “For many years it has been our belief that a West Australian school of social work is essential to the satisfactory development of the profession and of the association in this State, and in the past 18 years no general annual report has failed to mention this need.” That March, she was appointed as temporary lecturer for the new course, a position which solidified in January 1966. For the first two years of the course Teddie was responsible for teaching all the professional subjects as well as securing fieldwork placements and supervisors. In addition, when course controller Dr Walter Tauss, a psychologist, went on sabbatical in 1967 and 1968 to complete social work qualifications in the UK, she acted as course controller. When Dr Tauss (by then inaugural Head of Department) passed away unexpectedly in January 1971, she again acted as head until the arrival of Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya. While teaching, Teddie completed a PhD on the side, published a number of journal articles, gave numerous lectures and talks at conferences and to women’s groups (even appearing on the ABC’s Lateline in a discussion about the role of the social worker), and continued to be involved with the AASW as a strong advocate for social work practice and professionalism. That dedication to professionalism and excellence
became her legacy to countless students. Even people with whom she clashed – such as former AASW WA branch president Jennifer Page (later Lefroy) - do not question the mark she made. Jennifer, who in the late 1960s was attempting to introduce more social workers into the then budding and much-maligned field of geriatric services, said she would never forget Teddie telephoning her to share her thoughts on the matter. “We had been going for 18 months or two years when we decided to invite another social worker to join us, and Teddie rang me, incensed at this, and said, ‘wasn’t it time I got off my bum and did some real social work?’. “Now, Teddie must have said thousands of things to me over the course of the years but the one I remember was ‘get off your bum and do some real social work’. Just like ‘where were you when Kennedy was assassinated?’ I will remember where I was when I had that phone call from Teddie. Just the anger I felt – it was so typical of the attitude that old people don’t matter. “Of course what one must remember about Teddie is that whatever her faults, whatever her advantages or her virtues, she was a very strong-willed, highly intelligent woman, and therefore she made a mark as a social worker within the community where social workers were seen as sort of ‘do-gooder ladies’. Anybody called themselves a social worker who did any kind of charity work within the community, but Teddie did bring that element of professionalism.” A few graduates who had been petrified of Teddie during their studies formed closer relationships with her after graduating, gaining an unexpected insight into the woman beneath the tough shell. Jan Stewart, who was one of those to visit Teddie occasionally in
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her Scarborough flat, said that even though she was still rather in awe of her former lecturer, she ended up seeing her as something of a mentor. “She was always interested in what we were doing, and I think I realised by then that she was actually probably a very lonely woman,” Jan said. “I don’t think she had a very extensive friendship network, so I think I recognised that at some level she really needed to know she was still valued.” She said it was a real lesson in life to think that Teddie probably never had any idea of how influential she had been to so many people and the lives of those they in turn went on to touch. “It makes you realise: be careful what you do and what you say to people because you can sow seeds that are positive or you can deeply hurt people and do damage to things. You may never know the outcome of your actions.” •
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FAMOUS WORDS Above, a scanned page from the AASW WA Branch annual report, 1965, including Teddie Stockbridge’s famous quote on the establishment of the course: “It is with great relief, pleasure and awe that we are able to report the opening, in March 1965, of the postgraduate Diploma course in Social Work at the University of Western Australia.”
CHANGING LANDSCAPES Above, aerial view showing whole campus, circa 1960 (3449P UWA Archives). Right, UWA Arts building. Below, Social Sciences corridor.
I found her totally intimidating . . . I think the more she thought you could handle it, the more terrifying she was ~ Sabina Leitmann
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CHAPTER 4 On the Smell of a Gestetner and an Oily Rag
A
defining characteristic of Social Work’s history at UWA has been the struggle for sufficient resources to support and grow the staff and its educational offerings. The Gestetner machine that used to pump out course notes for the social work students in the first few years was an early symbol of how strapped the department was.
Brian Wooller, who graduated from the second UWA Social Work intake in 1967 before being persuaded by senior tutor Margaret Grogan to join the understaffed department in late 1970, remembers using the old-fashioned machine alongside founding lecturer Teddie Stockbridge. “One of the most interesting jobs we had in those days was with the Gestetner, because it wasn’t just
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STEPPING OUT Professor Jayasuriya doing what he did best - leading the way in front of colleagues.
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teaching: we had to run off the notes as well,” Brian said. “There was a secretary but she was too busy so we would collate it. There would be Teddie and me around the table: spread it all out, collect it and staple it, collect it and staple it. “There were two and some parttime people running the show at that point. It very much ran on the smell of an oily rag. “It wasn’t until Laki turned up that we managed to increase the staff.” Brian worked in the Department for five years, first as senior tutor and later as lecturer, teaching social welfare theory, history of social work, social administration, social policy and research methods. He also took responsibility for the fieldwork education program. He later became a prominent and frequently outspoken member of the professional association, with key roles at State and national levels of the AASW. His entry into UWA’s Social Work Department occurred with the help of inaugural head Dr Walter Tauss, who smoothed the way for his initial enrolment (and a State Government cadetship) despite him not having fulfilled all the prerequisites. It helped that there was a ready-made connection – Brian’s mother knew Dr Tauss’ father, who was the local Watkins man (a door to door salesman of household items). However, given the dominance of women in the then embryonic profession, it soon became clear there was another motive at play. “When I turned up for the first lecture with Teddie Stockbridge, I knew exactly why old Wally had bent over backwards to get me on the course, because they were all women and there were only six of us,” Brian said.
There were two and some part-time people running the show . . . it very much ran on the smell of an oily rag ~ Brian Wooller “I think in the early days in particular, social work was attractive to women because it was an alternative to nursing and teaching - and probably more interesting than either of those, with a lot more freedoms attached to it. I think over time a lot of those freedoms have disappeared. You can’t be as bolshy as you once might have been and get away with it. But a lot of the early women were very strong, but gentle, if that makes sense.” Dr Tauss died in January 1971 just three months after Brian joined the department, leaving him and Teddie as the only staff.
“She was the lecturer and I was the senior tutor, and that was the staff, so we prevailed upon dear old Margaret Grogan, who had feted me to take the job, to come back. And then Teddie got sick – cancer, as we discovered later. So there were times when it was just Margaret and I, senior tutors. And they complain about the workload now – let me tell you!”
A TIME OF GROWTH The arrival in 1971 of social psychologist Professor Laksiri ‘Laki’ Jayasuriya – another in a line of psychologists to lay the foundations of the course - heralded a period
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RUNNING ON A SHOESTRING Top, Irwin Street Buildings 1980 (5768P UWA Archives). Middle, Diana Silver, Brian Wooller and Ben Schlesinger. Above, Graduation party, 1990.
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of gradual staff and department growth. This was at least partly attributable to the new head’s finesse in negotiating the often tumultuous world of university politics. “Laki was a very good university
ON THE SMELL OF A GESTETNER AND AN OILY RAG politician,” former President of the WA Branch of the AASW Jennifer Page (now Lefroy) said. “He knew how to play university politics, and that made a difference. People were pretty angry at the beginning that he wasn’t a social worker, because that was the history of social work departments. It was the same at Curtin where there was not a social worker in charge initially.” Brian recalled one occasion when the AASW was undertaking
of lecturers and tutors to the department, some of whom would become important and long-term fixtures. He continued to push for an increase in staff numbers to develop a nucleus of specialist staff, saying that no matter what the size of the student intake, a professional school of social work must be built around a minimum of well qualified professional staff. However, despite some improvements by 1973 (when there
its regular accreditation review, and almost didn’t give the UWA course a pass. “They would go in every few years and look at the course and say, yes, it’s got the tick,” Mr Wooller said. “Well, there was one time when we didn’t give the tick to Laki. They no longer use people from the same state but I was on that panel and we knocked him back for some reason – he had reduced the prerequisites or something similar – but he was able to use the fact against the University to improve the situation. He always played a bit of a long game. People forget there’s always more to it.” Over the next few years, Professor Jayasuriya added a series
was a student intake of 19), there were still only four full-time staff including himself, plus a temporary tutor and various visiting staff. In the department’s annual report that year, Professor Jayasuriya remarked for the second year running: “The problem of staffing continues to dominate as the single most important factor affecting the future of this department.” He noted with regret that no extra staff had been granted for 1974 and argued that the shortage was hampering the development of the social work program. As student numbers expanded – 37 enrolled in 1979 - things slowly changed, but even during the best of times there have never been
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HAPPY DAYS Above right, opening of the Family Service Centre, 1977: L-R Christine Coonan, Margo Nicholls, Patricia Hansen, Brian Cheers, Judy Cheers. Above left, students on placement at the Family Service Centre, 1982: L-R Bob Huxley (WAIT student), Debbie Street, Ann Lumsdaine (UWA students), Tom Barrett (supervisor), Rae Lindsay (Director) and Laura Cassidy (UWA student). Images from Looking Back
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more than nine academics on staff. The department made do by prevailing upon a diverse stream of visiting and temporary lecturers, many of them local practitioners and academics from related disciplines, and others academics visiting from overseas. Staff additions during the 1970s and 1980s included Frank Pavlin, Brian and Judy Cheers, Helen McMahon, Audrey Bolger, Tom Barrett, Rae Lindsay, Patricia Tulloch (later Harris), Maria Harries, Mike Clare, Pat Hansen, Owen Hicks, Jim Ife, and Christine Choo. Most had been practicing social workers and a number, including Rae Lindsay, Judy Cheers, Maria Harries, Owen Hicks,
Pat Hansen and Christine Choo, were UWA social work graduates. Administrative staff members included departmental secretaries Marie Harris, Pam Hayden, Judy Grimshaw and later, Rosa Catalano, who is still with Social Work and Social Policy after 25 years.
FAMILY SERVICE CENTRE A key development during this era – and one of Professor Jayasuriya’s proudest innovations – was the establishment of the pioneering Family Service Centre. The centre opened in 1977, with $5,000 in hardwon University funding, as a place where Social Work students could gain campus-based practice under the close supervision of academicpractitioners. The service, run by department staff part-time on top of their regular academic workloads,
offered counselling to individuals, couples and families and carried out research relating to educational methodology in practice teaching. It also established a popular Financial Counselling Service which continued for six years; and provided professional development for academic staff and practitioners in the field. Over its 10-year lifetime, the centre, under the direction first of Brian Cheers and then Rae Lindsay, supported the placements of 96 social work students from UWA and Curtin. Although it closed in 1988 – starved of dedicated staff and further University funds despite two committee recommendations to properly support it – the centre was seen by many as a success. Former Social Work lecturer, Emeritus Professor Owen Hicks, was one of the staff to work part-time in the centre.
EARLY LEADERS Below, Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya with Doctor Graycar, visitor to the Department (13085P UWA Archives) Bottom, Professor Jayasuriya, 2015. Bottom left, Brian Wooller.
That was the great struggle, to get recognition. We were like a lone wolf out in no man’s land . . . isolated from the main structures of the University ~ Professor Laksiri (Laki) Jayasuriya
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“It gave staff credibility and it gave them immediate contact with clients,” Professor Hicks said. “It was limited because the nature of the clients wasn’t a typical cross-section from the community: it dealt with marital and family counselling issues and didn’t deal very much with the hard edge of welfare and poverty, but that’s not to say the people who came in didn’t have problems.
ON THE SMELL OF A GESTETNER AND AN OILY RAG “I think it was particularly useful for a whole host of reasons – that sort of profiling, that testing of what you teach actually in practice.” Professor Jayasuriya said he saw the centre as one of the big achievements of his tenure of office. “I think we were the first in the whole of Australia to have something like that and I struggled to get it - it was not easy to get funding,” he said. “It was not an easy task to gain initial University support and the fact we did get it gave us a different dimension and recognition within the system.” The centre had been part of a wider push by Professor Jayasuriya to gain more respect for the department and to widen its focus. The professor, a dynamic, intellectual individual with a prolific publication output and a growing reputation as both a scholar and an influencer on social policy around multiculturalism, anti-racism, citizenship and welfare, knew the path to prosperity lay with improving the course’s profile and position in the University. “That was the great struggle, to
get recognition,” he said recently. “We were like a lone wolf out in no man’s land and therefore sort of isolated from the main structures of the University. One of my main struggles therefore was to integrate the Social Work program within the University’s governance structures. That could only mean by getting into a faculty, because everything is faculty oriented. That struggle for getting faculty membership was very important.” His other key goal was to develop a strong academic and policy profile – a desire that at times caused considerable conflict within a department staffed by, as he later described it, a diverse mix of ‘conservative bureaucratic professionals, radicals of various hues, incrementalists, social reformers, armchair activists and fashionable ideologues’. Although Professor Jayasuriya understood, respected and fought tenaciously to promote the goals of social work practice, he also knew that an increased emphasis on research and policy was critical to elevating the course’s standing.
PARTY TIME Graduating students, 1990.
“The link between policy and practice was the key and central feature in the early days of developing the school,” he said recently. “We were not going to be just simply a practice-oriented department. The whole question of straddling the two wasn’t easy but we were trying, as much as possible in terms of the capacity of the department and the resources available, to engage in it.” In a 1981 speech to graduates, he described the duality the department wrestled with – having to equip graduates with direct service skills as well as an understanding of indirect service such as policy formulation and implementation – as its Achilles heel. Although he believed that direct service giving would remain the mainstay of the profession, his aim was to train professionals who could critically evaluate their own actions and involvement. Accordingly, he had endeavoured to develop a ‘scientific/professional model’ of social work training that conformed to the norms of an academic community, as opposed to an ‘action-oriented training model’. “This has been part of my philosophy, which I hope has been widely shared by my colleagues,” he told the graduates. “It assumes that we can serve the needs of society and still pursue the aims of disinterested scholarship.” He later added: “An education system, whether it be in social work, medicine, accountancy or law, which fails to achieve a fitness between the two worlds of work and learning is doomed to disaster. But this fitness is indeed difficult to achieve . . .”
THE POLICY DIVIDE In 1974, Professor Jayasuriya was appointed Foundation Chair of Social Work. A year later, as part of the policy push, he brought in senior lecturer Patricia Tulloch
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“I was pretty obdurate at the time and when you’ve been trained to think historically and to think sociologically, you keep coming back to that. However I am also much more cognisant than I would have been that it’s extremely helpful, say if you’re poor and your landlord is knocking at your door ... to have a skilled person helping you sort through the problems and how you’re going to approach
(now an Emerita Professor of Murdoch University). Like many of the department’s founders, Trish Harris, as she later became known, had studied in the United Kingdom and had a degree in history and one in sociology. She arrived as a non-professional with an interest in the structural reasons behind disadvantage and inequality and, as part of her teaching responsibilities, focused on the areas of social policy and social administration. Although many of the students were receptive, Professor Harris and lecturer Audrey Bolger - also brought in as a non-professional - frequently found themselves in heated dispute with their practitioner colleagues over the relative merits of policy versus practice. Those more focused on the interpersonal helping elements
of social work felt the emphasis on policy detracted from the requirement of a social work course to train competent, service-oriented professionals. Those on the policy side believed social workers had just as important a role to play in questioning and shaping the policies which impacted those they served. It was a battle being played out in social work schools across Australia, and one Professor Harris, with the benefit of hindsight, now reflects on somewhat ruefully. “That tension or ideological argument was going right through social work at that point and I mean, to some extent it still does,” she said. “But I think it’s evened out. I think both sides have acknowledged that they need to learn from the other. The profession has kind of grown up, you know.
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FORWARD THINKING Clockwise from left, UWA Arts building, Social Sciences building, Patricia Tulloch aka Trish Harris, Rae Lindsay with students, Family Service Centre.
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them one by one. It’s pretty darned important. So yes, I’ve mellowed.” Professor Harris said the old battles seemed quite quaint in retrospect and, if she could do it all again, instead of seeing the two elements as oppositional notions she would see them as complementary. “But they are specialist areas, so you could have one unit on the policy side of it, you could have one in helping people to get through particular situations, and you could have one called integrated practice where you bring those perspectives together. The difficulty was we saw them as rivals.” In 1981, Professor Harris briefly took over as Head of Department, before leaving UWA in 1982 to head to New Zealand. On her return to Australia she moved to Murdoch
ON THE SMELL OF A GESTETNER AND AN OILY RAG University, where for many years she was Professor in Sociology and Social Policy with the School of Social Inquiry.
New Home, New Name As part of his continuing efforts to give equal weight to both practice and policy, Professor Jayasuriya successfully pushed during the 1970s for a name change to the Department of Social Work and Social Administration. The new name took effect in 1979. In 1982, Professor Peter Boyce (Politics) and Professor Reg Moir (Agriculture) were appointed to a working party charged with examining Social Work’s role and position at the University. By now Professor Jayasuriya was once again Discipline Chair, having resumed the headship earlier that year. The Boyce Committee noted the uncertainty that had surrounded Social Work’s history at UWA and the debate that had persisted about the appropriateness of retaining it; however it also noted the high approval rating for UWA Social Work graduates among major employers in the public and private sectors. “Interviewees representing the two major employing agencies avoided an expression of outright preference for UWA graduates to WAIT graduates, but all insisted that abandonment of social work teaching by the University would be not merely regrettable, but disastrous,” the working party’s report said. Ultimately, the committee agreed there was an ongoing need for university-educated social workers (ideally at a rate of 40 university and 60 WAIT graduates per year) and recommended the course should be retained at UWA and located within the Faculty of Arts. It also suggested that staffing levels should not be allowed to drop below eight, and that the staff needed to pay more attention to research (see separate
Committee’s view that such a move would be unsuitable). However, in the process it determined that the department had a very restrictive degree pattern and was ‘poorly staffed and resourced by a University indifferent to its aspirations’. It recommended a change to a two-plus-two degree in order to create more course flexibility. The existing BSW degree was subsequently broadened to admit undergraduates who had completed two years of relevant undergraduate study. Meanwhile, Professor Jayasuriya’s continuing efforts to give the department more
story, Research or Bust, p86. At the time, the department – with a staff of five professional social workers and three non-professional social scientists – was the second smallest social work department in Australia. The move to Arts finally took effect in 1983. The fit was never particularly comfortable – a problem anticipated by the working party, which acknowledged that Arts was not an ideal home but said it was more suitable than any other existing faculty. Nevertheless, the relocation represented the successful culmination of one of Professor Jayasuriya’s original goals – finding the department a faculty home.
The move had barely been settled when the department found itself with yet another fight on its hands: fending off an external recommendation that it should relocate to Murdoch University. After an outcry by Social Work staff, a new UWA working party was formed to examine the idea. The review by Professors Allen German and Andre Morkel eventually scotched the Murdoch suggestion (echoing the Boyce
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ALL SMILES Final year students 1977. Opposite page, Professor Jayasuriya in front of the portrait of Wally Tauss.
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intellectual depth had included introducing a doctoral program in 1981. The first PhD student, Denzil McCotter, completed her doctorate in 1985 under Professor Jayasuriya’s supervision, however it wasn’t until the 1990s and 2000s, under the careful stewardship of Associate Professor Maria Harries, that the postgraduate research program really started to bear fruit. During its time with the Arts Faculty, the department underwent
a number of further name changes in tandem with wider University restructures. In 1990 it was known as the School of Social Work and Social Administration, changing soon after to the School of Social Work and Social Policy. By the late 1990s it was again known as the Department of Social Work and Social Policy. Then in 2001, in the wake of a University restructure intended to encourage interdisciplinary, inter-school and inter-faculty research and teaching networks, it became known as the Discipline of Social Work and Social Policy within the Faculty of Arts’ School of Social and Cultural Studies. It is now known as Social Work and Social Policy within the School of Population Health.
Elder Statesman Apart from campaigning tirelessly for the department’s continuing growth and increased research capabilities, Professor Jayasuriya spent the majority of his tenure publishing assiduously himself. A pioneer in Australian multiculturalism, he had been one of the first Asian people to be offered a teaching position at Sydney University. He spent much of his career alongside his work at UWA participating in numerous public bodies and received multiple awards, including a Centenary Medal in 2003 and a UWA Honorary Doctorate of Letters in 2006. He also published a series of scholarly books examining subjects such as cultural identity, immigration policy, race, nationalism, and Sri Lankan and global social development. Now an Emeritus Professor and Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Professor Jayasuriya is often credited with having put social work on the map in Western Australia. “Laki was one of the best things that happened for social work in this State,” Brian Wooller said. “Given he wasn’t a qualified
(Laki) fought the battles of establishing and really keeping social work going and developing it; having a vision for what social work could be ~ Dr Sue Young social worker in the terms of the Association, they shouldn’t have given it to him, but he was right to the fore and did a lot of really good stuff. “I think he gave Social Work a profile that I don’t think subsequent people have been able to build on. He always had a positive approach to things and always had a clear goal – even though he may not have shared it.” Many who passed through Social Work as students or who worked with Professor Jayasuriya recall not only his powerful intellect, but his boundless energy, his wicked sense of humour and the enthusiasm with which he offered up his endless ideas – a bit like a firecracker going off, as some described it. “He was a bundle of energy,” current AASW WA Branch president and 1976 graduate Sabina Leitmann said. “He was a little dynamo and spoke very fast and was very passionate and very smart. I found him intellectually stimulating. If you were a student who was confident and you wished to dialogue, he was very open to that. He welcomed robust discussion.” “He was so full of ideas that they would trip over each other,” Trish Harris added. “I remember Denzil McCotter once came to my office after she did a session with him and she had a little recorder with her. I said ‘Oh, do you record your sessions with Laki?’ and she said ‘Yes, I have to, he keeps changing tack. It’s like walking along a minefield: you take one step and then suddenly boom! Another idea will come up behind you!’”
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Upon her retirement in 2003, the late Rae Lindsay described Professor Jayasuriya as one of the most important mentors of her life. “Certainly my formation as an academic has been more strongly influenced by him than any other person,” she said. “He socialised me into academia (and) awakened in me a real appreciation and concern for multicultural issues.” Now, with the passing of years, many regard Professor Jayasuriya as the discipline’s elder. “I just see him as the elder statesman par excellence,” 2002 graduate Pip White said. “He was always accessible, always helpful.” Dr Susan Young, a 1988 graduate, former Discipline Chair and current coordinator of postgraduate research at the School of Population Health, said she hadn’t fully appreciated Professor Jayasuriya as a student learning psychology in the social work course. “It was only after I stopped being a student and I came back and started to do more study and work here that I realised how engaged and important he was in the multicultural era,” she said. “He also fought the battles of establishing and really keeping social work going and developing it; having a vision for what social work could be. “I know him very much better now as a colleague and value him immensely. He’s our elder – our wise man. Somebody visited from New Zealand on one occasion and just met him very briefly, and he said ‘You need to hang on to him – he’s your wise man.’” “And that’s right – he is.” •
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CHAPTER 5
The Reluctant Academic
head Trish Harris sighed, when her old colleague’s name came up. “She was somebody who was thoroughly grounded in herself; perceptive, too. She somehow seemed to escape the battles that surrounded the rest of us – a remarkable, intelligent, lovely person.” Rae graduated with a Master of Social Work in 1973, winning national recognition via the prestigious Norma Parker Award for her research thesis entitled Crisis Theory: A Critical Overview. The thesis later became the Department of Social Work’s first official publication. After a spell as tutor, Rae left UWA again to become a social worker at Princess Margaret Hospital. She loved the job and it was only the persistence of Head of Department Professor Laki Jayasuriya, who considered her one of his most outstanding students, that dragged her away from practice and into academia. For this reason, fellow 1973 graduate, and later social
W
hen Rae Lindsay’s name is introduced into a conversation, there’s frequently a pause and a softening in the tone. A wistfulness creeps in which makes clear that, here, we’re talking about somebody special. A faded photograph of the 1975 student intake has Rae, who had
just joined the staff as a temporary senior tutor, standing at the front and to one side. Youthfully slim and standing slightly askew, clad in a soft blouse and skirt and towering, smiling, over some of her companions, she immediately draws the eye. “Wonderful, lovely, lovely Rae,” former lecturer and Department
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activist and politician Grace Vaughan, dubbed her ‘The Reluctant Academic’. Nevertheless, she excelled, taking to teaching with a deep commitment and passion. She became a cheerful and treasured member of the Department staff and took on a number of roles, most particularly spending nine years as the Director of the innovative Family Service Centre. The centre, a key initiative of Professor Jayasuriya’s era, ran from 1977 to 1988. It offered counselling to individuals, couples and families and served as a place where social
32 Social Work at UWA ●
work students could undertake campus-based practice under the close supervision of practioneracademics. Rae commented later that the nature of the centre offered staff an opportunity to get to know many students more personally than was possible in the usual university setting. The venture, run by staff part-time in addition to their usual academic workload, was considered a success, but eventually foundered due to the University’s refusal to provide further funding. “The only time I saw Rae Lindsay moved to tears was when we cleared out the little house named the Family Service Centre at 1 Arras Street, Nedlands,” long-time department and Family Service Centre colleague Dr Tom Barrett wrote after Rae’s death. In a page-long article in the February 2008 edition of The UWA Social Worker February 2008, he spoke of her two faces: the more familiar, happy and laughing Rae that most students saw, and the ‘Easter Island’ face encountered by an unfortunate few. “The latter was Rae at her serious best,” Dr Barrett wrote. “She often referred to putting on her Easter Island face, the one characterised by the stone statues on Easter Island, with students and
in staff meetings when required. I visited Easter Island on my own in 2002 but was never really alone – I had dozens of Rae Lindsays all around me.” He said he only saw Rae really angry once, in a staff meeting, ‘red-faced and standing just like the Moai (Easter Island statue)’. “It was an impressive delivery,” he wrote. “Generally Rae was very even in her temperament and had a calming effect on those around her.” In his own tribute to Rae in the same edition, Professor Jayasuriya wrote that Rae’s death had left a deep void in many quarters. He described her as a scholarly practitioner and exemplary researcher, a devoted member of the United Church, Wembley Downs, a wonderful and valued colleague, and a close family friend for more than three decades. “Rae and I enjoyed a special relationship . . . as ‘spirit’ friends, a ‘spirit’ blended from different faiths – one Christian and the other, Buddhist,” he wrote. He said what sustained Rae in life was her desire to working towards a ‘Just Community’, with particular concern for the excluded and marginal. Her prize work, Recognizing Spirituality. The Interface between Social Work and Faith
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She somehow seemed to escape the battles that surrounded the rest of us ~ Patricia Harris TEACHING FROM THE HEART Opposite left, Ian Scarman of UWA’s Department of Management with Rae Lindsay. Opposite below, 1975 student group with Rae Lindsay in red blouse. Above left, Rae Lindsay with other staff including Rosa Catalano, Maria Harries and Tom Barrett, 1990. Above right, Rae Lindsay supervising Sister Naomi McClements.
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(UWA Press, 2002) brought together two of her passions in life – ‘the spiritual journey with its many ups and downs, mysteries and joy, and the education of would-be social workers’. By the time she retired in 2003, Rae had taught and supervised an estimated 1,100 students. At her farewell she said that although she would miss the beautiful campus and her social work colleagues, she would miss the students even more. She described how, in the face of potential burnout, they had helped bolster her as she worked towards her dream for a more compassionate and just society. “My enthusiasm and energy for this seemingly impossible task has been energised and kept alive by a steady stream of students – passionate about justice issues – who have both shared this dream and brought me new insights and understanding,” she said. Rae Lindsay died unexpectedly, but peacefully, in her sleep, in January 2008. She was 68. •
CHAPTER 6
T
But WAIT, There’s More
he State Government’s decision in 1966 to fast-track a second school of social work when the first one was still barely finding its feet shocked those who had fought long and hard to
establish Social Work at UWA. The second course was to be offered by the brand new Western Australian Institute of Technology - part of a Government push to professionalise the public service.
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Current Australian Association of Social Workers WA Branch President Sabina Leitmann said the dismay was understandable: with association members having spent nearly two decades attempting to persuade UWA to take social work on, the establishment of a second course with virtually the stroke of a pen was a slap in the face. “For 18 years, this small band of women had been working to try to get UWA – the reluctant family – to take this foster child, social work, into the family,” Sabina said. “And yet here was the will of government saying, ‘we need a technical college, we need applied professionals, and we’re going to set up a social work program’. So money was thrown at it and from go to whoa it all happened within the space of, at most, two years.” She said the federal and state governments at the time were expanding tertiary education but didn’t want more old-style universities. “They wanted these institutes of technology where they could deliver professionals who would perform within the community. They would apply knowledge. They wouldn’t be these ivory tower people philosophising – they would be the technocrats and the doers of the world. “The problem was they didn’t consult the local professional association at all. They just bypassed it all and decided they would set it up and then they went to the association and said, ‘if we set up this course will you accredit it?’” Sabina said employers who had seen UWA dragging its heels
on its own course, apparently uninterested in producing social workers in the numbers required, were, for the most part, happy to have another option available. Although many would later stand up for the importance of having social workers trained at university level, the idea of having graduates available after a three-and-a-half year course compared to UWA’s fiveyear program was attractive. “When WAIT started, the Health Department, the Child Welfare Department, mental health – they all saw an opportunity to fast-track a qualifying program that could staff the public service,” Sabina said. “That then created enormous tensions. The social work course at WAIT was on the nose from the perspective of the professional association for many, many years, because the Government just went ahead and did it and consulted with the profession afterwards. They really felt cut out of the dynamics.” In a sign of the AASW’s unhappiness at the way the WAIT course had emerged, it delayed national accreditation of the course – initially an associateship diploma - until some of its concerns were addressed. Accreditation was finally granted in 1973 and the associateship was converted to a degree, but Sabina said the tension lasted well into the 1990s, with the relationship between WAIT (later Curtin University) and the AASW distant, and leadership roles in the association predominantly filled by UWA graduates. “Grace Vaughan, Brian Wooller, Joe Calleja, Maria Harries – they were all UWA people and, although I am a UWA graduate, I was also a Curtin academic, so I’m actually the first person in that leadership role who straddles both universities,” she said. Professor Jim Ife, who was head of Social Work and Social Policy at both Curtin and UWA at different
“It was fairly interesting. There was a kind of reluctance to take the other department too seriously, if you like. I saw it in both sides and I thought it was quite crazy.” Sabina said part of the reaction against a WAIT-based course stemmed from social work’s historical roots within universities in both the UK and the US. “One of the earliest social work programs was within the London School of Economics, which is one of the showcase places, and in America social work had been professionalised quite early on and
times throughout the 1980s and 1990s, was bemused by the tension between the two courses. Although the university/institute of technology rivalry wasn’t exclusive to Western Australia, he found the mistrust between the UWA and Curtin courses strange. “I sat in meetings in both schools of social work in that time, each saying we want to cooperate more with the other, and in each one they would say, ‘oh we’ve always been keen on cooperation, but they’re just not interested in cooperating at all’,” he said.
“There was this mythology in each department that the other one was the uncooperative one. Or someone would say something and it related to something somebody had said 10 years ago or something.
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THE RELUCTANT FAMILY Left, Sabina Leitmann, AASW WA Branch President. Above, early WAIT Campus, circa 1967. Photo courtesy of Curtin University.
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had a long university tradition,” she said. “So social work in Australia could draw on those traditions to locate itself from the beginning within universities.” By 1970, the association had
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE come to realise there was a market for both kinds of course: an undergraduate degree such as that offered by WAIT and a postgraduate degree of the kind UWA could offer. The arrival of the WAIT course had set off a series of extended reviews at UWA (see Early Battles, pp13): first as to whether the UWA course should even continue, and then after a passionate campaign for its retention succeeded - the form it should take and the qualification it should give. Although it was agreed that a 17-month diploma course was insufficient and awkward to run, opinion was divided on what should replace it. Employers made it clear that they preferred a fouryear undergraduate degree, saying ‘any profession needs the basic degree course as its foundation, rather than something tacked on to another discipline’. Some argued that the Master’s qualification being pushed by UWA Social Work staff would be unrealistic, unnecessary, and setting the sights too high. Such a degree would ‘put social workers out of step with all other professional groups in the hospitals’ and ‘much routine social work would not provide adequate job satisfaction for a person with a Master’s degree’. The AASW, however, argued there would be a need for both, with plenty of room for social workers with differing degrees of academic attainment. They pointed out that social work agencies would require social workers for positions requiring varying responsibilities, and that it would be appropriate for some to have a first degree in social work and others to have postgraduate degrees. In the end, the UWA subcommittee charged with determining Social Work’s future shape was persuaded to a Master’s degree, with the change taking effect from 1971.
Meanwhile, the WAIT course had switched to a four-year degree in 1970. It immediately became a larger degree program than the one at UWA - 35 students enrolled in the course in 1967 to UWA’s 17 - and by 1982 WAIT had 18 full-time staff compared to UWA’s five professional Social Work staff. WAIT would continue to turn out a greater number of students than UWA, with its limited resources, has ever been able to manage. Jim said the size difference had advantages and disadvantages for both courses: at UWA the smaller staff and student groups meant people got to know each other better, and worked well together. “The WAIT department was too big for that,” he said. “It tended to be a bit more bureaucratised. But on the other hand, the advantage of a larger department is you’ve got more flexibility – people can be teaching the units that they want to teach rather than the units they’re teaching because nobody else is there to teach them.” He said that although there were some socio-political differences between the courses, he was never convinced that one course was better than another. “There were very good graduates coming out of both,” he said. “Overall I don’t know that there was a heck of a lot of difference between the two in relation to the kind of things that were taught. I think both departments operated on a philosophy that said there are different ways to do social work, there are different sorts of social workers, and social workers work in different fields and work from different perspectives. We’re not here to tell you how you should do social work, we’re here to help you work out what sort of social worker you’re going to be, because whatever you do you’ll face challenges and issues that you need to deal with.”
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Sabina agreed: “Although the structure might have been different, in the end the students had to come out ticking off the same boxes as far as knowledge and skills goes. I would suggest the UWA course initially saw itself as more exclusive – more western suburbs. That fits with the whole ethos of UWA. Curtin has always been more proletariat.” The AASW WA now has a healthy relationship with Curtin, UWA and Edith Cowan universities, and whatever rivalry may have existed in the past, there has certainly been plenty of cross-pollination between the Curtin and UWA social work courses since. A number of UWA Social Work graduates and staff members have either done their initial degree at Curtin or shifted between Curtin and UWA as academics and students - including new Head of Social Work and Social Policy, Associate Professor Judy Esmond, who graduated from and taught at Curtin University at various times before joining UWA Social Work and
Although the structure might have been different, in the end the students had to come out ticking off the same boxes as far as knowledge and skills goes ~ Sabina Leitmann Social Policy in February 2015. All social work programs also collaborate on research projects and in the supervision of PhD students, and Curtin and UWA, with the AASW, are joint founding partners in the WA Social Worker of the Year Awards (which ECU also sponsors). Most people now agree that, despite the anxiety the WAIT course’s arrival caused, in the long term it has been important to have both schools (and now three). “It has allowed for healthy competition between programs, with each developing differing areas of expertise as well as offering prospective students a choice as to where they undertake their professional education,” Sabina said. “The growth of programs has also increased the opportunity for social workers to complete qualifying higher degrees by research, thereby expanding the knowledge base of the profession.” •
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HAPPY DAYS Clockwise from left, students celebrate the end of the year, 1994; an end of year gift from the class of 2008; a selection of PHds; and the quadrangle of the Social Science building where staff and students held many gatherings over the years.
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â—?
37 Social Work at UWA â—?
CHAPTER 7 Looking Back: Reflections on Twenty Five Years 1965-1990
than once to take responsibility for the course - Social Work’s presence there was an uneasy fit. It would remain with the faculty for nearly 30 years, finally severing ties with its move, in 2012, into the School of Population Health within the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences. Looking Back author Jenny Gardner, who graduated from the course in 1976 and received her PhD in 2011, was commissioned by ‘Prof’ Laki Jayasuriya to write a history of the department which would examine its early beginnings and highlight the achievements of those associated with it. The result, launched at the then school’s 25thanniversary event, was the 50-page booklet Looking Back: Reflections on Twenty Five Years 1965-1990. Jenny said the key theme to emerge during her research for the booklet was the struggle the course had had to find its identity. “The overall theme I think was that sense of struggle, particularly in the beginning – that struggle for professionalism and the struggle for recognition,” DOCUMENTING HISTORY Looking Back author Jenny Gardner and, above, the book which charted 25 years of history.
A
lthough it seemed sometimes as though it might never make it, by 1990 the then School of Social Work and Social Administration had stumbled to an important milestone – its 25th anniversary. Having clung like a barnacle to an institution which often seemed ambivalent - even hostile - towards its very presence, the school at that point was still relatively small
and led by long-time head Laksiri Jayasuriya (although he would retire the following year). In 1983, it had been incorporated into the Faculty of Arts – an important step in creating a sense of security after years of being isolated within the University. Nevertheless, having been taken under the wing of a faculty with vastly different imperatives - and which had previously declined more
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she said. “That was why Laki was always strong at trying to develop research, because of the credibility research offers in the profession.” Apart from detailing early staff members and developments, Looking Back also focused on the achievements of graduates including former Catholic Archbishop of Perth Barry Hickey; Denzil McCotter, who was the first student to be awarded a PhD in Social Work at UWA and went on to senior positions in the WA Department of Corrections; and political firebrand Grace Vaughan, who graduated in 1973 and later became a vocal and forthright member of the Western Australian Parliament, as well as President of the International Federation of Social Workers. Jenny did her initial Social Work degree when the course was based in the Physics building – temporary digs during the period between its first home on Irwin Street and its subsequent long-term home in the Social Sciences building. She went on to work in the hospital sector,
and is now Manager of Pastoral Services at St John of God Hospital in Subiaco. She said she had come through the course during the Whitlam years when social work knew no bounds, but perceived that the profession was now much more bounded. “My sense is that social work roles on the whole have become much more specific and defined,” she said. She described people like Professor Jayasuriya, Associate Professor Maria Harries and early graduate and lecturer Brian Wooller as real visionaries who had had the energy and drive to promote social work and its contribution. “Prof was the driving force,” she said. “I did my research under him and I would go in with my chapter and he would have a pile of books this high and say, ‘just go and read these, Jenny’. He always had an incredible ability to synthesise material and to read and to be up to date. “His multicultural approach
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The overall theme I think was that sense of struggle, particularly in the beginning – that struggle for professionalism and the struggle for recognition ~ Jenny Gardner
VISION AND PURPOSE Jenny Gardner with Nancy Patterson (nee Keogh) and Rae Lindsay.
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was quite innovative for his time. And he wasn’t a social worker, so he always had that challenge. He’s developed a great deal of admiration - people speak very fondly of him as well as with great respect. He had a very strong vision about what social work could offer and it was a professional, intellectual contribution as well as a practical contribution to the community.” She said Maria Harries had been another key figure in both the department and the wider community. “She’s had enormous credibility in the field as well as being president of the AASW,” Jenny said. “She continued to supervise her students after she left and until they completed, which she didn’t have to do. But it’s just this deepseated commitment to Social Work and to her colleagues and students that goes way beyond the call of duty. She’s also had a very strong community role. “One of the things about Social Work is it takes people into community issues and community areas. That means people become involved more broadly than just with their jobs: community doesn’t stop at 5pm. It probably attracts people with that kind of interest – it’s a way of life.” •
CHAPTER 8 Areas of Practice and Graduate Achievement
E
arly graduates headed primarily into the fields of child welfare, health and mental health at a time of enormous social change. Some would go on to have a significant impact on their respective areas along the way, actively fostering the careers of the countless young social workers who followed them into the field. As the profession grew, so too did the scope of practice, with social workers moving into increasingly diverse areas. First intake graduate Marcia Foley moved into mental health at a time when the system was opening up and hundreds of patients who had lived for decades in what were colloquially known as ‘lunatic asylums’ were being released back into the community. It was also a time when interdisciplinary teams of psychiatrists, psychologists, mental health nurses and psychiatric social workers were becoming more common. Marcia became Deputy Principal Social Worker at Graylands Hospital, and later charted the development of social work in the mental health arena in Western Australia as the basis of her PhD, which she completed in 2011 at the age of 87. (see separate story, p46) Jane Brazier, who was part of the second intake, went on to a pioneering role in child welfare, beginning with what was then known as the Department of Child Welfare (it has since undergone numerous name changes). The department, which had moved to professionalise its staff, would become both a major employer of social work graduates and
a significant contributor, via cadetships and scholarships, towards student enrolment in both the UWA and Curtin social work courses. Jane worked in service delivery, policy and management roles across child, family and community services and also held senior leadership roles in disability services and community development. In each of these fields she retained a strong commitment to engaging with vulnerable families and protecting children through preventative strategies. She was Director General of the Department of Community Development from 2001 to 2006, during which time she initiated many DCD-sponsored projects, including UWA’s Centre for Vulnerable Children and Families - an important contributor to research which went on to have significant social policy impacts. Jane’s lifelong involvement with Aboriginal communities continues today, with membership of the
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Board of Parkerville and a role chairing a trust for people who lived at Sister Kate’s Children’s Home. Brian Wooller, also from the second intake, initially joined the Mental Health Services of Western Australia, and then, after a spell as senior tutor and lecturer with the UWA social work course, moved to the Department of Community Welfare. There, he worked in a variety of roles including Deputy Superintendent at the Bridgewater Childcare and Assessment Centre and acting Superintendent of the Riverbank centre for juvenile offenders. He later worked with the Community Services Training Centre, providing training programs for staff of the Department of Community Welfare and other human service organisations. Throughout his career, Brian has been an active member of committees and boards within universities and across a range of human services organisations and non-government agencies, including as Vice Chairperson of Consumers of Mental Health WA and as a member of the State Government’s Redress panel. Alongside his career he has been a committed and forthright advocate for the social work profession, holding key roles at state and national level in the AASW (including as Federal Treasurer), and later becoming President of the Society of Professional Social Workers. He has also acted as a mentor to social HIGH ACHIEVERS Brian Wooller with Jane Brazier and Mike Clare.
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workers at the beginning of their careers, including a young Joe Calleja and Judy Esmond, current head of Social Work and Social Policy at UWA. Brian is a Life Member of the AASW. Virginia Scott –another second intake graduate – started in child protection with Jane Brazier and went on to practice extensively as a social worker there and in various state and commonwealth agencies in roles spanning casework, education, policy development, research and organisational change. Her commonwealth work included affecting organisational change in areas such as rehabilitation services and social security. Virginia also became involved with the AASW early on and, as a member of the AASW National Practice Standard Working Party, played a key role in developing the practice standards for the profession. The standards outline expectations of practitioners in the field and call on them to regularly and rigorously review their practice, challenge the organisations for which they work, and think actively about the policies affecting the people they are working to help. She was also Chair of the AASW National Education Committee, a member of the Code of Ethics Working Party, and has been involved in committees and working parties charged with reviewing the education and accreditation standards for social work education in Australia. Virginia is also a Life Member of the AASW. Libby Lloyd, from the third intake, spent decades as a clinical social worker specialising in women’s and children’s health, including five years as Chief Social Worker at King Edward Memorial Hospital and 12 years as Head of the Social Work Department with the Women’s and Children’s Health Service in WA, a position she held until her retirement in 2006. While
in that role, she helped to coestablish Aboriginal Liaison Services at KEMH; best practice standards for newborns at risk of maltreatment; the specialist multi-professional Child Protection Unit within Paediatric Medicine at MPH (which evolved from the services pioneered by the Social Work Department since the 1970s); and the Health Information Resource Service for Women at KEMH. Libby has also spent time lecturing in social work at the University of NSW, UWA and Curtin University, specialising in medical social work, grief and loss, domestic violence, children at risk and cultural diversity. She has complemented her work in clinical services, training, consultancy, service development and education with a variety of social research projects. Maria Harries, who graduated in 1970, has spent the majority of her 45 year social work and academic career advocating and researching in the field of children and families,
Social work gives people a pretty broad world view and a set of generic skills you can use for the rest of your life – Owen Hicks particularly in relation to mental health and trauma associated with experiences of abuse and violence - especially that endured by former child migrants and the ‘Forgotten Australians’ who spent their childhoods in out-of-home
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KEEPING FOCUSED Above, second intake graduate Virginia Scott and, top, third intake graduate Libby Lloyd.
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care. She was an integral longterm staff member within UWA Social Work and Social Policy, with roles including Associate Professor, Coordinator of Postgraduate Research Studies, and Discipline Chair. After retiring in 2008, she became a Senior
AREAS OF PRAC TICE
The strength of the profession isn’t in the title, it’s in the behaviour – Joe Calleja
Honorary Research Fellow with UWA and an Adjunct Professor at Curtin University, where she has assisted with research development. While at UWA, Maria spent years carefully nurturing the postgraduate research program, supervising countless PhD and Master’s students and taking a leading role in the discipline’s Centre for Vulnerable Children and Families. She has been an important researcher and contributor to significant public policy debates including that surrounding the mandatory reporting of child abuse. Maria is a member of a diverse range of boards, has been an elected councillor for the City of Subiaco, and has held leadership roles in the AASW and the WA Council of Social Services. She is also a member of the Truth, Justice and Healing Council and was made inaugural Chair of the newly established MercyCare WA. In acknowledgment of her contribution
GRASS ROOTS Top left, Jan Stewart, former CEO of Lotterywest Top right, Joe Calleja. Above, Brian Brand, Senior Officer from Technical and Further Education, receives the first edition of Incomes and Outcomes from the editors, JoAnne Byrne and Joe Calleja, in 1982.
to the Australian community, she was awarded an Order of Australia (AM) in 2004. Jan Stewart, who graduated in 1972 with the first group of those undertaking the Master of Social Work qualification, became Chief Social Worker at Princess Margaret Hospital before moving into consultancy and quickly climbing
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the ranks at Lotterywest, where she spent 22 years as CEO until retiring in 2015. The WA lotteries body is unique in Australia in being the only one to distribute the money raised from lottery products directly to the community and nonfor-profit organisations, providing significant direct support for often grass-roots, community projects. Jan, regarded as a visionary in the international lotteries industry, continued to see herself as a social worker at heart while running the multi-million-dollar organisation, and has attributed much of her success in the role to the foundation she had as a social work student and in her social work practice. Jan was awarded a University of Western Australia
Medal in 2004 and a Public Service Medal in the 2008 Australia Day Honours. She now serves on a range of not-for-profit community and arts boards and is a life member of both the Chamber of Arts and Culture and the WA Ballet, as well as an Honorary Member of the World Lottery Association, of which she was Senior Vice President for a
number of years. Colourful and wellknown Western Australian parliamentarian Grace Vaughan graduated with a Master of Social Work in 1973 (alongside long-time UWA Social Work lecturer Rae Lindsay) and, in 1990 at least, was regarded by Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya as the department’s most outstanding graduate thus far. Grace, who became a prominent social worker and campaigner for social justice and was President of the International Federation of Social Workers, was one of several key people credited with putting social work in Western Australia on the map. Joe Calleja, who completed the social work course in 1982, became a prominent member of the AASW, serving as WA branch president and national vice-president, and a key figure in a range of social work arenas including child protection, family support, juvenile justice, relationship counselling and, most recently, the field of mental health. He is now CEO of non-government mental health agency Richmond Wellbeing (formerly Richmond Fellowship WA). His other roles have included Principal Social Worker for the Department for Community Development, executive manager of KinWay, Anglicare WA’s relationship counselling service, and director of Court Support at the Department of Justice. Joe was instrumental in introducing closed-circuit television in courts to protect witnesses when giving evidence and also played a significant role in the introduction of the Hearing Voices Network into Australia. He has been a member of a range of boards and advisory councils, including the WA Council of Social Services (WACOSS), and the inaugural Mental Health Advisory Council in WA. While still at UWA, he and fellow student Jo-Anne Byrne helped develop a resource book for the unemployed, begun by
of government, non-government, corporate and private practice areas, developing an increasingly wide range of methodologies. In addition to child welfare and protection, health and mental health, other specialty areas include aged care, the justice system, schools, local government, working with
former lecturer Patricia Harris, into a service directory called Incomes and Outcomes: Getting By on a Low Income. Other graduates who have gone on to leadership roles include Emeritus Archbishop Barry Hickey (1972), who set up Centacare, the Catholic Church’s welfare network in Western Australia, before becoming Catholic Archbishop of Perth; Sabina Leitmann (1976), who is current president of the WA branch of the AASW; Celine Harrison (1988) who was Head of Department of Social Work at King Edward Memorial Hospital 20062012 and established evidence-based practice guidelines and interagency protocols concerning newborns at risk of abuse or neglect; and Michael
Wright (1995), who currently works as a postdoctoral researcher with the Telethon Kids Institute and Curtin University and has become a leading advocate in the field of Aboriginal mental health.
REACHING OUT Left, Grace Vaughan. Right, Maria Harries, Virginia Scott and Brian Wooller.
Expanding Reach Social work has continued to expand its reach into a broad range
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Aboriginal people and communities, counselling, community work and development, domestic violence, addiction and homelessness. Graduates have also taken their social work skills to the global arena, utilising their degrees as a valuable foundation for international humanitarian work. Jeremy Hobbs (1981) spent his
AREAS OF PRAC TICE
career working in the areas of community development and humanitarian aid, with a strong focus on Indigenous rights and race issues in Australia and on the campaign for the rights of the people of East Timor. He spent more than 20 years as a CEO in international non-government organisations, and was Executive Director of Oxfam International from 2001-2013. In that role he lobbied the UN, governments and multinational institutions on topics including trade, arms control, sustainable development, climate change and sustainable development goals. He is now an international development consultant based in Melbourne. Phil and Julie Sparrow, both 1994 UWA Social Work graduates, spent more than a decade in Afghanistan working with TEAR Australia and Hagar International. Their work included training locals to run vital community development projects and working to alleviate the plight of refugees, disaster victims, drug addicts and trafficked women and children. Phil, who returned to Perth in 2012 with Julie and their
EXPLORING BOUNDARIES Phil and Julie Sparrow in Afghanistan circa 1996. Right, 1991 graduate and current lecturer Dr Mark Sachmann.
children, wrote about Afghan refugees in Australia in From Under a Leaky Roof (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2006). They both continued to be involved with Afghan refugees. Michael van Koesveld (2006), who as the son of 1969 graduate Libby Lloyd is one of several second generation social workers, followed up his Bachelor of Social Work with a Graduate Certificate in Mental Health Practice at UWA while simultaneously working with refugees coping with the consequences of torture and trauma. He then completed a Master’s in Humanitarian Program Management in the UK and worked with humanitarian organisations in Chad, Ethiopia, Yemen and Myanmar. A recent Master’s in Conflict Studies will enable him to move
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towards mediation and negotiation work, ultimately aimed at reducing the ongoing trauma and chaos of wars. Michael said the skills and knowledge he gained while studying social work at UWA – including social systems analysis, interpersonal communication, mental health, advocacy, mediation, counselling, community development and teamwork – had substantially shaped his early career as a social worker and more recently his work as a humanitarian aid worker. He said he had benefited from the wisdom, experience and support of staff at UWA: “In my own work I often feel a sense of accountability to their commitment and integrity.” Closer to home, others – such as 1991 graduate and current lecturer Dr Mark Sachmann - have built on the basic interpersonal and counselling skills taught in the social work course, pursuing ongoing specialist training and, in some cases, eventually setting up in private practice as counsellors or psychotherapists. Since 2001, these practitioners have been able to apply to be Accredited Mental Health Social Workers with a Medicare provider number, enabling Medicare rebates for their clients. In addition, many social workers are employed in areas which are not referred to as social work positions, but continue to bring their social work training and values to the job. Emeritus Professor and Senior Honorary Research Fellow Owen Hicks, who graduated in 1978 and was a Department of Social Work lecturer from 1979-1986, came into social work with a science degree and a background in high school education. After spending the majority of his career working in staff development and training services – including a long stint in the University-wide role of Director of Staff Development at UWA - he has now returned to education in the form of international volunteer teaching assignments at universities in China and Vietnam. Owen said that while doing the course the focus was very much on students becoming a social work practitioner of some sort, whether providing direct support or going into social policy and development. However, his own career path demonstrated the broad
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value of a social work degree and the way it could take people significant places outside of social work. “It does mean there is some generic value in the social work program that may not be appreciated,” he said. “I think social work gives people a pretty broad world view and a set of generic skills that you can actually use for the rest of your life.” Similarly, Richmond Wellbeing CEO Joe Calleja said he had taken his social work skills into whatever setting he had been employed with and applied them within that context. “The strength of the profession isn’t in the title, it’s in the behaviour,” he said. “I have always had the view in any job that I have worked in that I am a social worker who is employed in a particular setting.” Former Social Worker of the Year Awards chairperson Katrina Stratton, who graduated in 1995, agreed. “Social work is not necessarily about the job title,” she said. “It’s that systemic thinking and the importance of relationships and putting people at the centre. That’s why we’re so important, I think. We humanise a lot of systems, no matter what the area.” Long-time editor of the AASW’s newsletter June Roe (1975) said social workers had gradually expanded their reach by being drawn in to the crucial social issues of the day. “Initially you could say that the profession was driven by where the jobs were,” she said. “When you look at the number of social workers employed in government and non-government sectors, initially government was probably the biggest employer of social workers. Now I think now it’s probably more like 50:50, with a lot of social workers working now in the non-government and volunteer sector. I think we respond to social conditions.”
Quiet achievers UWA’s social work legacy isn’t solely about leaders or high fliers: it is about the hundreds and hundreds of graduates who went on to work, quietly and unobtrusively, but almost always with great effect, in unsung roles at the coal face or behind the scenes as researchers or policymakers within the many different arenas of the profession. While many did rise to the heights of leadership, many more worked at whatever level most fuelled their passion - often choosing to remain in direct contact with clients, where they felt they could make the most impact. They were people like Jan Kay, who graduated with a DipSocWk as Janette Colless in 1972. She was lowkey, unobtrusive and frequently doubted her abilities as a social worker. Yet, in the eyes of others, she became ‘one of the best social workers around’. Having left the profession to raise her family in her adopted home of Victoria, she decided with some trepidation, in her 40s, to return to social work. She chose to work in two highly challenging areas: with sexually abused women, and with violent men in a men’s prison. She later began her own private practice as a counsellor, but struggled to charge what she should have and never turned anyone away because they couldn’t pay. “In every aspect of her life and work, Jan truly lived those social work values we had been taught as students,” friend and fellow 1972 alumna Jan Stewart said in the eulogy she delivered at Jan’s funeral in 2014. “Respect for others, a commitment to social justice, and complete professional integrity. She did not have to refer to her old books to remind herself in order to practice them. They were simply the embodiment of who she was.” Mid 1990s graduate Michael Wright – a leader and researcher in the field of Aboriginal mental
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GAME CHANGER Michael Wright, a leading advocate in the field of Aboriginal mental health.
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health - agreed it was important to remember those working without fanfare. “That’s in no way to demean those who work in more glamorous positions and roles in the community, but there are so many that don’t, like the women that work say around domestic violence and in refuges and those kinds of places, who are fearless in their fight for human rights and so forth,” Michael said. “There are people who work with Aboriginal people who have been working for years – decades, some of them – who would never work anywhere else, but their work is
so hard and challenging. But the rewards they get, they would say, far, far outweigh the other things that make it really hard. “There are so, so many rewards.” •
CHAPTER 9 Dr Marcia Foley
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hrough sheer alphabetical quirk, Marcia Foley is listed as the first ever graduate of the discipline of Social Work at UWA. She sits at the top of a list of an estimated 2,000 students to have successfully passed through the course since 1965 - one of six pioneering students to gamely enrol in the first course of its type to be taught in Western Australia.. After carving out a career as one of the earliest mental health social workers to practice in the State, the mother-of-six returned to the UWA Social Work fold decades later to set a new record, becoming – at 87 – the oldest student to complete a doctorate at the University. Speaking with Legacy & Promise earlier this year, Marcia reflected on her time at UWA and her experience as a young woman entering the profession at a time of enormous social and institutional change, when women were still fighting to be taken seriously. She had already begun a degree, majoring in economics, when she read in the newspaper of the
desperate need for social workers. “I imagined social workers were these ladies who flitted around in white coats in hospitals, and I thought that would be rather nice,” she said. She switched to psychology to meet the prerequisites for the new course and obtained a place in the first intake alongside Karlis Raduzis, Jenny Patterson, Marjorie Silver, Ilona Osborne and the late Peter Gorton. “There were six of us, but only three of us from that first course actually worked as social workers,” Marcia said. She studied under founding lecturer Teddie Stockbridge, later following in her teacher’s footsteps by moving into a career as a psychiatric social worker. “Teddie Stockbridge really started off the social work course. She was an English psychiatric social worker, but that psychiatric part was rather frowned upon later because they were trying to cut the medical dominance,” she said. “Teddie was forced, I think, to introduce a more community base into the course,
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which she did.” After graduating in 1967, Marcia was offered a job at Heathcote Hospital, where she had done one of her practicums. She had been supervised there by the hospital’s first psychiatric social worker and relished working as part of FIRST INTAKE Left, standing Karliss what was then a ground-breaking Raduzis, Peter multi-disciplinary team which – Gorton. Sitting (l-r): unlike other teams she would work Jenny Patterson, Marjorie Silver, Ilona in later – held psychiatric social Osborne, Marcia workers in high regard. Foley. Opposite, “One of the reasons I did so well, Marcia Foley. I think, was that I was accepted very well at Heathcote– because psychiatric social workers were the icing on the cake,” she said. “They worked as a team with the doctor, the psychologist and the social worker. The staff at Heathcote were mainly English men and they held PSWs, as they called them, in very high regard.” She said that, although not all doctors she encountered in her career would be so appreciative, her Heathcote experience showed what was possible. “That was the beginning of teamwork for social workers and that was one of the main contributions I made, I think – having social work accepted as an equal member of the interdisciplinary team.” Marcia said entering social work at the time she did – particularly the mental health field which was on the cusp of major change - meant the profession was more or less an empty canvas. “Mental health then was like an uncharted sea, because there were so few social workers – it was like setting out in a little boat on the ocean, not knowing where you would end up. There was nothing there, so therefore there was nothing to follow. That was even more so when I went to Bentley Clinic. They mainly did interviews with people in the office, but when I started I had to go out and talk to community groups, and that included groups of doctors, to tell them about what the clinic had to offer and what I had to offer. I felt as though that was a contribution that I really did make, because that hadn’t ever been done before.” From Bentley Clinic, Marcia moved to a job which, even now, makes her cringe: working in the social
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welfare department at the old Claremont Hospital. She said the hospital, under Dr Harry Blackmore, was busy discharging hundreds of longterm psychiatric patients, some of whom had been there for decades. However the social welfare department charged with helping to settle patients back into the community was a huge, unmanageable affair. Shortly afterwards, in 1972, the hospital split into Graylands and Swanbourne hospitals and Marcia went with Graylands. “It really was a horrible job because the doctors there were used to dealing with mad people and all they wanted to do was give people medication,” she said. “I had quite a few clashes with dyed-inthe-wool doctors at Graylands. The psychiatrist in charge used to call me madam – ‘Madam!’ “There used to be a weekly ward meeting where each discipline had to present their argument. I went to great trouble this particular time because it was a case that had a lot of social implications, and all they were doing was giving out medication. This woman had been in hospital about 20 years, but after a long discussion the other members of the team, the psychologist and the OTs, and this . . . man . . . who was in charge of all the doctors, he got up and said, ‘well gentlemen, let us get on and practice medicine now’. And in a body they all walked out with him. I’ll never forget that.” She said what a social worker contributed depended largely on the attitude of the head of the team they were working in. “Some of them were all right, but they were in the few,” she said of psychiatrists she worked with. She was irked by the tendency of some, when writing reports, to adopt the social worker’s contribution as their own.
Mental health then was like an uncharted sea, because there were so few social workers – it was like setting out in a little boat on the ocean, not knowing where you would end up ~ Marcia Foley
Despite the poor treatment and the difficulty of the job, Marcia remained there for 10 years, becoming Deputy Principal Social Worker. During that time she supervised numerous social work students from UWA, using as her guide the supervisory skills she had learned from Teddie Stockbridge who taught her the importance of detachment and of not pre-judging people or situations. “She showed us how not to become too involved, but to remain caring,” Marcia said. “‘Controlled emotional involvement’ she called it, and I remembered that always, because I had a lot of students over all those years.” One of those students was a young Maria Harries – who in a neat role reversal went on to cosupervise Marcia when she returned to UWA years later to undertake a PhD. Marcia was by then retired and a great grandmother: at one point during the eight years she was working on her thesis, there were three generations of her family studying at UWA. Her thesis on the origins of social work in Western Australia offered an account of the development of social work in mental health services in WA, charting three distinct phases and taking in some of her own experiences. Bachelor of Social Work 1976 graduate Jennifer Gardner, who wrote Looking Back to mark UWA Social Work’s 25th anniversary, received her own doctorate the
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same day as Marcia - March 23, 2011 - and recalls the wonderful atmosphere in the room. “Marcia stepped onto the stage just before me to get her PhD and got a standing ovation,” Jennifer said. “It was very inspiring to see her do that. She had been a social worker for so many years and when she came back she hardly knew how to work a computer, so it was a huge challenge for her. She went on and did it. She was fantastic – a real lady, a really gracious, lovely person.” Marcia said she hadn’t realised at the time that she was the oldest person to achieve a doctorate at UWA. Having remained involved with the University throughout her life – she squeezed in a Master of Philosophy before tackling her PhD – her age hadn’t really occurred to her. The associated fuss, including media coverage, soon reminded her. “I didn’t realise how old I was,” she said. “I was 87 – I couldn’t believe it.” Marcia, now 92, still hopes to finish off what she calls the last chapter of her PhD thesis: her own contribution to social work within WA’s mental health sector. “I always meant to go on when I had finished and do a bit more, but never got around to it. I still intend to do that last chapter,” she said. •
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PART 2
BRANCHING OUT
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CHAPTER 1
Stage Two
been,” he said. “That started to change in the 1980s at both WAIT and UWA. We developed more of a broader social science base, if you like, for what we were doing. “For example, it was compulsory for all students to have done at least one year of psychology before they did social work, and I think we sort of loosened that a bit so they could do something that was seen as equivalent.” Jim said the way psychology was taught at UWA at the time – with a heavy focus on ‘rats and stats’ – wasn’t particularly relevant or useful for Social Work students. “I don’t think it was a very
I
f Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya laid the foundations of the UWA Social Course during his two-decade tenure as head, then it was the next generation, under a variety of heads and leading hands including Rae Lindsay, Jim Ife and Mike Clare, that gave it form. “Their job was different to what I had to do,” Professor Jayasuriya told Legacy & Promise. “I had to lay the bricks, do the groundwork, and people like Jim, Maria (Harries) and Mike Clare were part of Stage Two, which really was a time when it established itself.” Rae Lindsay became Head of School following Professor Jayasuriya’s early retirement in 1991, briefly filling the position while the Chair was negotiated, advertised and appointed. Rae, who had been a senior tutor and then lecturer with the Department since
the mid-70s, did not particularly enjoy the role, and gladly handed it over to the successful applicant, Professor Jim Ife. Initial developments following Professor Jayasuriya’s retirement included a shift in focus for the Social Work degree, away from its Psychology roots. Jim, a community development expert who had previously been Head of Social Work and Social Policy at WAIT (now Curtin University) and had come from a more socio-political perspective, wanted to reduce the heavy psychology bent that had marked both the WAIT and UWA courses’ early years. “I think at both the schools in Western Australia historically, psychology had been dominant and the other social science disciplines, which are also important in supporting social work, hadn’t
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STRONG FOUNDATIONS Above left, Mike Clare and Rae Lindsay. Above right, Jim Ife. Above, Rae Lindsay and Tom Barrett, (School of Social Work and Social Administration) with visiting Swedish social workers Majen Espwall and Anders Stavhad (mid Sweden University).(28940P, UWA Archives).
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appropriate foundation,” he said. “Student feedback confirmed that: many of them found their compulsory year of psych to be a waste of time. Students who came from Murdoch Psychology in my view had a much better background, in that there was a much stronger humanistic psychology tradition there. “The AASW guidelines at the time did not require psychology as such, but rather something like
STAGE TWO
I had to lay the bricks, do the groundwork and people like Jim, Maria and Mike Clare were part of Stage Two, which really was a time when it established itself ~ Professor Laki Jayasuriya
‘human behaviour and growth’. I actually thought, as did others at the time, that this could equally be provided by study of, for example, English literature or philosophy, with emphasis on exploring the nature of humanity, so we changed the requirements from ‘one year of psychology and one year of anthropology/sociology’ to a certain number of units from a prescribed list of subjects, which included psychology of course, but also anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy etc., with a certain amount of flexibility built in to cope with the different subjects of different universities, e.g. we could include gender studies, youth studies, criminology, etc.” Other significant developments during Jim’s two spells as Head of Department during the 1990s included the growth of the postgraduate research program, engineered by Maria Harries – a shift which Jim said changed the nature of the department and
lent it more credibility within the University – and the addition of a dedicated Indigenous unit to the Social Work course. Violet Bacon joined the department In 1997 as the first Aboriginal lecturer in social work in an Australian university(see The Rise of the Indigenous Unit, p72, and Research or Bust, p86). Jim left UWA in 2001 and returned to Curtin University, where he subsequently established the Centre for Human Rights Education at Curtin. He remained there until his retirement in 2006. Back at UWA, veteran lecturer Mike Clare had taken the headship baton from Jim. Mike, an associate professor who had been with the department since 1987, said Professor Jayasuriya had done the work needed to get the philosophy of the course right and build its credibility, while Jim negotiated the academic processes necessary to grow the course and manage the changes involved in the move, in 2000, from
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FUN TIMES Above left, graduating class of 2011 and above, staff and students have fun at Rottnest, 2001.
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a two-year postgraduate degree to a four-year undergraduate model. The change in structure led to greater student enrolments, which in turn translated - for one of the few times in Social Work’s history - to greater security. “There was a moment when the numbers took the pressure off,” Mike said. “The four-year course had years where there were 50 students in each year, so suddenly the budget was secure because we had four intakes. We were growing our postgraduate students; we had
visitors from overseas; we were growing research; we were setting up a research centre: there was a lot of positive momentum.” The increasing numbers, combined with a period of federal government investment in the quality of teaching and learning, meant Social Work found itself, through the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, in a golden age of innovation. During this period the course was twice named the best social work course in Australia in the annual Course Experience Questionnaire filled out by graduates across the country. This era also saw the development of an idea, sown by Mike and Maria, of a dedicated research hub. Their vision translated into the setting up, in 2004, of the Centre for Vulnerable Children and Families as a conduit for research by Social Work staff and students in partnership with other universities and agencies (see Research or Bust, p86). “If Stage One was trying to get a foothold within the University and as a professional program, Stage Two was the age of innovation, growth, security and strategic planning,” Mike said. While the late 1990s and early 2000s were about security and growth, the era that followed brought with it an entirely different mood as university funding started to contract and structural changes, research funding and publications became more of an issue. “That’s when we had to change gears from teaching and learning, student numbers and postgraduate student supervision, to being far broader in our intent,” Mike said. “That was a hard ask, because we were a very experienced staff group and what we had been doing then had to transfer itself into a broader set of accountabilities. We managed to, but it was challenging.” Mike said he had only recently
realised what a challenging but rosy period the 1990s and early 2000s had been compared to what followed. “This is the first time I have realised how relatively benign that period was,” he said. “Undergraduate and postgraduate numbers were growing and our budget was fairly safe for a while. “We introduced two Graduate Certificate programs – one in Child Protection, coordinated by Brenda Clare, and one in Mental Health, originally coordinated by Maria Harries and later by Mark Sachmann. We also introduced the idea of a Social Work Summer School for practitioners and managers and worked to develop what we called a Taught Course Pathway for social workers – from the Graduate Certificates, through the MSW and to a professional doctorate. “We were seen to be capable and serious about PhDs and we were seen to be serious about doing social work. That was good for UWA in the WA context.” That period of security – while not fully recognised at the time – tallies with the recollections of Emeritus Professor Owen Hicks, who lectured with Social Work between 1979 and 1986 and returned to UWA as Director of the Staff Development Centre from 19922002. He said that while Social Work did appear to struggle much of the time, he believed it was healthier than it thought. “It always seemed to struggle for its existence, and I was never too sure how much Laki played that to sort of strengthen the staff, strengthen the resolve and pull them together, but it is a bit of an anomaly within UWA,” Owen said. “You’re talking about a department that provides an education to people who are going to go and work in the welfare sector and it’s coming out of one of the richest institutions in the world. There were always those within the
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OUT AND ABOUT Discipline staff celebrating a University Teaching Award in York.
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University who would say, ‘this is a thorough, professional program – what on earth is it doing in an institution of learning such as this?’ That debate I am sure still goes on.” However, he said the outsider’s view afforded to him by his role in staff development throughout the 1990s suggested Social Work had more ground beneath it than it thought. During his time in that job he oversaw the introduction of a suite of programs and courses for the professional development of academic and general staff. The role exposed him to all areas of the University and showed him that most departments had the
perception that they were more hard done by than others – even when they weren’t. “One of the beauties of my job was I got to see all the departments, and hence got a feel for which departments were healthy and which were not healthy, which were in internal conflict, which were in real danger of losing funding,” he said. “When I would visit departments they would tell me what the University was like. What they told me was what their department was like, generalised to the institution
STAGE TWO “At the end of the year the students always did something wonderfully funny,” Maria said. “They would give the staff awards – I remember I got the ‘Shut up Mike Award’ (we used to co-lecture a lot) and at the end-of-year function there
and there were times when I would have to say to people, ‘it would be good for you to talk to people in this department or this department’. “Social work was generally pretty healthy. They had a coherent program. They knew what they were about, relative to other departments. They had a pretty reliable student intake, and with the student numbers came a survival budget at least. Their research wasn’t at the level of output of many other departments, but there were sleeper departments who weren’t doing much in the research arena. “Social work students were pretty happy with the program, too. My impression of my colleagues as they were then, looking back, was that they maybe had more of a siege mentality than warranted.” If the siege mentality was unwarranted for a spell, Mike says it certainly became more justified as the 2000s wore on. He has a vivid metaphor for this era – that of the children in the book Treasure Island, caught in a hut and being surrounded by pirates. “They loaded their guns and pointed them out the window but there were more guns and windows than they had firers, and they would run around inside firing strategically. That’s what I’m saying:
we were understaffed and amazingly creative, given the circumstances, so that we couldn’t be nailed . . . until we eventually were. “I think we were hard to manage because we were punching above our weight, but eventually the numbers of staff were less than five, for a while – which is very challenging in the long-term, and below the minimum number specified by the professional association.” He said that although it was tough, the Social Work staff continued to work extremely hard. “We were on agency boards, committees of management, doing consultancies, doing projects – we were engaged with the world of social work. For all of us it wasn’t a job – it was a way of life.” He said the staff largely got on together: “There was respect, if you like, for one another and a commitment to mission impossible, in a way. It was aspirational: we were trying to be better and for that to happen we had to be pointing in the same direction enough of the time.”
GIVING THANKS This page and opposite: banners and student gifts from end of year celebrations. Above, former lecturer Dr Brenda Clare.
Fun Times Amid all the hard work there were rewards, even if only of the tonguein-cheek kind. Student groups would regularly come up with amusing and light-hearted ways to mark the end of the year.
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would often be a big sign up saying ‘Welcome to the Laki Country’. “Laki also used to remind the graduating students that ‘obtaining a degree is not a terminal condition’ – in other words, this is the start of a long learning career. They were fun times.” Other signs included ‘Ife – be in it’ or ‘Anything to De-Clare?’ A newsletter from the 1990s contains a page of bouquets, with one staff member lauded for ‘holding her own in the face of incredible flak’. “It was just lovely,” Maria said. “They took the mickey out of themselves and out of us. We always emphasised the importance
of light-heartedness as the professional life in social work can be very heavy and onerous, unless one can balance it with fun. Over many years the graduating students prepared songs and frolics of great mirth which they shared with us, and it augured well for their future capacity to find balance.” In a sense, the discipline put the ‘social’ into Social Work. “I think more than any other program in the University there was much more the kind of social interaction within Social Work,” Professor Jayasuriya said. “The other departments were very formal and discipline-oriented. The only other example I can think of is Medicine.” Students also found creative ways to mark the end of their studies, with different cohorts presenting the discipline with a range of increasingly unusual gifts. The 2005 graduating cohort produced a framed T-shirt signed by the group. The 2006 cohort followed up with a framed matching tracksuit bottom, also signed by the group – leaving Mike a little nervous as to what the next group might come up with. There was a sigh of relief when the 2007 student group decided to collect a named spoon from every graduating student and incorporate them into a collage of key social work concepts (a joke sparked by the fact there was only one teaspoon in the Social Work kitchen).
Other Developments There was a raft of structural
changes throughout the post-Laki era, with the degree switching from a four-year Bachelor of Social Work to a qualifying two-year postgraduate Master of Social Work in 2009. Social Work and Social Policy also underwent an exhausting array of name changes, evolving from the School of Social Work and Social Administration to the School of Social Work and Social Policy, then the Department of Social Work and Social Policy, and then the Discipline of Social Work and Social Policy. Fieldwork Education, always one of the discipline’s particular strengths, also continued to develop. Initially led by Tom Barrett, others to guide the program in subsequent years included Mike Clare, Brenda Clare and Katrina Stratton. Early graduate Libby Lloyd had facilitated a workshop in 1989 that led to the UWA course making a significant commitment to enhance the quality of Fieldwork Education. This included successful applications for internal and external funding for development projects, and new planning and assessment tools for long placements. The 2000s saw important developments on the alumni front, with a push to create a cohesive alumni committed to key initiatives for students, graduates and researchers. The UWA Social Work Alumni, launched in July, 2006, was central in the development of the inter-university and interagency partnerships involved in establishing the annual Western Australian Social Worker of the Year
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Awards in 2009 (see Celebrating the Profession, p66). This period also saw the retirement of some of Social Work’s longest-serving members of staff. Rae Lindsay left in 2003 after 26 years with the discipline; Tom Barrett retired in 2007 after 29 years on staff; Associate Professor Maria Harries left in 2008 after 20 years; and administrative officer Judy Grimshaw retired in 2008 after 13 years. Associate Professor Mike Clare followed in 2009, after 22 years with the discipline; Dr Brenda Clare retired in 2010 after 10 years; and Vi Bacon formally retired in 2011 after 14 years, but continued to lecture in the Indigenous unit parttime until 2013. All these changes, and more, were faithfully chronicled by 2002 graduate Pip White in The UWA Social Worker, an invaluable newsletter initiated by Mike Clare and published semi-regularly from 2002-2011 (see Celebrating the Profession, p66). •
CHAPTER 2 Headship
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ocial Work and Social Policy’s first 25 years at UWA were marked by relative leadership stability, with Dr Walter Tauss taking the reins for the first five years, occasionally relieved by Teddie Stockbridge; and Professor Laki Jayasuriya in the driving seat as Head of Department and Foundation Chair for almost all of 1971-1991. The same could not be said for the second half of the discipline’s existence. No Discipline Chair since Professor Jayasuriya’s retirement has been able to take such a longterm view of the role. Professor Jayasuriya was followed by Rae Lindsay, who acted in the role for a year or so until the appointment of Professor Jim Ife, who completed two spells in the job over the following decade. Jim said his memory of dates was a little patchy, but recalled the headship being held by a number of people throughout the 1990s. “It changed hands a bit, but it was a fairly convivial changing
of hands,” he said. “I don’t think anybody particularly liked being Head of the Department but we rotated it a bit, if you like.” Jim left in 2001 and returned to Curtin University, where he had been Head of the School of Social Work before moving to UWA as a senior lecturer in 1986. After his departure, Associate Professor Mike Clare – who had already held the role briefly in the mid-1990s, in between spells led by Jim - became Discipline Chair. Mike remained in the role until 2009, barring a couple of breaks during which he went on sabbatical. Into those gaps came acting heads Tom Barrett and Maria Harries. Mike’s stint remains the longest spell yet after Professor Jayasuriya,
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whose own period as head was briefly broken in 1981. In response to University expectations that headships be periodically reviewed, Patricia Harris took over from Professor Jayasuriya from 1981-1982. However, she viewed it largely as an administrative role and did not attempt to make any major changes. “As far as the weight, the authority for developments was concerned, it remained with the Professor,” she said. Professor Jayasuriya resumed the headship when Patricia left the Department in 1982 to move to New Zealand, and stayed until 1991. He has remained formally attached to the Department as an Honorary Senior Research Fellow. During his time as Head of Department, Professor Jayasuriya worked primarily on building the department’s credibility within the University, building partnerships with academics outside the University, straddling the line between social work policy and practice, and finding the department a faculty home. Jim’s tenure was notable for the changing focus of the degree, away from its psychology roots; the shift from a two-year postgraduate degree to a four-year undergraduate model; the development of a dedicated Indigenous unit within the course, and a renewed focus on developing the postgraduate research program. The early part of Mike’s headship was marked by a brief age of growth and development, during TOP TEAM Top, L-R Rae Lindsay, Jim Ife, which student numbers were Maria Harries, Audrey up, staff numbers were growing Bolger, Tom Barrett, and the discipline, for once, felt Laki Jayasuriya, Mike Clare. Above, safe. His overall tenure saw an Professor Jim Ife, increased focus on research, with Opposite right, the continuing growth of the Associate Professor Judy Esmond, Head postgraduate research program of Social Work and begun by Professor Jayasuriya and Social Policy since Jim and continued by Maria. An February 2015, and Sue Young, Head important related initiative was from 2009 to 2011. the establishment of the Centre for Vulnerable Children and Families. Mike also invested a great deal of
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energy in ensuring a high quality of teaching and learning, with the development of the fieldwork program a major focus, along with moves to strengthen connections with Social Work Alumni. By the time Maria was acting as head in 2006 any sense of security was gone. The discipline’s protector, Executive Dean of Arts John Jory, had long since retired; University funding was contracting; others within the Arts Faculty were making increasing noises about Social Work no longer fitting (if it ever had); and the Social Work staff members were working harder than ever after the departure of a lecturer who, contrary to expectations, had not been replaced. With exhaustion and frustration levels rising, Maria sat down with a senior member of staff and outlined the problem. “Mike Clare was away and I was acting and I told our faculty lead at a staff meeting, ‘we’ve got an occupational health and safety issue sitting around this table: we can’t do it’. I was exhausted and working seven days a week. He looked around the table and said, ‘all I can see are dollar signs’. But he himself was exhausted: he was under pressure and we were under pressure.” With some feeling, Maria wrote in the November 2006 edition of The UWA Social Worker: “The role of Acting Chair of Discipline is not one that holds many attractions when the academe seems to be constantly throwing up new challenges and when yesterday’s answers are no longer relevant to questions that seem so simple.” Dr Susan Young, who was Discipline Chair from 2009 until 2011, also found the position a fairly thankless job, saying slim resources meant much of the time was spent simply spent holding things together. “I can remember Rae Lindsay saying about it, ‘you don’t get a chance to do anything that
you want to do, other than administration’, and I always remembered that,” she said. “And when I got to do it I thought ‘You’re right, Rae, you’re absolutely right.’” Susan presided over the introduction of the Master of Social Work in 2009, shepherding it through its first two years under provisional accreditation towards full accreditation in 2011. The role of head has again been in flux in recent years, with former University of Warwick and University of South Australia social work academic Donna Chung appointed Discipline Chair and Winthrop Professor of Social Work and Social Policy in mid-2011 after a concerted push to have the role filled by a senior professor. Donna’s arrival coincided with the department’s move out of the Faculty of Arts and into its new home in the School of Population Health. After Donna’s departure for Curtin University in 2013, the role remained empty for two years. As of February 2015, a sense of stability has finally returned with the appointment of Associate Professor Judy Esmond as Head of Social Work and Social Policy.
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Judy, a former Curtin University social work lecturer who is regarded as a leading international expert on volunteerism, civic engagement and social capital, brings a dynamic, no-nonsense approach to the role and foresees a period of rethinking the way Social Work at UWA goes about its business. With growing numbers, she says, comes not just a need, but a responsibility to review the way the course is taught. While the fundamentals will remain, that means more online units, a more creative approach to research partnerships and funding, and thinking about ways to engage more with business and nongovernment agencies. “If we’re going to grow we have to be able to think big and thinking big is about how to deal with bigger numbers,” Judy said. “The student who used to sit around all day and did nothing else but be at uni is long gone. We’ve got families working part-time, trying to study in between, and if we don’t respond to that then our students will go elsewhere. They’ll go to Flinders University and do it all online. For me, being online as a student means I have flexibility - I don’t have to physically be here for four years. “You can teach research methods online - you do not need to be face-to-face for that. Or you teach some units and we all come in for a block, say a week, and the rest is online. Why do we have to stick to this, ‘you must come in every week for 18 weeks for three hours’? It actually will end up destroying things. To me, it’s about how do we go from just surviving to thriving? And we can’t stay here. “Social Work is at the point where it could really thrive - but we have to start thinking big instead of small.” •
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CHAPTER 3 Inspirational Teachers
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hile the UWA Social Work and Social Policy department may have struggled at times to convince others at the University of its strengths, there was rarely any question about the teaching commitment of its staff. More than once, UWA’s Social Work course ranked number one out of 27 Social Work courses in Australia in the Course Experience Questionnaire introduced by the Keating Government and sent to every university graduate in Australia. This success prompted UWA to give the then Department an award, enabling staff to enjoy a two-day retreat in York. They used it to reflect on teaching and learning processes – part of a regular pattern of reflection and review of the curriculum. There were other bouquets and signs of the staff’s commitment to professional excellence and quality teaching: in 2002 Brenda Clare was awarded one of eight grants from the Teaching and Learning Committee for a project which enabled the discipline to offer additional mentoring and support to new placement supervisors; and in 2007 lecturer Violet Bacon was awarded the inaugural national Neville Bonner Award for Indigenous Teaching. Staff members Rae Lindsay and Dr Tom Barrett, who spent 26 and 29 years respectively with the discipline, were lauded on their retirements (in 2003 and 2007) for their tenacious commitment to social work education. Rae, although ‘dragged’ to academia in the mid-70s by Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya,
excelled at teaching and became deeply committed to the process - always maintaining a careful balance between experiential and theoretical teaching. The discipline also gave students rich exposure to outside sources, inviting a string of visiting lecturers – many of them graduates who had gone onto excel as practitioners, and others academics from overseas – to contribute to the innovative and multi-disciplinary focus of social work teaching at UWA. Student voices spoke loudly in support of the staff, as well: postgraduate students whose achievements were captured in The
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HONOUR ROLL Violet Bacon, third from left, received the national Neville Bonner Award for Indigenous Education in 2008. Opposite left, Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya - a towering figure and role model for social work students. Opposite right, Emeritus Professor Dennis Haskell with Associate Professor Maria Harries.
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UWA Social Worker throughout the 2000s frequently spoke glowingly of the encouragement, expertise and guidance of supervisors such as Associate Professor Maria Harries, Dr Christine Choo, Dr Brenda Clare, and Dr Susan Young. Similarly, graduates from across the decades interviewed for this publication frequently mentioned the way various staff had inspired them - even if some were more than a little terrifying. Original lecturer Margaret ‘Teddie’ Stockbridge intimidated almost every student she taught. But while her character left an indelible impression, so too did her
rigorous approach to teaching. Many graduates credit her with planting the seeds of values and ideas that they carried and grew throughout their careers. “Teddie Stockbridge did the bulk of the work on our core social work theory and practice,” 1968 graduate Virginia Scott said. “She was really excellent because she never allowed us to say something without saying why we were saying it and what the basis of it was. We all thought she was terrifying, but
she was very exacting. “Social workers need to be thoughtful and they need to never make assumptions about things, because you are working with other people in their lives, and we can be in a position where we can have quite a lot of effect on people. We need to be always very clear about what the nature of that relationship is and what the ethical framework is for us in that space at that particular time, and how to work with that properly. Teddie did a lot of testing of our thinking in that kind of way. So the ethical and the values base of Social Work - we had a very rigorous learning process
with her.” Libby Lloyd, who was part of the third intake and graduated in 1969, and Jan Stewart, who graduated in 1972, said they had continued to invoke much of what Teddie had taught them throughout their careers. “Teddie was fantastic – a character,” Libby said. “She’s quite alive in the minds of most of us of that generation – ‘What would Teddie have thought? What did Teddie say about that?’ That’s the
kind of influence she had on us. What she gave us was a really solid foundation about what being a professional meant. “People were terrified of her, but she was such a good teacher,” Jan said. “She certainly kept us to account for her work, and she was a really conscientious marker. “I remember writing far too long a case study once, and she wrote a two-page critique of it, very balanced, with feedback, beginning with: ‘I hope in future you will discipline yourself to a more succinct assignment, but I have to acknowledge you have done this very thoroughly.’
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Teddie was fantastic – a character. She’s quite alive in the minds of most of us of that generation – ‘What would Teddie have thought? What did Teddie say about that?’ That’s the kind of influence she had on us. What she gave us was a really solid foundation about what being a professional meant ~ Libby Lloyd
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INSPIRATIONAL TEACHERS Joe said others whose approach to teaching helped lay the groundwork for his later career – and involvement with the AASW - included Associate Professor Patricia Tulloch (Harris), Rae Lindsay, Professor Owen Hicks and past lecturer Brian Wooller. “The very first thing I remember about the course was in the first week Brian Wooller, who was president of the AASW, came in to give a talk to the group about the importance of the professional association. I thought Brian was very inspirational. He had been an academic, he was a practitioner at that stage working in the
Brian (Wooller) really set the tone for me that you don’t just learn things in an academic environment – you actually take them out and work with them in the context of the broader society ~ Joe Calleja “It must have taken her ages to read those assignments and to write the feedback she did. So although she was formidable, I experienced her being respectful.” Like many students of the 70s and 80s, 1983 graduate and former national vice-president of the Australian Association of Social Workers Joe Calleja was deeply influenced by the teaching of Laksiri ‘Prof’ Jayasuriya. “The irony was Prof was a
clinical psych, but over the time of the course and over the years my feeling about the Prof was he was more of a social worker than many of the social workers I knew,” Joe said. “He understood all the issues around social justice and equity, and had that whole passion for ensuring that policies and processes were built around the needs of the individual or population groups. His passion for research and capacity to work were just inspirational.”
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Department of Community Welfare. “He talked about the importance of professional identity, the importance of supporting the only body that could truly speak out on behalf of the profession, and how the profession itself was one which worked for social justice and social change. So that very much influenced me and I, I guess, lobbied my fellow students to join the AASW and built a relationship with the AASW from that time onwards, which has been longstanding. “Brian also really set the tone for me that you don’t just learn things in an academic environment – you actually take them out and work with them in the
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context of the broader society. “And Pat Harris was a major researcher and her work around issues of equity and social policy impact – the impact of policies on pensions, on services, all of that, has helped shape the framework of thinking that was consistent with where the profession sat at any level – whether it was casework or community work, policy, or organisational change.” Although the characters attached to the course – and the structure of the course itself - evolved a great deal down the years, the changing lecturers and the atmosphere they created continued to make a strong
“They seriously took into consideration your life situation and your living situation and so forth,” he said. “They were always flexible and adaptable around your personal situation, whatever that might be at the time, and always very accommodating to try to meet whatever those needs you had. To me that was always a comfort, if you like - always being able to go and talk to the senior lecturers in the school about either your own personal situation or whatever it was. “I always felt quite empowered in that space. I never felt like I was ever a student, even. I thought it was a meeting of minds. That was
impression on their students. Dr Michael Wright, who graduated from UWA with a Bachelor of Social Work in 1995, said one of the things he enjoyed most about the course at UWA was the space made to have adult conversations: “That, I think, is very much what social work is about, more often than not.” He also appreciated the level of interest staff took in students and their personal circumstances.
quite heartening and comforting.” He said the standout academic of his time was Associate Professor Maria Harries – another fiercely intelligent woman who has kept a close eye on countless students over her decades-long association with the course, even after retiring in 2008. “The world of academia is full of egos, as you know,” Michael said. “For as long as I have known Maria it was never about her. It’s
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never been about what she’s done and seeking the glory. It was very refreshing and grounding, also.”
Small but perfectly formed
PRACTICAL EXPERTISE Opposite top, Irwin Street buildings now. Opposite below, Joe Calleja, and above Brian Wooller.
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One of Social Work and Social Policy’s perceived weaknesses – the small capacity of its course relative both to other courses within UWA but also its counterpart at Curtin University – has in some ways been one of its greatest strengths. Graduates interviewed for this publication often highlighted the value of that smallness, which allowed them to get to know lecturers and their fellow students better. Virginia Scott, who was part of the second intake, said the size of the intake – which, like the first year, comprised just six students – ensured the group remained close long after graduation. “It was a very new program and there were just six of us, plus a part-time person in the course,” she said. “We were a small group and had different backgrounds coming into it, but we always had that very strong friendship and that strong collegiate commitment to social work, all of us. “I think that had to do with us being able to work together as students and grow together and learn together about Social Work, and to be able to connect with each other through our Social Work working life, I suppose, which we have done.” She recalled the group starting out in the original Irwin Street location, where temporary huts housed the nascent department. “It was those little old buildings down the side of the campus, along Fairway, where we had most of our lectures, and that was our home, if you like, on campus. That was our history there. We would get into the classrooms there in a small group and we would have some very
INSPIRATIONAL TEACHERS
rigorous discussions.” Even though course numbers have grown significantly since then – in 2015 there are 116 students across the two-year Master of Social Work course, almost double the 2012 numbers - Social Work remains a relatively small course compared to others. Current first year student Jess Roscic, who completed a communications degree at Edith Cowan University in 2007, said one of the benefits of a cosier cohort was that students felt more free to raise concerns, and experienced a feeling of safety when tackling difficult subject areas. “My undergraduate degree was hundreds and hundreds of students but here we’ve all been really closeknit straight away, which is really important because some of the discussions that get facilitated in the lectures are really contentious subjects,” she said. “Without that feeling of psychological safety and trust, people aren’t going to say what they are worried about or what they really mean, especially if it’s disagreeing with someone else, because obviously you don’t want to
get alienated or even attacked. “If you’re talking about, say, abortion, people are always going to have very strong views on both sides. Being able to say, ‘actually I think this . . .’ and the fact our cohort has been really strong has really contributed to the course for me.” She said that in one of her earliest lectures, a Social Work Knowledge, Theories and Values lecture taught by Dr Sue Bailey, the first thing the students had to do was break into groups and talk about ways to end rape. “I thought, ‘OK, we’ve barely even met each other, and that’s obviously a confronting topic’ but I thought that was really awesome that she did that. I thought: “Yes! That’s why I’m on this course – let’s talk about it.” Former lecturer Violet Bacon, who developed the Indigenous People and Social Work Unit, said the smaller nature of the course meant she had been able to get to know students more closely – an important element of her warm and approachable teaching style. “My door was always open,” she said. “I made an effort every unit, when I went in, to get to know
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NEW GENERATION Current first year student Jess Roscic.
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everyone’s name and by the end of it, or midway through, I would know them.” Class of 2005 graduate Louise Durack - who dropped out of an Arts degree for a while before returning to complete that course and follow it up with a Bachelor of Social Work - said the size of the Social Work course distinguished it from its larger rivals. “I think the difference with the course, particularly coming from Arts, is that in Arts you’re thrust into the adult learning process in a massive university, with massive courses, and no one cares whether you live or die,” she said. “Then you come into Social Work and Brenda (Clare) knows if you turn up on time or not. “Because it was a smaller cohort, it was knowing that there was greater individual support.” Katrina Stratton, who graduated in 1995 and went on to become a lecturer and Field Education coordinator with the course, said another advantage was the built-in network created by the smaller cohort. “You go through with that cohort so you come out with an existing network. I mean, I’m doing an MBA at the moment and you have a vague cohort, but not really. I’m unlikely to graduate with anyone I started with – whereas in social work you really travel the path together.”
Supporting the learners Encountering the kinds of confronting topics inherent in the social work experience – during in-class discussions and in the field – has the potential to take a toll on students. Associate Professor Mike Clare, who was Discipline Chair for most of 2001-2009, said it was vital for the staff to support students’ emotional health and wellbeing and help them make sense of often confronting areas of work
and learning. It was sometimes impossible to predict how different experiences throughout the course would affect students, which made it vital to provide avenues for them to sort through their thoughts. “We had a commitment to smallgroup teaching, which meant that hopefully things would surface in discussion,” he said. “The student would know a staff member and have a conversation, and they did. We also supported them on placement, which we knew might be emotionally provocative, with what we called integration groups. Once a week, the students came back here and with a small group had a tutorial with the same staff member who had seen all of them. “For a while we also ran integration groups which were essentially about making sense of your own social work education, so it was relatively unstructured. We didn’t fill it with content; we wanted to make a space where students could reflect on the many things that they may come across. Even just what do you say if a client says, ‘do you want a cup of tea?’ There are so many ‘how do you dos’. “The bottom line is I think if you run a professional educational program, you’ve got to be a role model. You can’t say one thing and do the opposite.” He recalled one occasion when he’d been due to give a lecture when news came that one of the student group, a woman in her 40s with children, had died. “It was my job to tell the lecture group, just like they might have to knock on somebody’s door and say, or visit somebody whose mum has just died, whatever it might be, their child has got cancer or some other horrible thing. “So I chose to do it by saying what had happened, and then leaving it open as to what anybody might want to do. Some people cried and some people wanted to
ask a question, and I just sat with the uncertainty rather than saying, ‘obviously we’re not having a lecture so I think you should go home’. I just waited. It was weird, but I thought that was the right thing. I’ll never know.” Early graduate Libby Lloyd, who went on to become Head of Social Work at Princess Margaret and King Edward Memorial Hospitals but also lectured in social work courses at The University of New South Wales and UWA, said it was vital to provide appropriate support and development for students as they progressed through the course, to ensure they didn’t contaminate their subsequent practice with their own neuroses. “Students need to be given good opportunities to explore themselves. They are the tool of trade,” she said. “Opportunities to explore their inner world, their motivation, their strengths, their weaknesses are really vital. You get some of that in the placements, but I think it should
OPPORTUNITIES TO LEARN (L-R) Maria Harries, Katrina Stratton, Mike Clare, Rosa Catalano, Violet Bacon, Brenda Clare.
be part of the curriculum. “It means having a good tutor who is based at the University and really gets to know you and has time and is committed to getting to know you and how you are adjusting to all of this. Because everybody is attracted to the profession for a reason. Yes, there’s altruism there, but there’s also bags of neuroses, inevitably. So that needs to be managed and people need to be aware of it. “That’s part of the responsibility of the profession - to help people get a handle on what the hell is that all about, what do I need to do to make myself as functional as I can, given all that? Because whether you’re going to end up at the psychotherapeutic end of the spectrum or the social policy end of the spectrum, your family dynamics are going to affect the way you do business, inevitably, because you’re a human being and you’re dealing with small groups and all the things that trigger your neurosis.” •
Everybody is attracted to the profession for a reason. Yes, there’s altruism there, but there’s also bags of neuroses, inevitably. So that needs to be managed and people need to be aware of it ~ Libby Lloyd
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CHAPTER 4 Perceptions of Social Work – Do-Gooders and Bleeding Hearts
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ocial workers have been called many things over the years: social reformers; bleeding hearts; hippy radicals; interfering do-gooders upsetting the status quo. Faint praise could be just as damning. Implicit in the vague, if well-meaning, view of ‘kind people doing good things’ lurked the patronising suggestion that, essentially, social workers were just sweet, ineffectual folk fluffing about: led by their hearts and not necessarily their heads. Although such labels may have been intended to belittle or sting, most social workers – confident in the genuine impact they can and do have on a daily basis - have chosen to embrace and wear them as a badge of honour, or even laugh at them. Some have done it more literally than others: current lecturer and 2002 graduate Sue Bailey once attended a conference which ended with participants making their own ‘bleeding heart’ brooches out of Fimo; and early graduate Libby Lloyd (pictured left) caused much hilarity at UWA Social Work’s 40th anniversary celebrations in 2005 when she produced a pair of outfits that represented two of social work’s most common stereotypes – the twin set and pearls, and the hippy. “It was the ‘twin set and pearls’ look that was so prevalent - a stereotype of middle class ‘gals’ doing ‘good works,’” Libby said. “The hippy dress represented the era of the late 1960s/early 1970s when western culture shifted to encourage individualism, selfexpression and breaking away from
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It would be horrible to have an image of a do-harmer, so I think one should strongly claim an image of doing good ~ Sabina Leitmann
previous generations. “As social workers we experienced this personally as well as professionally. The manifestations of this social change ranged from discussions of whether we looked unprofessional if we didn’t wear stockings to work, to passionate debates between the (supposedly) more radical community developers and the (supposedly) more conservative ‘interpersonal helpers’. This was really about the age-old question as to whether social workers supported or challenged the status quo. It’s a complex question as we usually work on the cusp of this, no matter what methods we use.” Libby still has the blue cardigan and hippy frock – neither worn for 20 years, she hastens to add (pictured left). Current lecturer Glenda Kickett, a 1993 graduate, said social work was an undervalued profession. “We often get called do-gooders,” she said. “But it’s not about being a do-gooder. It is about helping people, but it’s helping people to make good decisions about their own life and helping them to get the skills to make those decisions. “I’ve had people say to me ‘Are you going to come and tell me about how I should be living my life?’ I say to them ‘No, that’s not what we do, that’s not what I’m here about. I’m here to give you some options about how you want to run your life and if you want to make change with your life. These are your options and you can take them or leave them. It’s up to you, it’s your decision.’” Current AASW WA Branch
president Sabina Leitmann said she was happy to be called a do-gooder. “I think it’s a wonderful image because it would be horrible to have an image of a do-harmer, so I think one should strongly claim an image of doing good,” Sabina said. “But you need to do it in a sophisticated, nuanced way.” Although some social workers have found people they worked with patronising or dismissive – on Libby’s first day on the job at Claremont Hospital, a male, middle aged welfare assistance officer told her: “Don’t think you’re going to make a difference, girly!” – many, particularly as the decades wore on and attitudes changed, experienced more respect. “I’ve been energised by the respect that other professions have for social work,” said Celine Harrison, a 1988 graduate and former Head of Department of Social Work at King Edward Memorial Hospital. “I have worked in a hospital in settings where doctors with egos the size of continents would still have time for what a social worker had to say about what the family might need from them, and that’s been good. “I think we also take the pressure off them by doing what we do, so they don’t have to think about it or don’t get in trouble with the family, because we’re there to support the family.” Former UWA Social Work Alumni secretary, 1995 graduate and Social Work lecturer Katrina Stratton agreed, saying that in many settings, social workers were sought-after additions to teams dealing with confronting and
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challenging situations. “Certainly when I worked in the hospital system there would be great sighs of relief when the social worker arrived on the wards,” she said. “The other members of the team were really clear that we were dealing with issues and situations that they couldn’t or didn’t want to deal with. So I think there is a bit more recognition these days.” “We’ve moved on from a place where it was nice women helping,” 2005 graduate Louise Durack added. “It’s more about walking alongside and accentuating what the person does well to grow their abilities, or the community or the organisation or system.” Former Discipline Chair Mike Clare, said misconceptions about social work sometimes extended to those who wanted to get into the field. “Some people are misguided,” he said. “They think the job is easy – that it’s about smiling and being nice. Well that’s the last thing it is. You’ve got to be emotionally tough to stick it out. I bump into ex-students all over the place, and it’s really heartening, but it’s a tough landscape and I think it’s got tougher.” He said it was unlikely that anyone who went to a party and said they were a social worker would elicit a terribly warm response. “They ask you what you do for a living and you answer, and usually the conversation moves on, or it’s ‘bleeding hearts, do-gooders – say no more, I know all about you,’” he said. “Imagine if you said ‘I’m a lawyer or an economist’ - there would be a dialogue. But social workers work with the disadvantaged and the vulnerable and there’s an ambivalence: ‘Maybe they’re responsible for their own mess. Maybe the more we try and help the more we mess it up. Maybe we should do nothing and see what happens.’ There’s a mix of values in the community about what’s the right way to respond to the issues that affect disadvantaged people.” Sabina said similar perceptions had hampered Social Work’s acceptance at UWA from the start, with the profession’s focus on working with vulnerable, marginalised and possessed populations an uncomfortable fit for the prestigious, predominantly middle class university. “UWA is a very middle class university so I think that was always part of the tension,” she said. “Not only that but it was an applied profession which was mostly
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PERCEPTIONS OF SOCIAL WORK - DO GOODERS AND BLEEDING HEARTS female – so the course had both class and gender working against it. “In a way, the University almost held Social Work as a foster child – a child that came into its family but it didn’t quite believe it was from the same gene pool. Sometimes I think the course has survived in spite of, not because of its parent – and that’s made the program incredibly resilient, growing up in a sometimes neglected part of the garden.” Perceptions of social work have had an impact at a broader level, too, with the rhetoric and policies of changing governments translating into the public’s – and the University’s - view of social work and, by extension, the health of the course and the profession at given times. “If the political powers of the day were giving welfare and human services a bad serve and dismissing it, then that was ammunition for people within the institution to argue that social work shouldn’t be here, or shouldn’t get any money or whatever,” former Social Work lecturer, Professor Owen Hicks, said. “When the rhetoric is not very supportive, it’s a harder job to fight for survival.” Nevertheless he said there was no question that social work was an essential profession. “I don’t think it’s an optional extra for a society, even though there are times when the government of the day voices rhetoric that suggests that that is the scenario,” he said. “I don’t want to be too much of a doomsayer, but I think the fabric of society is deteriorating and the more it does, the harder it is for social workers to practice effectively, because the less support you have to hang what you might be able to provide onto. So the future is assured for social work, I think, but the task is more challenging.”
Courage and Core Skills It is difficult to paint a definitive picture of the ideal or most effective social worker. Social workers operate in so many different ways and in so many different arenas that it is impossible to pin them down to any one description. Some ingredients, however, are universally agreed. In particular retired and practicing social workers highlight again and again fundamental skills and traits such as systemic thinking - the ability to look at issues from an individual, organisational and wider point of view; the need to keep an open mind and not give up on individuals or the possibility of safe and hopeful outcomes; the courage to question decisions and systems in order to influence policies and be effective in bringing about change where needed; the ability to deal with complexity; and the ability to humanise systems or institutions for those who must engage with them. It was the bigger picture view in particular that persuaded Celine Harrison, a psychology graduate, to switch to social work from her job as a graduate welfare officer in child protection. “It was that broad way of looking at and describing the world that first caught me,” she said. “I thought, yes – I can see what sort of a difference we might make in the lives of individuals and families, but always with a broader canvas of how society is structured, historically and through contemporary forces.” She said social workers were in a position to exert a significant positive influence on people’s lives at critical moments, such as when dealing with pregnant women in situations of risk. “For instance in the women’s hospital, if you think of their lives as like a 24-hour clock, the times when we encounter them are like five minutes to midnight,” she said.
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“We have to make those five minutes count, and it’s the individual social worker at that time, at that front line, who is on duty and attached to that clinic who does that.” She said the challenge for social workers was remembering that while they could not always stop bad things from happening, they should never give up on effecting positive change. “The distressing thing for social workers is. . . the work is never, never done. It’s cyclical. You never can say ‘oh I have got that sorted’. But I think the challenge for the future will continue to be as it has always been - to understand that we are never going to prevent dreadful things from happening, whether to children or in elder abuse or being discharged from a mental health facility when they shouldn’t have been and all of that kind of stuff, but that our practice should not be guided only by the bad things that will happen. “In fact our practice should be guided by a vision of
If you think of their lives as like a 24-hour clock, the times when we encounter them are like five minutes to midnight. We have to make those five minutes count, and it’s the individual social worker at that time, at that front line, who is on duty and attached to that clinic who does that – Celine Harrison positive outcomes for families and individuals – that people can change, and systems can change, even if they don’t change forever, which is why we need to always continue to keep those kinds of skills in our toolboxes: the ability to advocate and to analyse systems and to articulate what it is that we think is happening and what we think we need to do to make lives better for people.” Dr Michael Wright, who graduated in 1995 said social workers had to be fearless to keep challenging the system. “If you are going to fight for people who are so marginalised and so disenfranchised, you are going to come under enormous pressure, because the system
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has to keep moving on and there are people who could never live up to being part of the system,” he said. “So if you truly want to fight for those people and try to work in a way that empowers them, you have to have a thick skin. “People aren’t going to go ‘oh that’s fantastic, what you have just done.’ People are going to get annoyed with you and they’ll be frustrated with you because you are always asking them to stop and think about what they’re doing.” He said that equally, social workers needed to be able to work with uncertainty. “If you’re not comfortable working with uncertainty then maybe it’s not a profession you should be in: go and be a bank clerk,” he said. “The people that work really well with this stuff are people who are by their very nature very, very patient, and who have a high tolerance level; who can just work slowly, methodically, fearlessly, but just with incredible patience. “Where people strike trouble is they take on the pressure of the system but they don’t know how to move within the system and allow the system to move around them.” Michael said he worried that too many social workers – including himself, to some extent – became beholden to the organisations for which they worked and forgot their roles as agents of change. “Social work has lost its way somewhat,” he said. “We are continually being pushed into this spot where we are now agents for ‘same’ instead of for change. Rather than disrupting the status quo, we’re now reinforcing or actually doing the Government’s bidding or whoever is paying our wages; whatever the agenda is at the time. There are lots of examples of that around Australia. I don’t think people do enough connecting of the dots.” Richmond Wellbeing CEO and 1983 graduate Joe Calleja said he too
worried that some social workers identified themselves as employees of a particular agency rather than as a social worker employed by that agency. “I think that’s a significant difference in the way you look at things,” he said. “They stop thinking critically about their profession and the knowledge and skills that their professional education has enabled them or can enable them to apply at a workplace. For example a policy that an agency might put in place might rub against the grain of the social worker code of ethics or the general ethos of social work, and they won’t necessarily question
many people out there who aren’t even at that level of consciousness.” Joe said that in addition to social workers moving to a system of registration, he would like to see social work courses inspiring students to think about their profession and their professional identity so they took that pride and sense of identity into the workplace and were better prepared to deal with the challenges currently facing society. He would also like to see social work schools speaking up more and questioning the policies of the day. “The need for social workers in significant positions of influence at all levels in government and the nongovernment sector is greater now than it has ever been, because we are facing major challengers around human rights and civil rights,” he said. “You only need to look at issues to do with welfare reform, with refugees and so on. But there are some big issues about people’s right to live
FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES Libby Loyd with 1988 graduate Celine Harrison.
that policy or challenge it or seek to influence it in a way that actually informs it more effectively from a client perspective, as articulated in our code of ethics. They become agents of the agency rather than social workers who are contributing to that agency’s culture.” He said social workers didn’t have to go in with guns blazing to be effective: “I’m not suggesting people should be in the trenches. They can do it very quietly and very subtly, but they’re doing it. What I’m suggesting is there are too
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a good life in the community, and there’s a convergence by both political parties around the middle ground that is populist and ill-informed in many respects. “Governments are forgetting the dignity of human life, the right that most people actually want to live a contributing life in the community, but there are more and more policies which are blame-centred and damaging to the integrity of individuals and families and communities. “So the role of the profession is more important now than I think it has been for a long time, and the role of the professional association in articulating these issues is quite critical, and I think it has become more vocal in recent years.” •
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CHAPTER 5 Celebrating the Profession
PROFESSIONAL EXCELLENCE Left, Louise Durack, third from right. Below, outgoing chairperson of the WA Social Worker of the Year Awards committee, Dr Katrina Stratton, at the 2015 awards.
founding aims of the WA Branch of the Australian Association of Social Workers: to spread the knowledge and understanding of social work in the community . The event would highlight the stories and contributions of WA social workers and the diverse ways that they – often quietly and invisibly – effected change, whether through direct practice, research, policy, advocacy, education, community development, organisational change, or leadership. The committee got to work and soon had UWA, the AASW
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ome time in late 2007, UWA Social Work Alumni Chair and founding member Louise Durack burst into a meeting of her fellow committee members brimming with the excitement of a fantastic idea. The group, which included Head of Discipline and Social Work Alumni Vice Chairperson Mike Clare, Alumni Secretary Katrina Stratton and members Fran Crawford and Angela Fielding, was discussing how to respond to a recent social work leadership forum that identified significant challenges facing the profession. Those challenges, reflected nationally, included struggles to attract social work students, stay relevant and remain professional in the face of the increasing deprofessionalisation of areas which had traditionally provided employment for social workers.
Louise’s idea was to celebrate and lift the profile of the profession by creating an annual Social Worker of the Year Award, an initiative that would hold true to one of the
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and Curtin University on board as partners, each of which provided crucial support. The first WA Social Worker of the Year Awards ceremony was held at
the University Club on June 23, 2009. There were four categories, supported by founding sponsors Richmond Fellowship WA (now Richmond Wellbeing) and the Department for Child Protection and Family Support, with an overall winner chosen from the four category winners. The inaugural Social Worker of the Year was 1982 UWA graduate Rosalie Dwyer, a social worker in the remote Indigenous community of Warburton more than 1,500km from Perth. Rosalie, a senior community worker with the Department for Child Protection, was recognised for her outstanding dedication and commitment to the Warburton and Ngaanyatjarra communities. She was described as a flexible, resourceful, adaptable practitioner delivering quality support to the community. Over the years, more and more social worker stories came to be told via the awards. As outgoing SWOTYA chairperson Katrina Stratton told this year’s awards ceremony, since that first event there have been 29 category winners and five more Social Workers of the Year: Glenda Kickett, Felicity Creagh, Michelle Charlton, Pippa Blackburn, and this year’s winner, Fran McGrath. The ceremonies are well attended, with guests frequently touched by the inspiring stories of those nominated and using the forum to reflect and hold conversations about challenges facing the profession and what it means to be a social worker. Awards patron and early UWA social work graduate Jan Stewart told this year’s ceremony that of all the generous acknowledgements and awards she had received in the final few years of her career as CEO of Lotterywest, the one she valued most of all was her role as SWOTYA patron. “Although it is now many years
since I have worked directly with clients ... my fundamental sense of personal identity is with the profession of which I am so proud,” she told a full house of guests. “I was truly touched when my colleagues asked me to undertake this role.” She said society today faced challenges of an order and magnitude she and her contemporaries could not have dreamt of in their early days as starry-eyed young graduates. Yet social workers, who frequently worked in the face of almost insurmountable difficulties in order to effect positive change for others, were part of a profession which was often denigrated. “I still can’t believe that those whose intent and life’s work is to do good in our community are sometimes described as do-gooders as some kind of insult,” she said. “Being a do-gooder is a name we should all wear as a badge of honour.” Six years on, founding SWOTYA committee members Louise and Katrina believe organisers have partly fulfilled their original goal of
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AWARD WINNING Social Worker of the Year Awards 2015.
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raising the profile of the profession and encouraging social workers to acknowledge their own value. They think there’s still a way to go, though. “I don’t think we’ve really seen a significant shift into a louder, prouder profession, which is probably a disappointment,” Louise said. “The continuing push for a team award, for example, is a real reflection of that. People want a team award but we want to highlight the stories of individual social workers - not social workers and the fabulous psychiatrists and systems they’re working with; not social workers in teams or organisations. We’re not looking for employer of the year: we’re looking for the Social Worker of the Year.” They would also like to see other branches of the AASW embrace the idea. “The intention was to pilot it here, demonstrate its effectiveness and then gift the model to other state branches and nationally,” Louise said. “It’s a shame that that hasn’t happened.” Sabina Leitmann, current president of WA Branch of the
CELEBRATING THE PROFESSION AASW (the national body of which donated $30,000 to get the awards up and running), said there had been some criticism around the awards because social workers didn’t like the idea of tall poppies. “They say that’s elitist, and I say that’s just not the way to think,” she said. “In celebrating the winners it is celebrating the achievements of many, through the example of a number of people. So it’s not individualistic in that sense. “It’s much easier to tell a story through the individual stories of a social worker than it is to have an abstract story. And that’s where I think by telling the stories of individuals, we tell the story of the profession.” Katrina said one of the positive outcomes of the awards was the way they had united the three WA university social work courses - UWA and Curtin University as founding partners, and Edith Cowan University as a sponsor - in a collaborative exercise that benefited all. Joe Calleja, former AASW national vice-president and CEO of major awards sponsor Richmond Wellbeing, agreed. He said the awards were a great celebration of social work and represented the kinds of things the profession – and the courses that fed it – needed to do to promote the professional identity of social work much more strongly. “I just think you have to be proud of the profession you come from,” he said. “It’s a really important event and it’s good to see all three universities engaging in that level of recognition of social work.”
The UWA Social Worker The UWA Social Worker rolled off the presses for the very first time in June 2002 – the brainchild of then Discipline Chair, Associate Professor Mike Clare, and journalist-turnedsocial worker Pip White.
Intended as a bulletin for graduates, staff, students, field educators and associates, the newsletter allowed those with an interest in the discipline of Social Work to keep up to date with current events. It was a means of re-establishing contact with alumni and provided a forum for matters affecting the UWA social work community. To some extent it also acted as a showpiece for the discipline’s broad research interests – essential at a time when universities, including UWA, were increasingly linking funding and performance outcomes to publication and research output. “I think I was aware of a need for Social Work to be more ‘visible’ in the faculty and the University,” Mike recalled. “I was used to receiving newsletters from schools of Social Work in the US and elsewhere, so I approached the ViceChancellor, Alan Robson, who gave us some funding. “I was aware of good news needing to be public. I think it was good for morale in the department and did help with visibility, but that’s for others to confirm.” The newsletter began with an ambitious plan to publish three editions a year, although the amount of work required and competing demands faced by those behind the publication soon saw it settle to a more realistic, if patchy, timetable. Over the next nine years, new editions would appear every six to 18 months. They were full of news on staff movements, staff and student achievements, conferences, staff and postgraduate research updates, graduate profiles, new initiatives and course developments. Editions also focused on the diverse array of community and Governmentrelated activities engaged in by those working and studying in the discipline, including involvement in important public policy
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WORDS AND PICTURES Pip White, editor of the UWA Social Worker magazine.
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debates such as that surrounding the proposed introduction of mandatory reporting of child abuse, and the impacts on children of being placed into care. There were updates, too, on contentious issues affecting the profession such as the mass resignation of the AASW WA branch committee of management in 2003. The 2003 edition reported on Emeritus Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya’s receipt of a Centenary Medal in recognition of his role as a pioneer in Australian multiculturalism. In a piece of late-breaking news, the June 2004 edition reported that Dr Maria Harries had been awarded an Order of Australia Medal in the Queen’s
Birthday Honours for her service to the social work profession and the community, particularly in the areas of mental health, child protection and education. The publication was a labour of love for Pip White, who had qualified as a journalist at Curtin University and then moved into respite assistance for families caring for people with mental illness. The job got her interested in social work and she initially looked to the Curtin course but, on finding they didn’t have a mid-year intake, enrolled at UWA. “It really was a different way of thinking and it was very exciting to do social work,” Pip said. “It suddenly just fitted for me in a way that journalism didn’t. Both my parents were psychologists so maybe coming from that kind of background it was always going to be a good fit. But just to be learning about sociological issues and the counselling and the broader policy issues – it was fascinating and I had a great time.” Pip graduated with first-class honours in 2002 before going on to complete her PhD (2008). Unable to completely quash the journalist within, she continued producing editions of The UWA Social Worker on the side. It was a timeconsuming but rewarding process. “The artwork and formatting became a hobby really,” she said. “I loved it because it was creative and like creating an artwork, almost.” In all, there were 10 editions of The UWA Social Worker, including two editions in 2006. One of those was a special alumni edition reflecting on the discipline’s 40th anniversary the year before. Perhaps the saddest task to fall to the newsletter was to record the unexpected death, in January 2008, of beloved former staff member, Rae Lindsay, who had retired in July 2003 after 26 years with the discipline. The February
2008 edition carried heartfelt, full-page tributes from Emeritus Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya and Dr Tom Barrett, alongside whom Rae worked for most of her association with UWA. “Rae had not been well, as I understand it, but it kind came out of the blue and people were not expecting it,” Pip said. “The in memoriam items were really moving.” The final edition of The UWA Social Worker was published in November 2011. Two years had passed since the last edition, with Associate Professor Mike Clare retiring in the meantime. Pip said new Discipline Chair Dr Susan Young expressed interest in her producing subsequent editions, but by that time she was working full-time. “I just didn’t have time to do it anymore,” she said. “I wish there were more hours in the day because I would have liked to have kept going with it.” Pip has since gone on to leadership roles within the social work profession, working particularly with people who have experienced childhood trauma. Her most recent role, as Founding Director of Tuart Place, saw her win the Leading the Way category sponsored by Richmond Wellbeing at the 2015 WA Social Worker of the Year Awards. “I’m so lucky to have stumbled into this role because it really is quite unique in terms of its participant leadership,” Pip said of Tuart Place. “There’s nothing that I feel better about than seeing someone come into the service in a pretty fragile state and then walking alongside them as they grow and get stronger; and then see them get to that point where they want to give back and help other people.” Unsurprisingly, she has built an extra task into the job: editing a newsletter, similar in appearance to The UWA Social Worker, called The
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Tuart Times. “It’s the frustrated journalist coming out in me again,” she said. “I can’t help myself!”
Student and Alumni Associations The UWA Social Work Alumni grew out of a desire not only to champion the social work profession and provide valuable networking opportunities to social work graduates, but specifically to champion the sometimes unloved (by its parent) UWA Social Work course. “It was kind of rallying their community around them a little bit – a community of support, really,” early Alumni Secretary Katrina Stratton said. “It was an opportunity for alumni to network and keep those relationships going with each other, but also with the discipline and with UWA.” Plans to launch the UWA Social Work Alumni were announced in the lead-up to the discipline’s 40th anniversary in 2005. A busy planning group made up of Joe Calleja, Mike Clare, Louise Durack, Maria Harries, Francine Holder, Anne Holloway, Trish Langdon and Brian Wooller established a number of key aims for the alumni. They included: enhancing professional development, creating a mentoring program for new graduates, raising
It was kind of rallying their community around them a little bit – a community of support, really – Katrina Stratton funds for the Laki Jayasuriya Scholarship, and supporting the Centre for Vulnerable Children and Family. Supported by funding provided by then UWA Vice-Chancellor Alan Robson – a consistent friend to the discipline - the alumni launched in July 2006. Dr Sev Ozdowski, who had recently completed a fiveyear spell as Australian Human Rights Commissioner and Disability Discrimination Commissioner, gave the inaugural lecture on the role of social workers in setting national policy. In the years that followed, the committee organised regular networking and professional development events; worked at expanding the membership and developing a mentoring program and a champions initiative (where nominated champions from each graduating year group acted as a voice for their peers); and worked in partnership with the AASW and Curtin University to launch the WA Social Worker of the Year Awards in 2009. By 2011, the alumni had segued into the UWA Social Work Alumni, Friends and Associates (SWAFA). That year
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CELEBRATING THE PROFESSION it launched the SWAFA Mentorlink program for new graduates and early career social workers. More than 30 Social Work practitioners signed up to mentor Social Work students in their final year of study and their first year of practice in the field. The occasion coincided with Dr Brenda Clare’s retirement as lecturer and the launch of a Mentoring Honour Board (with Brenda’s the first name added). In a report on the Mentoring Program in The UWA Social Worker, SWAFA chairperson Sue Bailey acknowledged the work of those who brought the project to fruition. “This project has had a very long gestation,” she said. “I know that Mike Clare among others have advocated for this as an important means of providing social work students with support as they leave academia and enter into the professional world of Social Work. This formal launching then begins this very important project which we hope will contribute to the development of a vibrant connected and supportive social work community in Western Australia.”
events including UWA Social Work’s 40th anniversary celebrations. Activities included social events, the production of SWSA T-shirts, and the setting up of an online discussion board. The Student Social Work Association was still running in 2011, working cooperatively with the UWA Social Work Alumni, Friends and Associates to run a graduate event and plan a website for 2012. However, as of 2015, the Student Social Work Association appears to be dormant. In the absence of that networking avenue, some current first-year students have turned to more modern means – social media - to achieve similar goals. A Facebook group has been created for the cohort which enables students to discuss assignments if they wish, share memes, remain in contact during long practicums, and share upcoming events such as a samesex marriage rally held in August.
NEW INTAKE Current first year student Jess Roscic.
Modern Face of Student Life By the early to mid-2000s, while the alumni was still gearing up to start assisting graduates, a Social Work Student Association had sprung up to serve a similar purpose for students. The association, run by and for Bachelor of Social Work students, was intended to build visibility, foster a sense of identity, friendship and collegiality among social work students, create networking opportunities, and provide student representation within the discipline, the wider University, and professional associations. It also had education and social action committees, and worked to network with its counterpart association at Curtin University and to support
First-year social work student Jess Roscic said the group offered an informal support network for current students. “Obviously most people use Facebook a lot these days, so it’s another place when we’re not in class or on campus to ask questions about upcoming assignments as well as to vent frustrations or stresses, post information about articles/training/events that are social work-related that people might find interesting, or to have a joke or check-in with the whole cohort at once,” she said. Jess said using social media in this manner as a student was new for her - during her first degree, at Edith Cowan University from 2005-2007, Facebook had been too new for anyone to consider using in such a way. “Facebook had been around for a couple of years already, I think, but it was nowhere near as popular or widely-used as it is today – so it’s funny to see the changes in regards to all that stuff in just a few short years.” Head of Social Work and Social Policy, Associate Professor Judy Esmond, said such groups could be useful but reminded students to be careful about what they posted, and always keep in mind the potential for their social media posts to haunt them when looking for work later. She said some students also found such groups more stressful than helpful, especially if people didn’t have all the information about an assignment or issue. “In the end, instead of guessing on Facebook, go and ask the lecturer,” she said.
Animating Social Work In 2013, the UWA Social Work Alumni, Friends and Associates (SWAFA) and the School of Population Health launched Animating Social Work, a short film designed to encourage
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undergraduate students to consider a graduate degree in social work. Devised and developed by SWAFA chair and Social Work and Social Policy lecturer Dr Sue Bailey and SWAFA secretary Stephan Lund, the film featured graduates, students and staff speaking about what a career in social work meant to them. Participants spoke of social work being satisfying, bringing hope to people, making a difference, being colourful and never boring, and like having a passport: ‘It will take you anywhere’. Recent and older graduates working in the field gave an insight into just some of the potential careers open to social work
Jarrod McKenna, began the First Home Project to support refugees settling into Australia. The pair used social media to crowd-source a community home loan to buy a rundown house in Midland, which had been a meth lab, and turn it into three small homes – one for them and the remaining two for refugee families. Sue said when the film was launched that the community was ‘at a time in history when social work is even more important, as we seek to address inequality and ecological justice across the planet’. “The title for the film comes from an understanding of animating that means literally
Our work requires collectives of concerned and passionate individuals to come together ~ Sue Bailey
students – from working within child and adolescent mental health services and in schools to working with the Office of the Public Advocate as a guardian, working with children in care, working with remote Indigenous communities and supporting recently arrived refugee families. Students also talked about being on the cusp of their Social Work journeys. Sue said the film featured some truly inspiring individuals, including young social worker Teresa Lee who, with husband
‘to breathe life into’,” she said. “Our work requires collectives of concerned and passionate individuals to come together. When animation is understood in its full social, human and political sense, it can become a very powerful idea.” In the film, she describes a career in social work as one which sets graduates up with a set of skills they can use in many different areas. “It’s much, much more than child protection or counselling,” she says. “It actually encompasses a huge range of jobs and opportunities and
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MOVING PICTURES SWAFA chair and Social Work and Social Policy lecturer Dr Sue Bailey, who devised and developed the short film Animating Social Work, and some stills from the film of Teresa Lee and Jennifer Maughan.
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I think that what I experience when I visit students in the field is I see all of that. “In Animating Social Work I wanted to breathe life into it and make those connections between those people that are doing that wonderful work in the field and also the University, and find out ways that we can build a community of UWA social work alumni. I saw that the 100th anniversary of the University was a really good opportunity to have some of that work being shown and demonstrated.” The full Animating Social Work video, produced and edited by Brendan Hutchens, can be viewed on the Social Work and Social Policy home page. Two abridged versions can be viewed on YouTube. •
CHAPTER 6 The Rise of the Indigenous Unit
Something’s Missing The arrival of Violet Bacon in 1997 to bolster the UWA Social Work course’s focus on Indigenous history and perspectives was a significant step in the discipline’s evolution and one that, for many people, was long overdue. It was also an historic appointment, with Violet becoming the first Indigenous social worker employed as a lecturer in any
Young were focused on Aboriginal people in their own work and research, the course itself contained only limited content specific to Aboriginal people and issues. “I spoke to Jim Ife and Mike Clare, particularly about a few issues I had on placement with these cultural sorts of approaches,” Glenda said. “There were discussions about trying to incorporate more cultural elements
university in Australia. Murmurs about the course’s insufficient focus on Aboriginal issues had begun in the early 1990s, when one of the few Aboriginal students to have undertaken the degree up to that point, Glenda Kickett, noticed the lack of specific Aboriginal approaches to social work. Although Social Work academics including Audrey Bolger and Sue
into the course.” She said the academics were receptive, but the challenge was convincing others, higher up in the University structure, of the need. It wasn’t until the arrival of Aboriginal student Michael Wright a couple of years later that the push really gathered momentum. Like Glenda, he noticed the lack of Aboriginal content and wasn’t shy
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INSTIGATORS OF CHANGE (above left) Sue Young, left, and Violet Bacon. Above, Michael Wright who helped prod Social Work into establishing a dedicated Indigenous unit.
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in saying so. He began to challenge elements of the course, repeatedly questioning their relevance and application to Aboriginal people. “It was a conversation that was starting to happen in the school,” Michael said. “I mean, they didn’t have anyone. I’m no shrinking violet and I would always raise the point: ‘What does that mean for Aboriginal people’, or ‘how do we do that?’ You
know, continually keeping it on the agenda – that’s kind of what I do. I think that’s why Maria (Harries) and I got on so well together. She liked to guide things and foster things and try to move the status quo somewhere else, so she and I were of like mind in that regard.” He said UWA wasn’t alone in lacking Aboriginal staff or focus, with Curtin University’s social work course at the time similarly light on Aboriginal content. Professor Jim Ife, who had previously headed the Curtin course and was head of UWA’s School of Social Work and Social Administration during Michael’s period as a student, said it was an issue all over Australia. “I think social work generally in Australia was pretty white,” he told Legacy & Promise. “It was in the ‘80s - I’m thinking nationally here – that there started to be more awareness of that. At UWA we had staff members, particularly Audrey Bolger and then Sue Young, who had had a significant involvement with Aboriginal communities. “It was a combination of those things which led to Vi’s appointment, but Michael really had a significant impact on the course when he took it because he really did force us to take Indigenous issues much more seriously. He was quite instrumental in pushing the need for more Indigenous understandings in the course,” said Professor Ife. Michael said it had been clear there needed not only to be more in the curriculum about Aboriginal people but, ideally, an Aboriginal person teaching the content. “My position, and it still applies to today, is Aboriginal people make up less than three per cent of the population here in WA and yet in places like the Department for Child Protection something like 60 per cent of the clients are Aboriginal,” he said. “If you’re in the justice
system it’s something like 70 per cent in the women’s prison and 50 per cent of the men - and these are where social workers often find themselves working. “If the people you are most likely going to work with are Aboriginal people, then surely there must be something in the curriculum being taught that relates to that particular group, because you have to work in an entirely different way with Aboriginal people - we know that much. The course material we were reading was coming out of Europe. Not all, but some of it was.” Jim was sympathetic and, soon after Michael graduated, travelled with other academics to Mandurah and Pinjarra where Michael had arranged to take them on country and meet with Noongar elders and people. It was an important experience for the academics and helped to spur further action. “We had a sort of cultural training program where about five or six of us were taken down to an area around Mandurah/Pinjarra by the elders,” Jim said. “For me it was a profound experience and I think it was for other staff members as
with Aboriginal communities and then I came to the course here and noticed that there wasn’t anything,” Sue said. “I remember being absolutely surprised when students said: ‘I don’t need to know that because I’m never going to work with any Aboriginal people.’ “It shook me forcibly, not only to have them show no interest but to have no realisation that they were entering a profession where the main clients were Aboriginal.” Sue said there had only been a handful of Aboriginal students to go through the course at that point, and perhaps only 20 overall. “I can’t begin to imagine what it’s been like for them, but some of them have been very insistent that we attend much better to working with Aboriginal people. There was very definitely a lack.” Following the trip south with Michael, staff held detailed discussions about the steps needed to establish a position for an Aboriginal academic who could develop material which would permeate the curriculum. Some felt they should go further, employing more than one Aboriginal person to
If the people you are most likely going to work with are Aboriginal people, then surely there must be something in the curriculum being taught that relates to that particular group ~ Michael Wright well. It was really significant.” Dr Sue Young, a 1988 UWA Social Work graduate who had begun teaching with the course in 1994, was also supportive of the move to deepen the Indigenous focus – particularly after encountering a concerning lack of awareness among some of the students. “Most of my work focus since the 1970s has been with or associated
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deliver the content. “One of the suggestions I made was that we should see if we could employ two people because of the loneliness of that position and the responsibility, which was subsequently experienced, of having to do all of the Aboriginal work,” Sue said. “I think that’s one of the expectations when Aboriginal people are employed in
THE RISE OF THE INDIGENOUS UNIT decision – return to DAO, which wanted her back – or stay with the UWA course. Jim spoke with Professor Alan Robson and secured ongoing funding for a permanent position. The cementing of the role was an historic move: although some social work schools in other Australian states had appointed Aboriginal people, the roles had been only contract or short-term positions. “We were the first social work school to appoint an Aboriginal lecturer to a permanent full-time position,” Jim said. Violet, who featured in a number of newspaper stories about the ground-breaking nature of her role, said she hadn’t dwelt too much on the historic significance of her
organisations – they’re expected to do all of that work.” Jim took the case to the University, arguing for at least one full-time appointment to the teaching staff rather than part-time or sessional lecturers. Ultimately, he hoped to secure two or more such appointments. “Simply to bring sessional lecturers in from the community does not allow the necessary integration of this material across the whole curriculum, and easily marginalises this important aspect of study,” he wrote in a submission in support of the project. “Further, the social work course will remain a potentially hostile place for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students unless there are staff members to whom the students can readily relate and who will understand their cultural background. “The project therefore has the aim of establishing, permanently, at least one Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff position in the School of Social Work and Social Administration. This position would be filled by a qualified and
experienced social worker from an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander background, with the necessary knowledge, experience and acceptability in the local Aboriginal community. “The school sees this position not as a token, or junior position, but as the appointment of an academic colleague who will participate fully in the entire range of the school’s research and teaching activities.” Then Deputy Vice-Chancellor Professor Alan Robson was supportive of the plan and made funding available for the appointment.
A Weight and a Privilege In 1997, Curtin University social work graduate and Yamatji woman Violet Bacon, who had been working with the Drug and Alcohol Office for 10 years, saw a newspaper advertisement for the position and applied, thinking it would be a brief and interesting diversion. “The thing that appealed to me was it was only 12 months,” she said. “So much for that!” One year turned into two, at which point Violet had to make a
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appointment at the time but had been aware of it as both a weight and a privilege. “I wasn’t too conscious of being a pioneer, but the newspaper articles and other people reminded me I was the first, and I suppose when I presented my first summer unit, I felt it then. I realised there was a lot to do and that I could lay the path for future Aboriginal social work lecturers.” She would eventually spend 14 years in the role, with an additional two or three years in a part-time capacity while a replacement was sought following her formal retirement in 2011. Her initial task was to research and develop the materials needed to introduce an Aboriginal perspective into the course. She spent most of 1998 undertaking an extensive consultation process, speaking with Aboriginal social workers and members of the Aboriginal community about what was missing, reading about what others had done, and forging links
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with UWA’s School of Indigenous Studies. She also travelled to New Zealand (and later, Canada) to investigate their approach to incorporating first peoples into their social work courses. “I went to New Zealand and shadowed the Maoris, because they already had so much Maori content in their social work – it was fantastic,” Violet said. “I was impressed by the Maori input into the Massey University social work course and realised that New Zealand was far more advanced than Australia in this area.” Initially it had been envisaged that Aboriginal content would be seeded throughout the UWA course rather than as a stand-alone component, but by the end of her consultations it was clear to Violet that a stand-alone unit was both preferred by Aboriginal people and required to cover the desired content. The unit – taught for the first time in 1999 - was initially established as a compulsory summer school unit but was later incorporated into the main course. “I worked hard to get the unit embedded in Social Work: four units, one of them the Aboriginal one,” Violet said. “No summer unit, none of that, and now it’s in there. That happened when we went to the Masters. I felt great relief after that – I felt my job had been done.” Violet took responsibility early on both for the Indigenous unit and other teaching areas, including organisational and interpersonal skills. She also supervised placements and taught across other disciplines within the Faculty of Arts. “I was included in everything the only thing I didn’t teach was research,” she said. “I found it all very exciting and innovative. I couldn’t believe where I was, and most of that probably related to my school years. I hadn’t liked school
and yet here I was wandering through the halls of UWA and thinking, ‘what am I doing here, teaching?’ I used to go over and sit by the river and take it all in. “In a way it was a bit unreal, but I felt confident and comfortable in what I could do. The experience I’d already had in the field and at DAO contributed to that, so I knew what I was doing. I’m a hard worker and I prepared well, too.” One of Violet’s greatest passions became introducing Aboriginal history and perspectives to students who – due to the lack of Aboriginal content in primary school curricula – for the most part arrived with little knowledge or understanding of the area. In what would become her trademark teaching style, she returned to traditional ways of telling stories, using oral traditions and the learning circle principle to impart knowledge around topics including the Dreamtime, dispossession, the 1967 referendum, health and social issues including drugs and alcohol, and working towards reconciliation or coexistence. Although sharing her own
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GROUND BREAKING Opposite left, (left to right) Mike Clare, Rosa Catalano, Tom Barrett, Brenda Clare, Violet Bacon, Mark Sachmann and Rae Lindsay. Below, Michael Wright with Danny Ford and Rose Walley.
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history was difficult at first, she made a point of using personal stories to illustrate the impacts of various Government Acts and policies on Aboriginal people. She shared with students the story of her own mother’s removal to a mission and showed them her late father’s native citizenship documentation - the paperwork he had had to show to demonstrate he had a right to be on the street. “Some of them had not heard anything at all about Aboriginal history, and hearing it from an Aboriginal person was an eyeopener for them,” Violet said. “My major aim was to give them a background of history and then let’s see how we can actually utilise that when working with Aboriginal people as social workers.” She said her narrative therapy approach encouraged students to ask questions, listen deeply and understand there was always another story interwoven within the answers they received. “As social workers we need to yarn with a purpose and listen to the multitude of layers entwined within every story we hear,” she
THE RISE OF THE INDIGENOUS UNIT said. She would later contribute a chapter on the topic – Yarning and Listening: Yarning and Learning through Stories - to the groundbreaking book on Indigenous social work in Australia, Our Voices: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Work. Violet also regularly invited Aboriginal guest presenters to share their own stories and experiences with the students as a way of busting stereotypes and myths about Aboriginal people. She wanted students to understand that every client had a story to tell and that social workers must be aware of them as people first. It was vital that they understood that Aboriginal people were not all the same and that dealing with an Aboriginal person from Albany, for example, would be very different to dealing with someone from Roebourne. “The overriding thing I wanted them to understand was the diversity – we are a diverse group,” Violet said. “I spent a lot of time talking about diversity, but also having a framework of history, so they could have that at the back of their mind as they were working. That history element came through in all the units. It was integrated throughout.” Violet became beloved by students for her compassionate, empathetic and approachable manner, her use of humour, and her non-patronising, balanced approach. It was an effective style that, with other factors including her vision of ensuring social work students became culturally appropriate and effective practitioners, helped win her the national Neville Bonner Award for Indigenous Education in the 2008 Australian Awards for University Teaching. “One of the things I never did was try to make anyone feel guilty,” Violet said.
“It was nothing to do with that – it was about understanding. “I wanted to build hope and optimism on Aboriginal resilience, as working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders poses a great challenge to the social work profession, now and in the past. I wanted to highlight the strengths as well as identify the realities of the circumstances that social workers might find themselves in when working with Aboriginal people.” Sue Young said Violet had worked wonders in raising Social Work’s profile in the area of Aboriginal social work and in developing a highly regarded core unit which had become the envy of many other social work courses. But it hadn’t always been smooth sailing, with Violet, and the Discipline, for a long time having to defend the decision to include a specific Aboriginal focus. “I don’t think it was easy for Vi to have to constantly defend why we were focused on Aboriginal material,” Sue said. “Some people thought it was to the exclusion of other needy groups. Having to make the case for why we should have first people’s content and focus in the course – I think it was a strain. I don’t think it could have been easy. “It still happens – I think it’s better now, but the justification is still needed. Sometimes there is still that challenge thrown out and you have to defend it.” Violet said one of her few regrets about the course was that the second Aboriginal lecturer position had never materialised. “One of the things I was disappointed in was that we didn’t get another Aboriginal lecturer, like a male,” she said. “But in saying that I always had lots of guest speakers. You cannot do an Aboriginal unit with one person – there are so many different perspectives, so that’s why I had guest speakers, as well
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BELOVED TEACHER Violet Bacon, the first Indigenous social worker employed as a fulltime lecturer in any university in Australia.
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as non-Aboriginal social workers to come in and tell how they worked with Aboriginal people.” She said she was pleased the unit was now being taught by Glenda Kickett, a WhadjukBalladong Noongar woman whose community experience and connections made the unit even stronger, but was sad that – given the amount of effort that had gone into securing the full-time position back in the 1990s – the role was now filled by an Aboriginal person on a part-time basis only. New Head of Social Work and Social Policy Judy Esmond said that although the Indigenous unit’s future was assured, she could not see the discipline having the resources to move back to a full-time appointment in the immediate future. However Professor Colleen Fisher, Head of the School of Population Health, said she was hopeful the position would eventually be filled full-time again. “When we knew Vi was retiring we did advertise for an Indigenous social worker, but we ran into
some trouble trying to recruit one,” she said. “Certainly that would be something that we would value - I really hope it does happen again.”
A Transformative Experience All three of the main academics to have had responsibility for the Indigenous People and Social Work Unit said one of their favourite parts of delivering the unit was witnessing the students’ growth and the capacity of their newfound knowledge to light fires within. “You saw their faces and you just knew,” Violet said. “It would come out in their assignments understanding and wanting to work with Aboriginal people. That in turn ignited me and kept me going. But I mean I’ve had passion for this throughout: passion for it to be there, passion for students to learn, passion for students to then go out and do social work.” Dr Sue Young - who now coordinates and helps to deliver the Indigenous People and Social Work Unit with Glenda Kickett - said she too had seen students transformed by the experience. “Some people drifted through it and left the course and were unmarked, and that was a few of them, but for more people it was transformative, and it still is,” she said. “I’m really privileged to be able to participate in that unit. It’s just wonderful to see the transformation in students and their embracing of these new ways of thinking and doing and being, and the possibilities. It’s marvellous.” Glenda - a leading member of the Noongar community, tireless advocate for Aboriginal people and now lecturer for the unit she unwittingly helped to initiate while still a student - said the increased awareness of students these days was pleasing.
I’ve had passion for this throughout: passion for it to be there, passion for students to learn, passion for students to then go out and do social work ~ Violet Bacon
“I go and visit social work students on placement and the way they talk about their contact with Aboriginal people where they’re doing their pracs, they’re more open, they’re more aware,” she said. “They know some of the protocol around that, about how to talk to people and who they should be talking to, and what they should be saying, so they’re more aware of that and coming from that approach, and they’re having success in their placements. For me that’s encouraging. You know you’ve done something good when you can see that change coming through.” Glenda, who has held numerous roles in the government, education and non-government sectors, said that while Violet’s approach had centred on narrative therapy, she brought her own expertise to the role, along with a human rights perspective developed under the influence of Professor Jim Ife during her student days. “I came from more, I guess, a
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HUGE IMPACT Detail of a card to Violet Bacon from her students reflecting on what she has given them through her teaching of the Indigenous unit.
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community development, human rights approach, and that’s the way I look at things and the way I teach,” she said. “I do a lot of teaching in the unit around human rights and social justice and those approaches and also I’m very strong on community development in Aboriginal communities. “I think if we’re really going to empower communities and people that’s the way to go. We talk about self-determination for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and that’s a fundamental human right, so that’s the approach that I take. I’d like to see us talk more about that in the social work course. We do a little bit but not enough.” She said that not only were students these days more aware of Aboriginal issues, but social work education was markedly different now to when she did her degree. “When I did social work I think it was coming more from a crisis/ problem-solving perspective. Now it’s more empowering and inclusive,
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encouraging clients or families to make decisions on their own behalf. There are so many tools around now to have that inclusive work with families, whereas when I did it I think it was more around responding to crises and trying to work within a crisis situation.” Dr Michael Wright said he too remembered a heavy focus on counselling when he was studying social work. “I don’t dismiss the value of counselling or underestimate how powerful counselling can be,” he said. “But if your issue is about putting food on the table, finding a place to live - what we call all the critical inquiry/critical theory stuff – what’s a social worker going to do? Sit down and tell them otherwise? “I’m not saying it’s always the case, but sometimes I think counselling is a way to get people to accept their situation, wrongly or rightly. It doesn’t address the big structural areas around inequality, racism; it doesn’t address any of those.” Ever one to question and probe – the tenacious approach that helped nudge the Indigenous unit into being – Michael said he was keen now to see social work courses revisit and question the principles upon which they were founded. “We now have an increasingly wider gap between the haves and the have nots,” he said. “It’s always the intention of social work to work with those people who have been disenfranchised and marginalised in our community, so we do have to ask the question – how effectively are we working with that group? “What is it we’re doing now and what are we teaching in the schools to actually skill people to be able to work more effectively with that group of people? They’re the big questions that need to be asked.”
They saw that as a real injustice and wanted to be involved in some way ~ Glenda Kickett Fears Make Way for Change Unlike many social workers - who speak of choosing the field out of an early, if nebulous desire to help people - social work was the last place Glenda Kickett wanted to find herself. For her, the profession was cloaked in negativity: social workers were the people responsible for controlling her family. They were the people who took kids away and kept Aboriginal people steeped in disadvantage. “It was an area that just added to that disadvantage – it just didn’t seem to me that it was empowering in any way,” Glenda says now. “But since I’ve gone into social work and
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FRESH START Glenda Kickett, who graduated from the course in 1993 and now teaches the Indigenous unit part-time.
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I’ve worked in the area, I’ve seen how things can change, how you can support people to make change and how you can empower them to make those changes.” Glenda especially didn’t want to work with children in care, with the negative memories it evoked. Her earliest recollections – as described to Geoff Hutchison during a Who Are You? Segment on ABC 720 in 2011 – are of growing up in Kellerberrin with her family in the 1960s. A broad family group lived in several hot, corrugated iron houses across from the pipeline and main train line on the outskirts of town. When they weren’t at school, she and her cousins spent the days playing in the bush, picking
mushrooms and kicking footballs, skipping rope or running races. Going to school, she remembers racist taunts and the white kids sitting apart from the Noongar kids. It was a time when Aboriginal people could be locked up for being on the streets after 6pm: if her grandfather wasn’t home by that time they knew he was likely in jail. In 1969, with her father struggling with mental health issues and her mother having trouble coping and heading north for work, Glenda and her brother and sister were fostered to a nonIndigenous family living in Floreat Park. It was a world away from the life the then nine-year-old had known, and as she struggled to adapt to the authoritarian child-rearing practices of her foster family, she couldn’t understand why she and her siblings could not just live with their extended family. There were visits home to Kellerberrin, but they were never long enough. Leaving was always difficult. “The strongest memory I think for me was when was I ever going to go back to my family, because family was the most important thing,” she told the ABC. Years later, she worked for the Commonwealth Department of Employment, Education and Training and, while visiting the families of children on Abstudy, became increasingly aware of socioeconomic issues affecting Aboriginal families. She decided to go back to study, in the hopes of finding a way to help families like those she had seen. Due to the prominence at the time of the Aboriginal Deaths in Custody inquiry, she initially thought she would take up law. Her uncle’s death had been one of those investigated. However Jill Milroy, of UWA’s
School of Indigenous Studies, suggested she try social work instead. After chatting with Professor Jim Ife over at Social Work, Glenda decided she liked the idea of working to empower people and encourage change. “I always say I didn’t think I’d ever end up in social work, given that it was the system, really, that determined and controlled the lives of my family and made all those decisions,” Glenda says now. “So it’s sort of strange that I’m now working in the system that did that, but I believe I’m making a change to that system.” She said the Social Work staff made a deep impression on her, exposing her to different areas of the profession and making her think about how social work as a practice could support people to make positive changes in their lives. “Having seen social workers in the past as the people who took the children away and the children were placed in care, it was turning that thinking around, and that helped me quite a lot,” she says. “Turning that thinking around and seeing how I can be a social worker that is positive and empowering and being an advocate for people – I think that’s the impression I have taken with me from all those people I had contact with in the Social Work arena.” Similarly, when the prospect arose some years later of working with Aboriginal agency Yorganop, which supports Aboriginal children in out of home care, Glenda initially recoiled at the idea. However, the fact she was out of work at the time and a single mother supporting a son drove her to give it a try. “It was the one area of work that I didn’t ever want to do – working with Aboriginal children in care – but I was desperate for a job. After I was working there for a little while I realised this is actually the area of
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work I do want to work with.” Glenda subsequently moved to Centrecare’s Djooraminda, managing the agency’s crisis care cottage and working on call 24/7 for two years, without a break, to provide short-term accommodation and follow-up support for vulnerable Aboriginal children and carers. She’s not sure how she didn’t collapse but says she loved it, nevertheless. “I loved the work and the role and the kids and helping to provide some stability for them, but also advocating for them and their families and getting them back home or into more stable placements. “I loved working with the carers in that area, too, because we all had the same commitment and the same passion – we thought we could make a change for the children and the young people.” Glenda’s work with Djooraminda and as an advocate for Aboriginal people across a broad range of volunteer roles and committee and panel positions was publicly recognised in 2010 when she was named Western Australian Social Worker of the Year. She remained with Djooraminda for 14 years and now, in addition to
It was the one area of work that I didn’t ever want to do – working with Aboriginal children in care – Glenda Kickett teaching at UWA one day a week and being the Perth chairperson of NAIDOC, is working part-time with the Australian Childhood Foundation setting up a cultural kinship program for carers. She is also undertaking a PhD at UWA, writing about her experiences in care while examining how and why Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people tell stories: “I’m looking at ways things can be done better for Aboriginal children in care, using my experiences as a case study, in a way.” In the end, Glenda has come full circle in being able to see how her own struggle could help improve the lives of others: “Social work is a very reflective area of work, so you draw on a lot of those experiences and you reflect on how you could use those to make things better for people, and that’s what I’ve done with my work.” She says that in a way, entering the arena of Aboriginal child care was a case of facing her fears. “Maybe it was meant to be. I do believe that, and that God has a plan for us. It probably still is His plan for me.”
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THE RISE OF THE INDIGENOUS UNIT Jess said the rally was marked by passion rather than anger and had a hopeful vibe, with a small band playing music as participants walked, chanting, from Forrest Place to Parliament House. “I felt very empowered and ‘heard’ being there - that even if this one protest didn’t achieve anything concrete it was still a symbol of the support Aboriginal people have from the WA community in regards to these proposed changes,” she said. “I think sometimes it’s easy to feel so disempowered, out of control and disenfranchised when you hear of the government making changes
Youthful activism Older hands who lived through the tumultuous social change of decades past sometimes fear that young social workers have lost the taste for activism. They may be heartened, then, by the recent involvement of young students and graduates in causes that require strong, courageous voices. This year, almost the entire cohort of first year students – nearly 60 students - decided to take part in one of the rallies against the forced closure of Aboriginal communities. “Some of us thought we should organise for a group of us to go rather than everybody just rocking up on their own, kind of randomly, and we could make a banner to take as well,” first year social work student Jess Roscic said. “While we were organising it we realised there was a lecture on that day – and it was the Indigenous People and Social Work lecture. “We thought well, instead of getting marked down as not attending, why don’t we use our social work skills and say this is relevant to what we’re learning,
and ask can that class be waived to encourage everyone to attend the protest instead? “We thought the response would be ‘do what you want but you’re going on your own and don’t mention UWA’, but actually we had the complete opposite response. Sue (Young) and Glenda (Kickett) just seemed completely stoked that we were going.” Rather than frown on the students, the two lecturers were proud of their willingness to actively engage with issues of social justice. They pushed the class back and went along to photograph the students marching with a ‘Close the gap, not communities’ banner that identified them as UWA social work students. “It really meant a lot to me and the other students that we had the support of our lecturers,” Jess said. “I think it reflects really well on the Social Work school and demonstrates that they’re walking the talk that they supported us in going. “At the end of the unit Sue said us attending the protest was one of her highlights – it obviously meant a lot to them too.”
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MAKING A NOISE 2015 students take part in a rally against the forced closure of Aboriginal communities.
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or taking away funding from things you know are so vital to our community. It’s easy to give up and feel helpless. So for me, anyway, attending the protest was a way to try and change this and show our government that people do care, we are watching their every move and we won’t let them get away with doing things like this – we are supposed to have a democracy, after all!” Glenda Kickett said the rallies coincided with the first semester Indigenous unit and followed discussions she had had with the
students about self-determination and the lack of consultation around the forced closure of Aboriginal communities. “They saw that as a real injustice and wanted to be involved in some way,” she said. “I don’t think there were many missing from the group at that protest. They’re a really great group.” She said students now were more aware of and keen to learn about Indigenous issues than those she had graduated with in the early 1990s – a time when there was little dedicated focus on Indigenous history or issues within schools or the social work course. “The students I came through with were lovely, but they weren’t that aware and because there wasn’t much being taught then they couldn’t further that awareness. But these ones want to further that and they’re going off and doing things themselves and trying to be involved.” Sue Young said she had been delighted when the students sought approval for their participation in the rally. “I thought ‘How can we not support this? How could we possibly think of ourselves as social workers and say no, you can’t do this?’” She said student involvement in social justice issues was woven through Social Work’s history, with students in the past regularly involved in activities around AntiPoverty Week, for example. But the demands and pressures on modern students meant it wasn’t always as easy for them to become involved. “It’s hard enough work getting through a degree – they find it really challenging just to manage everything that goes on in their lives, to say nothing of the cost,” Sue said. “But if they’re given the opportunity to do some of this work they will do it with enthusiasm and genuineness, because that’s why
It really meant a lot to me and the other students that we had the support of our lecturers. I think it reflects really well on the Social Work school and demonstrates that they’re walking the talk that they supported us in going ~ Jess Roscic, student they’re here in the first place. The students in the Indigenous Unit this semester did find that opportunity and they took it.” Other examples of relatively recent student activism include students raising awareness of poverty and issues facing tenants. In the latter case, students paired with the Tenants Advice Service in a campaign dubbed “No Room in the Boom” to distribute 1,000 postcards to the Premier urging action to address the severe problems facing homeless people and tenants at a time of economic prosperity. Others have taken peaceful action against asylum-seeker policies. Recent social work graduate Teresa Lee was involved
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in a well-publicised peaceful sit-in at Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s office late last year. The group of eight people conducted a prayer vigil and called for an end to offshore detention and the release of children locked up on Nauru. The participants were arrested and charged with trespassing. They pleaded guilty and received spent convictions. More recently, current students called on their counterparts to support marriage equality by attending a rally in Perth. “The world has changed,” Sue said. “Student poverty is a major issue and they’re struggling, a lot of them. They have family commitments, children, jobs, a whole range of things. So I haven’t necessarily seen that they’re not committed and that they’re not willing, but there are lots of other things that get in the way. “But given the chance to do that sort of work they will do it, and they will embrace it and they will put their hearts and souls into it, because it’s real to them.”•
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CHAPTER 7 In the Field
were funnelled primarily into child welfare, health and mental health placements. First intake veteran Dr Marcia Foley, who graduated with a Diploma of Social Work in 1967 and went on to become UWA’s oldest PhD student (she took out her PhD in 2011 at the age of 87) - found her placements pivotal in determining her later career in mental health. “I had a placement in Heathcote Hospital, supervised by a woman
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or as long as social work education has existed, field placements have been a crucial part of the equation. Students enrolled in UWA’s fledgling course originally undertook three placements, with the requirement eventually changing to two full-time placements of 13 and 16 weeks. The placements are an AASW accreditation requirement, with students expected to be exposed to two different contexts, two different client groups and two different approaches. Early student Virginia Scott, who graduated in 1968 and went on to develop the practice standards for the profession, said course controller Dr Wally Tauss and lecturer Teddie Stockbridge did an incredible job in arranging placements for the early students, given the low numbers of social workers then employed in Western Australia. “There weren’t a lot of social workers in WA at the time, but the
ones that were there were superb,” she said. Although it can still be difficult to organise practicums, over the years the variety of placement opportunities has significantly broadened – a reflection of the expanding scope of Social Work practice. In the early days, students
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CRUCIAL WORK This page, first year field education students at their Integration workshop at Landsdale Farm School, 2015. Opposite, first year students on placements in an aged care facility.
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who was the first psychiatric social worker there, and I really found that fascinating and interesting,” Marcia said. “When I had finished my placement the superintendent said they would be delighted if I could join the staff, so I did, as a psychiatric social worker.” She later worked at Graylands
Hospital and became a field supervisor herself, in the process nurturing enough UWA students to earn a spot on Social Work and Social Policy’s Fieldwork Supervisors Honour roll, which recognises supervisors who have provided at least seven placements to students from the course. “I supervised students all the time, all through my career,” Marcia said. “I thought that was part of (being a social worker).” Later, as Social Work expanded its reach into areas including aged care, schools, the justice system, Indigenous-focused agencies, community and disability support agencies, refugee support services, rural agencies and drug and alcohol, domestic and family violence services, so too did the placements. Students even completed international placements in countries including Nepal, the UK, Canada and Sri Lanka. For many students, placements completely changed their view of fields they had been unaware of or had not expected to like. “I desperately didn’t want to do child protection,” 2005 graduate Louise Durack said. “Then I did the prac and loved it – it was a really dynamic, supportive team. But I think it’s absolutely dependent on the team you go into.” Former fieldwork education coordinator Dr Brenda Clare wrote in The UWA Social Worker in November 2006 that students consistently reported that their placement experiences were at the heart of their professional education. “It is there that learning ‘touches them personally’,” she wrote. “They learn how to do and be as student practitioners, building on and extending classroom learning and discovering first-hand how to manage themselves and make decisions in the heated environment of their practice settings.” She said that at the heart of this
sometimes fraught and inevitably anxiety-inducing experience was the relationship between student and supervisor. The supervisor’s role – to educate and act as mentor and role model for their student – was complex, time-consuming, and could be daunting, however in her experience supervisors took on the task of equipping future colleagues for practice with commitment, enthusiasm, and a great deal of skill. Over time the discipline developed assessment tools and education, training and support programs for fieldwork supervisors, who had to be qualified social workers with at least two years’ experience. Brenda said many practitioners were willing to supervise but didn’t always feel confident initially, and needed help in understanding how best to help students in their practice-based learning. In 2002, the discipline secured funding for a new initiative which extended existing training for supervisors. The project, Enhancing Professional Education Through Onsite Practice Teaching and Learning, developed a reflective teaching package for professional social workers acting as supervisors. Run by Brenda, it built on earlier work done by then Discipline Chair, Associate Professor Mike Clare, in developing a curriculum which specified the academic and professional learning requirements for students in the field. In the mid-2000s, the field syllabus was again redeveloped to conform to the University’s emphasis on outcomesbased learning. As with the overall discipline, the field ship was sometimes threatened by tightening resources and external pressures. Mike said that at times when resources were increasingly thin – what he sometimes refers to as the ‘Treasure Island’ or ‘backs to the wall’ days – the discipline could have chosen to loosen its rigorous approach
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to placements, which required a staff member to visit students three times during each of their placements. “We could have said, ‘no, we won’t do that’, but we didn’t,” he said. “We stayed with the requirements to plan, review and assess the three different conversations. The external social worker was delegated our responsibility - when they were doing it for the first time, they couldn’t just be left alone. That wasn’t fair, wasn’t right. “We had to run courses to train the supervisors, and then visit to review the process. It wasn’t like they were there for a fortnight - if it wasn’t going well we had to do something about it. If you are sub-letting an important task, you can’t just say ‘get on with it’.” Virginia Scott said that despite its importance, that practice element is still challenged from time to time – largely because of the difficulty in placing students. “I very strongly advocate for a very strong practice component, linked with the theoretical work,” she said. “Practicums to me are core to social work education. Any program that doesn’t have a practice element to it is not a program that I would really think is sufficient. You need to integrate the theory and the practice during the learning process.”
Early graduate Libby Lloyd, who became Head of Social Work at King Edward Memorial Hospital and also tutored and lectured in social work – including at UWA - said she preferred the old model of three placements rather than two, in case one was a ‘dud’, but said field placements had the potential to be life-changing. It was vital, however, to have good supervision. “I’ve done research with the supervisors and been a fieldwork supervisor myself, and I can tell you they vary enormously,” she said. “Some are fantastic,
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IN THE FIELD utterly committed, and some are not. It’s hard to get them, because everybody is working harder and harder. Some agencies make time allowances for this, some don’t, and they’re doing it out of the goodness of their heart and their professional commitment.” She said university courses also needed to be wary of expecting too much of placements. There had been a time when it felt as though students were coming to placements without some key skills, such as psychosocial assessment. “The dilemma is you can’t train up everybody in everything before they hit the deck, but it felt like they were asking a lot of placements, to do that very basic training,” she said. The Master of Social Work Course introduced in 2009 received its first full accreditation in 2011, providing a reaffirmation of the course and setting a new chapter for the next five years. Commendations for the course included an acknowledgement of the rigorous field placement curriculum and its management under the stewardship, at the time, of 1995 graduate Dr Katrina Stratton. Katrina, who is now Coordinator of Research and Evaluation at Wanslea, agreed the success of fieldwork placements depended very much on the team the student went into and the skill of the supervisor. She said the fieldwork education program had benefited from the discipline’s move into the School of Population Health in 2012, which occurred when she was still coordinator. “Part of the benefit is that they were also providing an education for a profession,” she said. “They understood the demands of placement, they understood the demands of working with external stakeholders – whereas in Arts they really had no understanding of that.
“I don’t know how the current staff feel, but from my point of view that was the best fit I had experienced as a staff member. In part that was because of the shared understanding around the importance and the challenges of that field education stuff and what it meant to have accreditation, and relationships with organisations, relationships with supervisors, the dialogue and feedback with the educator – all those kinds of things.” New Head of Social Work and Social Policy Judy Esmond said the field program had always been a crucial part of the Social Work course, but would become even more important as the discipline sought to move beyond simply surviving to thriving. Increasing student numbers, combined with competition for placements with students from Curtin and Edith Cowan universities’ Social Work courses, meant the UWA fieldwork program needed to expand its focus into more diverse areas, such as schools and aged care. “When you go from 30 students to 60 students on placement you have to go, ‘well, how can we do this
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We’re not teaching them to be child protection workers – we’re teaching them to be social workers that can work in any context and across a number of sectors ~ Dr Sue Bailey
THINKING AHEAD Dr Sue Bailey, current Field Education Coordinator, has mapped out a broad program of stimulating and challenging placements for students.
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differently and still offer students an amazing field placement experience?’ because if we kept trying to do what has been done and it wasn’t working, it wasn’t going to help,” Judy said. “That includes looking at placements differently and looking at opportunities for students to do placements that are not traditional, but will definitely bring them employment - even if they’re not necessarily called a social worker. So we are opening up all sorts of areas that will make them a well-rounded
social worker, but not in the traditional way it’s always been done.” She said that while the location and shape of placements may change – for example, incorporating some basic research into the student’s period with a host organisation so as to add value to the experience for both sides – the significance of fieldwork in the context of social work education would remain. “No matter what people say about what they teach and what they do, the thing you remember most as a student is field placement,” she said, “Field placement sorts out whether you’re cut out for it or not: you either make the grade or you don’t.”
Playing the field In a complex logistical process which would be painfully familiar to those in whose footsteps she walks, current Field Education Coordinator Dr Sue Bailey earlier this year mapped out a broad program of stimulating and challenging placements for 53 students. The dozens of government and non-government host agencies she secured included hospitals, aged care settings, the courts, mental health services, child protection services, sexual assault support services, and family and domestic violence services. Sue also placed two students to Geraldton and Mt Magnet, where they spent time in an Indigenous community, and others have done their placements at UWA’s Future Farm 2050 Project, in a library and community garden setting, at a FIFO resource service, and at a volunteer resource centre. Sue, who has a special interest in the emerging area of eco-social work, said the field coordination role enabled her to try new things. “As some of the biggest challenges facing humanity are environmental challenges like climate change, sustainability is an
important addition to social work practice,” she said. “The students placed at the Future Farm for example worked alongside a range of disciplines such as environmentalists, scientists and agricultural people and really understanding and getting a sense of what rural Australia is like, working regionally in Pingelly and working with the communities out there.” Similarly, she said working in a community garden and library gave students valuable insights into positive, community-oriented settings which acted as social hubs and provided education, activities, collaboration and cooperation. Sue said aged care was a huge growth area for social work, and by extension, field education (see separate story – Aged Care, pp 99). She had also placed students into schools. “That’s an interesting one because there used to be social workers in schools but they’re now not in them so much, so schools are desperate for some support. We’re setting up two programs, one in a primary school and one in a high school, and that’s been really successful.”
Sue said the fact that many social work graduates went on to work in jobs that did not always have ‘social worker’ in the title could make it difficult to find social workers to supervise students. “You’ll approach an organisation and they might say they don’t have social workers, but you do a bit of digging and you find somebody that you know has a social work degree. So that’s often the case – the use of systemic thinking and understanding context enables them to be really transferable skills.” Sue said the business of placing so many students were encouraged to be open to a variety of placement possibilities. “Mental health placements are very popular. However we emphasis that students will learn skills and have experience wherever they are placed which will enable them to practice in a variety of practice areas. “I try to de-emphasise the significance of that because otherwise they get really disappointed if they don’t get the placement that they want – but I don’t know anybody that has done a placement and been very disappointed at the end of it.” She said the specific destination was not as important as the opportunity to develop key skills applicable to any area. “We’re teaching them to be social workers that can work in any context and across a number of sectors. Many students have been surprised when they really enjoy working in areas they would never have chosen for a placement. A lot of them, once they’ve worked in aged care say, ‘I love it, I want to do it’ – yet they would never have picked it.” •
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n the early years, the department recorded the names of outside professional Social Work staff who had provided field placements and supervision in an innovative departmental handbook. Later, a fieldwork supervisors honour board was established to recognise individuals who had provided more than seven UWA student placements. Over time, the board collected a long list of names, many of them UWA Social Work graduates. Some had gone into leadership positions and become widely known; others remained quiet but dedicated achievers committed to giving back to the profession, and to the course which gave them their start. Some were staff, some were straight practitioners, and others blended the two. The board now hangs in the corridor of Social Work and Social Policy’s new home at The School of Population Health.
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CHAPTER 8 Research or Bust
R
esearch teaching - even though not necessarily popular with all students - has always been central to the Social Work course at UWA, with a strong emphasis on the importance of developing evidence for and evaluation of practice. It is ironic, then, that one of the enduring criticisms of the course has been its perceived lack of research output compared with the rest of the University. Fairly or not – especially given Social Work’s necessarily weighty commitment to high quality teaching and practice – claims of little to no research capacity have been levelled repeatedly. On more
than one occasion, the argument was used as ammunition in attempts to remove Social Work from the Faculty of Arts, or from UWA altogether. The issue reared its head in other contexts, too. Despite efforts by Head of Department Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya to increase the department’s academic strength, a 1982 working party set up to consider Social Work’s future within the University honed in on the problem. Working party members Professor Peter Boyce and Professor Reg Moir were largely supportive of Social Work and its contribution to the community However they pointed out that
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ACADEMIC RIGOUR (Left) Former ViceChancellor, Emeritus Professor Alan Robson, and, right, former Executive Dean of Arts, Emeritus Professor John Jory.
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while the department was certainly publishing, the bulk of it was coming from Professor Jayasuriya and the recently resigned lecturer Pat Tulloch. There was little to none emanating from the professional social work staff. The Boyce Committee acknowledged that onerous teaching and supervision requirements may prevent a heavy commitment to research, but urged ‘that every effort be made to ensure that all staff complete a higher degree and that those staff not now active in research be encouraged to reconsider their priorities.’ It also suggested that staff should make more time available for research by reducing their heavy involvement in fieldwork supervision. The working party’s formal recommendations went a step further, making support for the retention of Social Work education at UWA conditional on acceptance of a number of points - including one requiring ‘stronger leadership and more productive research activity’ from the professional social worker component of the department. Emeritus Professor Alan Robson – who as Deputy Vice-Chancellor from 1993-2004 and Vice-Chancellor from 2004-2011 went in to bat for Social Work on several occasions – said Social Work’s core purpose of taking good graduates and making them into excellent social workers inevitably made it a target within UWA’s research-driven environment. “It’s always going to be a very hard ask to support a school like that in a very research-oriented
university, where a lot of the money follows research funding and doesn’t necessarily strongly follow the teaching,” he said. “But they all got jobs very, very quickly. They were snapped up and the thing that overwhelmingly was a feature to me was the high quality of the graduates and the excellent training they received, and the very positive comments from the accrediting bodies and employers about our graduates.” The praise failed to move others within the University, who complained to Professor Robson on several occasions that Social Work wasn’t ‘paying its way’ and should be discontinued. “The resistance was that they had never been a high research area,” Professor Robson said. “I guess among some people in the University there’s a view that Social Work is not really academic enough - it’s a ‘doing profession’. Yet to me there’s no question that it is an academic area.” He said a general lack of understanding about the discipline was compounded by the absence of a strong voice within the University community. “At different times you had these really strong people, like Underwood in Agriculture and Bayliss in Chemistry; people who could argue the case and who could influence the decision-making and strengthen their area compared to other areas. Apart from Laki, I don’t think Social Work had those sorts of people, because it’s always been a very small group. “I had proposals a couple of times from people saying you have to get out of Social Work – people saying I don’t think Social Work can really survive and so on – and I resisted it because I thought we were producing very good graduates and we had very good people.” Professor Robson said former Executive Dean of Arts John Jory
fielded similar complaints but proved a strong protector of the discipline, supporting its retention and need for resources. However, his retirement in 2000 left Social Work more exposed. “After Jory left there was a view that they weren’t paying their way and they were a drain on the rest of the faculty,” Professor Robson said. “I think (former Discipline Chair) Mike Clare did a lot of work to make it more viable. They were building up the research, which was a big thing. That also made it harder for the critics to argue against it. “Maria (Harries) - who is very understated but incredibly wellregarded in the community and someone I would class as a real stalwart within Social Work at UWA - was asked to do many difficult tasks in the school and really did a lot to build up the research work. She built up a very large research program, which was new. Before
that it didn’t seem to me there was a lot of research.” Emeritus Professor John Jory confirmed that research had been an issue, at least in the 1990s during his tenure as Executive Dean of Arts, but said that even though he didn’t really understand Social Work himself, he was prepared to support the discipline for purely pragmatic reasons. “My impression – and it was really only an impression – was of a lot of lovely, kind people very devoted to their jobs and the people they were looking after, and to the students,” he said. “But pulling out the other side of me, as Dean I had to encourage research - and they weren’t doing it. There was hostility in the faculty, partly because of that. “Against that, I argued that whatever people thought of Social Work as a Discipline - which was another thing people couldn’t really grasp – they were the only
I guess among some of the people in the University there’s a view that Social Work is not really academic enough - it’s a ‘doing profession’. Yet to me there’s no question that it is an academic area ~ Professor Alan Robson
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RESEARCH OR BUST department in the faculty where the graduates immediately got a job. So I said: ‘We need them, otherwise that will be yet another thing counted against us in the University statistics – that nobody gets a job through doing Arts.’ I’m not all idealistic, by a long way.” Like the Boyce Committee before him, John appreciated that research was difficult to build into a course
1991, wasn’t especially conscious of any research pressure when he joined Social Work as a senior lecturer in the mid-1980s. However, he said the mood soon changed. “When I started it was still very much the old boys’ club,” he said. “You just sort of went off and did your own thing and nobody cared very much, but it changed quite dramatically over the years to much
DRIVING FORCE Below, Senior Honorary Research Fellow Maria Harries. Left, PhDs.
so heavily centred on teaching. “The problem is, when you are active and teaching a lot – because everybody was teaching a lot – thinking about research can be exhausting and it gets put aside,” he said.
Building the Program Professor Jim Ife, who completed two separate periods as Head of Department following Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya’s retirement in
more like what it is today. There was more demand for research and research output and so on. We didn’t just respond to that – I think we anticipated it a bit. The building of the PhD program in the late 1980s through to the mid-to-late 1990s was pretty important, I think.” The challenge of building up the department’s postgraduate research program was taken on predominantly by former graduate and long-time lecturer, Associate
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Professor Maria Harries. “Social Work had won a number of teaching awards, and the struggle was how to maintain the teaching levels and at the same time increase the research,” Maria said. “I got a research scholarship to help build up the research in the department and I contracted somebody to help me do that. But I spent most of my time trying to build up research among a group of people who, by and large, were too busy to do that. We never got enough support.” Despite the challenges, Maria – herself a prolific researcher and member of a range of influential community boards and policymaking committees – made substantial inroads into the task.
In 1990, there was only one PhD student attached to the program: by 2006, shortly after Social Work’s 40th Anniversary at UWA, there were more than 40 Master’s and PhD students. “We had a lot of postgraduate research students,” Maria said. “Not only did we have a lot, but they were involved in really interesting research projects and these projects were very relevant to the world, in terms of both practice and policy development.” Postgraduate research projects tackled a broad range of Social Work practice and policy areas, including parents caring for children with intellectual disabilities, child protection, early childhood trauma, homelessness, grief and loss, refugees, no suicide contracts, social worker responses to terrorism, the reshaping and privatisation of human services in Western Australia, therapeutic jurisprudence, family therapy, juvenile justice, gender, race, treatment needs of violent sex offenders, tobacco-related harm reduction, honour killings in Jordan, and many more. Many students found their path to completion smoothed, at critical times, by the practiced intervention and support of supervisors including Maria, Dr Christine Choo, Dr Brenda Clare and Dr Susan Young. Many later said they would not have made it to the end without that support. In The UWA Social Worker of September 2009, Christian missionary, Noongar elder and novice research student Maxine Knapp paid tribute to Maria and Christine for their combined efforts in supervising her PhD, which provided a comprehensive history of Aboriginal Evangelical Fellowship in Australia (now to be published as a book). She praised Christine for her patience and for helping her to
remain focused. “I still hear Dr Choo’s words of wisdom going through my mind: ‘Get the ideas out of your head and write them down,’” she wrote. “Occasionally Dr Choo would add ‘or you won’t have a thesis’. “Toward the final stage of my research Dr Maria Harries took on the role of principal supervisor. By this time I was getting discouraged, tired and weary - so close to finishing yet the thesis appeared almost out of my reach. “One day Dr Harries asked me point blank: ‘Maxine, do you want to finish this thesis?’ I said: ‘Yes.’ Dr Harries said: ‘Let’s get to work then.’ It didn’t take away all the problems or struggles but that pep
Maria said that while postgraduate research came to hold its own, academic research was slower to develop. Even so, work done by Social Work and Social Policy academics - both within the discipline and as part of their participation in an extensive range of external boards, agencies and inquiries - meant the discipline played a significant role in the development and review of a number of significant State and Commonwealth government policies and programs. Research and policy influence was particularly strong in the area of child safety and child and family wellbeing, including child protection, with a heavy focus by
I argued that whatever people thought of Social Work as a discipline - which was another thing people couldn’t really grasp – they were the only department in the faculty where the graduates immediately got a job. So I said: ‘We need them, otherwise that will be yet another thing counted against us in the University statistics – that nobody gets a job through doing Arts’ ~ John Jory talk lifted my spirit and gave me the motivation I needed to finish my task.” Others, including lecturer Dr Katrina Stratton, who had completed her own PhD in 2006, supported postgraduate students by helping them to develop their academic writing skills. Katrina instigated a research writing group in early 2006 to help students learn how to prepare journal articles and submit material for publication. The group provided a form of reciprocal peer review and critique, and helped participants develop strategic planning and discipline.
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staff including Maria, Professor Mike Clare and Dr Brenda Clare on areas including the debate around the mandatory reporting of child abuse, the treatment of children in outof-home care and the treatment of migrant children. Lecturer Carolyn Johnson also undertook muchneeded research into the poorly understood subject of familicide, presenting on the subject nationally and internationally and generating significant interest among legal and social work practitioners and policymakers. Her research on the subject while still a postgraduate student also saw
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her win the 2002 Grace Vaughan Award, along with an Australian Postgraduate Award scholarship. Her thesis was later published as a book with UWA Press. Other staff, including lecturer Dr Paul Murphy, worked to develop new and exciting research partnerships across a wide range of agency settings – something the Accreditation Panel of the AASW recognised in October 2001 as a ‘significant and innovative strength of the discipline’. Staff were also contracted to evaluate a variety of key programs including the innovative Columbus Pilot Project within the Family Court – an early intervention and case management strategy for cases where there were allegations of family violence and/ or child abuse. In addition, staff hosted and presented regularly at workshops, conferences and symposiums within Australia and overseas. In 2007, the postgraduate program was further enriched by the addition of a professional doctorate and Graduate Certificates in Mental Health and Child Protection. Maria, who was then
Discipline Chair, wrote in The UWA Social Worker that the additions had been made in response to market demands by practitioners and their employers for specialised applied courses. She also pointed out the many ways staff members were contributing. “We are a very small team – nine of us – and the activity level has been huge this year,” she wrote. “Various reports in this newsletter will testify to the research, alumni and scholarship activities for 2006. It has not been easy for staff to coordinate visiting fellows, workshops, conferences, alumni, presentations and teaching. Without our administrative support we would not have achieved this.”
SPECIAL RECOGNITION Bankwest Conference Development Awards 2005 community-based award presented to the UWA Centre for Vulnerable Children and Families, Wanslea Family Services and MercyCare.
The Centre for Vulnerable Children and Families A tangible example of Social Work’s commitment to nurturing research came in the form of the Research Centre for Vulnerable Children and Families, established in 2004 with sponsorship from then ViceChancellor Alan Robson and the Director General of the Department for Community Development, Jane
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Brazier - herself an early UWA graduate. After extensive consultation, it was determined that the centre would incorporate both policy and practice, with a core focus on children, families and vulnerable populations. The Centre was the brainchild of Professor Mike Clare, Associate Professor Maria Harries and Dr Paul Murphy, who initiated a strategic plan to scope and then build a research hub in the discipline. Along with a team of recruits including Dr Debbi Rosser, Dr Ranjit Kumar, Dr Denis Ladbrook and Heather Deighan – all supporters of the discipline and of research – they designed a plan to draw together and coordinate research and consultancy activities via partnerships with colleagues from other disciplines, other universities and human service agencies. Dr Susan Diamond - who had drawn the attention of Mike after conducting a literature review which revealed some of the harmful effects of out-of-home care, and who was undertaking a PhD with Social Work - was seconded from the department for Community Development to run the centre. Susan said the centre grew out of a vision to develop and promote high quality research, policy and scholarly debate. It aimed to increase resilience, be an advocate and voice for vulnerable children and families, and contribute to the continuing professional education of social researchers and practitioners. “There had been a whole lot of inquiries and the issue of child wellbeing had become highly topical,” she said. “There was a need for relevant research that was capable of informing the various policy positions that were developing in government and nongovernment services in relation to children and families, and making
them much more evidence-based.” Early areas of inquiry emerged mainly from the research work of staff and postgraduate students and included models of care, child protection, fostering and out-ofhome care, domestic violence, elder abuse, grand-carers, suicide prevention, Indigenous models for the prevention of sexual abuse, and promoting family safety and wellbeing for new mothers using drugs. The centre also offered consultancy services including program evaluation and planning, focus groups, literature and resource reviews, curriculum development, professional training and development programs, and advice to parliamentary committees. In addition, it ran and participated in a variety of conferences and think tanks which
helped showcase Social Work’s research and activities. “We became known as a centre that was prepared to undertake interesting or different things,” Susan said. “There were just so many things that we were all involved in. Essentially it was about building a stable of academics who wanted to be aligned with the centre and who were prepared to have their research happen under that banner, and to grow awareness about the impact of social policy on practice in relation to children in Western Australia.” She said given the difficulty in obtaining funding for the kinds of projects the centre and Social Work in general typically dealt with, they punched well above their weight. “It was really, really exciting to see the little things coming together, the little bits of money,
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TRIO OF MINDS Left to right, Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya, former ViceChancellor Professor Alan Robson, and former Executive Dean of Arts, John Jory.
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the endorsements from a nongovernment agency wanting work done, and the capacity we had to make a difference for them,” she said. “But it was all small dollars and hard going. “I can remember having a conversation with Maria about the amount of money that was going into some of the big research centres in the University, supported by companies like Alcoa and BHP and various wealthy individuals around Perth, and thinking, ‘how on earth do you get a centre in relation to vulnerable children and families started?’ It sounds awful, but you would be better off having a cancer centre, because it’s a sexy cause. Vulnerable children and families and hardship and poverty don’t actually get anybody’s interest.” Susan said staff fought valiantly to develop and maintain research
RESEARCH OR BUST projects in the face of increasingly limited resources. “The University provided a room for the centre, but it was individual academics who made it work and it was a struggle because none of those academics have had access to big money. It just doesn’t come to those sorts of centres,” she said. “I just watched it being cut to the bone over the years and a group of absolutely committed researchers and academics making every little dollar count, putting back. I mean all of those academics - Mike and Brenda and Susan Young and Maria - all put research dollars, which they were entitled to use to progress their own next bit of research, back into the department and back into new students, new researchers, so that we all got a chance. “And while they were a small and committed band, they were also committed to being collaborative wherever possible. Every time there was a project there was collaboration with non-government agencies, other PhDs, other university academics that had come and done a stint at UWA. They were always open to developing the relationships and growing the research networks.” Susan ran the centre as the inaugural director until 2008, when she moved to Tasmania. She said she felt privileged to have been a part of Social Work and Social Policy and the development of the centre, and to have been mentored by people including Jane Brazier and her UWA colleagues. “I think for me being there felt life-changing,” she said. “I really just loved the time in that department. The people in it gave me a sense of meaning and purpose in the work that I was doing. It was affirming - I made really good friendships and felt I was able to make a difference in a number of significant policy areas. I learnt so much and I got top class mentoring. There was great
Professor Maria Harries in 2008 and also had a spell as Discipline Chair, said that while major research hadn’t traditionally been a strength for Social Work staff, it was on the agenda moving forward. “We undertake little research activities, but we’re certainly not on the NHMRC or ARC grant circuit,” she said. “Frankly, the last three or four years we’ve been busy just trying to get on and manage the course. It’s the next thing we must do and it’s part of our strategic planning, if you like, now that we have pretty
leadership in the discipline. “They were all fundamentally practitioners and loved social work practice and teaching, and then as the requirements in universities became more focused on research and creating your research portfolio, there was a very, very high level of commitment. But it was all really focused on highly relevant research and research in which real people had a real voice – developing techniques which allowed the voice of children, the voice of foster carers, the voice of
Because they were somewhat disconnected from the previous faculty - just sort of left there, if you like – that promotion of the achievements was lacking. I think that’s social work in a nutshell, that they’re not all that good at tooting their own horn – Prof Colleen Fisher parents, the voice of disabled people and the unemployed to be heard.” It was a sad time for all involved when the centre was decommissioned several years ago as a result of University policy aimed at reducing the number of small centres. However, it is acknowledged there are exciting times ahead, with the template and business plan for the now defunct centre being utilised to generate new plans for a policy and practice research consortium (see below).
Research moving forward With Social Work and Social Policy now settled into its new home in the School of Population Health and poised to embark on a new chapter, it is clear that - although teaching will continue to be an important focus – research will be a key, and evolving, part of the story. Current postgraduate research coordinator Dr Sue Young, who took over the role from Associate
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THOUGHT LEADERS Right, Dr Susan Diamond and opposite, Professor Colleen Fisher, Head of the School of Population Health.
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much bedded down the course. Partnerships with Population Health are on the agenda. “We do publish and do bits of research – we’re not trailblazers by any means, but we do produce things. We recognise that we could
do things differently and that we should be doing things differently.” Professor Colleen Fisher, Head of the School of Population Health, said criticisms of Social Work’s research output were not entirely fair, with its previous contributions to research and social policy having been downplayed. “They do have quite a good publication record and certainly in terms of higher degree by research students and in terms of their number of staff, Social Work has been quite productive,” she said. “I think there wasn’t that support around them to sort of push it forward and say, ‘this is what we’re doing’. There was no celebrating, for want of a better word, what they’d achieved. It was just happening and because they were somewhat disconnected from the previous faculty - just sort of left there, if you like – that promotion of the achievements was lacking. “I think that’s social work in a nutshell, that they’re not all that good at tooting their own horn. I know a couple of years ago, when they had the inaugural Social Worker of the Year Awards, there was some discontent – ‘we can’t be celebrating ourselves, we work with people who are disadvantaged, how dare we stand up and celebrate who we are?’ So I think that’s almost been ingrained in Social Work over a number of years.” Colleen said she hoped the School’s work with Social Work and Social Policy in celebrating its 50th anniversary would help to raise its profile within the University. Meanwhile, moving forward she would be working with the discipline to look at how to maximise research funding and partnerships with people within the school who already had managed to secure decent research grants. This had already begun to happen, with academics thinking about creative and innovative
ways to secure and share research funding. “Collaboration is the key,” she said. “I don’t think that as a group and with their circumstances as they’ve been that Social Work and Social Policy have the capacity to get those big grants, so there needs to be a stepwise process where something small leads to something bigger leads to something bigger, and the best way to get there a bit quicker is coming on grants from people who have been successful in the bigger grants, to help build up that track record.” She said the discipline would play an important part in regenerating research within the school, because it had something public health people didn’t, in that it could bring methodological expertise in addition to content expertise. Another ‘peg in the hole’ would be to move away from the traditional thesis-based PhD to PhD by publication, so that developing researchers could build up track records that way. New Head of Social Work and Social Policy, Associate Professor Judy Esmond, said the discipline also needed to become more entrepreneurial in the way it thought about obtaining funding and generating income. She said academics had traditionally obtained money for research by writing timeconsuming grant applications for ARC or similar grants, with a low chance of success. In the current contracting funding environment, chances of succeeding in such grants were even slimmer than usual. Instead, social work academics needed to utilise their networking skills to form more research partnerships and develop projects tailored to the customer’s needs. Judy said her own business background had trained her to think in terms of what customers
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wanted instead of just doing research for the sake of it. “People don’t come to the shop just for you, the shopkeeper, and they don’t come for us to do research just because we like doing that research,” she said. “We have to ask the customer what they want and make it happen. I know it sounds very businesslike, it sounds very marketing, but that can coexist because there’s something about social work that is really quite lovely, and it’s the fact it’s about people caring about other people and doing good things for people and working with people, whether it’s community or whatever. Social Work has so many networks and contacts that we could become really, really good in this school at doing that.” Judy said the discipline also had to think about how to generate more income to help itself grow. This could include offering more professional development courses relating to social skills such as relationship building and conflict resolution. “Now if we go there, we’re going
RESEARCH OR BUST
for the money, not just for the sake of, because having money allows you to do other things,” she said. “Basically we just need to go, OK, we’re going to take care of the foundations, which to us is the teaching. Then we look at how we do the research grant work, but in a very different way. Then the professional development work, but it’s how to sell it in a way that people want to come and it’s interesting and they want to come back and tell other people to come. I know I sound like I’m talking about a business, but I am – that doesn’t mean it can’t be a business with a heart.” She said that with these and other changes, including in the way parts of the course were delivered, she could see how the discipline could begin to thrive, rather than simply surviving. Other options included exploring new areas such as corporate volunteering - a form of community development which was exploding in popularity. “Corporate volunteering, which is literally doing it for nothing, has grown and it’s grown because when people feel good about themselves and do for others, the corporation benefits from teamwork, from
people feeling good about their jobs, all those sorts of things,” she said. “It’s a big win-win and a fantastic example of how two things you would think would be very opposite – making money in business and volunteering – have worked. Why can’t Social Work be part of that story in some way as well? “So I think Social Work has a lot of really good things to engage with. It’s not what it was in the past - but neither is the University and neither is the world around us. “So not only can we adapt, but we can thrive if we decide that we look out, rather than in. It seems to me that the out has been lost in looking in, and so we have to go back out – that’s where the opportunities are.”
ENGAGING MINDS Communicating research can be accomplished in a variety of ways.
Social Policy Consortium A key part of Social Work and Social Policy’s commitment to research moving forward will be a social policy consortium which brings together social policy research, practice and teaching. Professor Colleen Fisher said the consortium would be similar to the now defunct Research Centre for Vulnerable Children and Families
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but would have a wider scope. “Certainly some policy-related research and practice will be around children, partly because of the interests of the people involved,” she said. “But I would expect and hope that it does become broader than that.” She said the consortium would effectively be a hub which brought together social policy research with social policy practice and teaching. “So it will be a site where if students are doing a social policy prac, for example, they can be co-located in an agency but they’ll have some time in here, where there’ll be access to a whole lot of social policy resources and things like that. “If there are visiting scholars in the area, it’s a place they can be housed and do work while they’re on site. It will also be a place for agencies that might want some policy-related research done, whether that’s sort of a scoping of what’s out there or empirical-type research that it can be undertaken through. “It will also feed into the teaching that will happen in the social policy graduate certificate, and the other thing that’s being talked about is whether there’s an appetite for expanding that to a Master of Policy, and potentially units in the undergraduate program also around policy. “So it’s sort of that three-pronged approach – it will be a hub where people involved in those programs can get hands on, practical policyrelated experience; a home for visiting scholars; and a place where policy-related research can be funnelled through.” Current lecturer Dr Sue Young said the consortium was a tribute to Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya, the discipline’s leader from 1971-1991. “The establishment in 2015 of the Social Policy Practice and Research Consortium was directly inspired by Professor Jayasuriya and his
unstinting commitment to social work being inclusive of social policy practice,” Sue said. “It’s part of his legacy.” She had been surprised but pleased to find that Population Health saw the hub as not just a Social Work and Social Policy activity, but one with relevance to the whole school. “They have embraced that, which really quite surprised me a little bit because I didn’t think it would have a great deal of meaning for them, but certainly they value that as an idea and think it’s good for the school.” She said early social policy areas of attention would be the issue of infants being taken into care – the numbers of which are currently higher than ever before, with the majority being Aboriginal children – and other child protection matters.
Finding balance While research, and the funding associated with it, is an important and necessary part of the Social Work and Social Policy story moving forward, former leading lights and other key figures hope universities will endeavour to strike a careful balance between that and the need to maintain and nurture quality teaching capable of turning out competent and career-ready practitioners. Current AASW WA Branch president Sabina Leitmann believes an over-zealous approach which ties support too closely to research and publication could be counterproductive. “Of course research is important, but it’s not like an either/or – it’s not as if research is producing teddy bears,” she said. “It’s not a factory in which you can somehow pump things out at volume. “This whole notion of having to produce, produce, produce actually sometimes works against the very notion of learning and research,
rather than supporting it. You can write on anything – as long as it’s in the right journal, you can write absolute nonsense. It becomes about quantity rather than quality. That’s not unique to Social Work – it’s a problem for nursing and occupational therapy and some of these other applied professions.” Former lecturer and Head of Social Work Professor Trish Harris believes people are better off doing what they are good at, rather than having to produce research for the sake of it. “My difficulty is when people start saying that one is better than the other,” she said. “We actually need both and I think to pressurise people who are very good teachers and very
universities to some degree, but I think now it has swung back significantly,” he said. “There is that issue of what the University is for – is it to generate research or is it to provide educational opportunities for new generations coming through? And it’s obviously a combination of both – it’s getting that balance right. “To put it bluntly, if you’ve got powerful friends within the upper reaches of the institution you’re reasonably safe, because the institution isn’t as rational as people might perceive it to be. And I believe at least that you can argue a case against pure facts and figures, and it’s not purely a research-focused institution. It has to pay more than lip service to its teaching responsibilities and its educational role.” Former Vice-Chancellor Professor Alan Robson believes universities have to remain realistic and not make every decision purely about money. “Every part of the institution can’t be a winner financially, and a university has got responsibilities
There is that issue of what the University is for – is it to generate research or is it to provide educational opportunities for new generations coming through? And it’s obviously a combination of both – it’s getting that balance right ~ Owen Hicks good practitioners that they must produce a paper: if I was emperor I’d say, ‘no, do what you’re good at.’ “We do need records of what works, but those can be research commentaries – part of the conversation in the profession. So generally as far as universities are concerned I really do look sideways at the ‘you must publish’. People who want to write will write and they will write well. That’s it.” Former Social Work Department lecturer, Emeritus Professor Owen Hicks, says research pressure within universities has fluctuated to some degree, with teaching and learning having had a big boost through federal government funding in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “That did shift the focus in
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to the community and they’ve got to meet those responsibilities,” he said. “You may have to subsidise some areas because it’s so important that we are training people in those areas. So you know, faculties like Business and Law, they’re always going to have lots of students and lots of demand and not find it difficult, but things like Social Work, which is really very, very important – they need to be supported. “You can’t just do everything based on money. You’ve got to consciously say, just like you’re probably never going to make any money out of Classics and probably you’re not going to make money out of Physics, but you couldn’t imagine a university without Classics and Physics. There are a lot of areas that you are going to have to use some of your other resources to subsidise. “You’re looking at the role of the university in the community. The wonderful graduates that Social Work has produced and its impact on the West Australian community is really quite substantial.” •
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CHAPTER 9 Prizes & Scholarships
A
number of annual prizes for graduates and postgraduate students have been established over the years to honour the memories of the founding members of social work at UWA and leading lights to have emerged from the course since its beginnings in 1965.
competing for the degree of Master of Social Work, has the highest aggregate mark across a range of specified units.
The Anne Thomsett Memorial Prize in Social Work
– in memory of Dr Wally Tauss, the inaugural Head of the Department of Social Work at UWA. Awarded to the student who has achieved the highest mark for the Indigenous People and Social Work unit.
– donated by Anne Marie Thomsett’s family in recognition of her life and to commemorate the endeavours she made on behalf of the less fortunate members of society. Designed to encourage and promote human rights, social justice and the desire to serve others. Awarded to the student in the Master of Social Work course to gain the highest mark across a specified unit and has compiled a field placement portfolio of a high standard.
The Walter Tauss Memorial Prize in Social Work Practice
The Jean Teasdale Prize in Social Work
– awarded to the student who, in the opinion of the relevant board, has demonstrated the most outstanding achievement during the field work placements.
– in memory of former early lecturer and tutor Jean Teasdale. Awarded to the student in the Bachelor of Social Work course or Master of Social Work who has shown the most individual personal growth over the duration of the course, and/ or made a substantive personal contribution to social work, and/ or has demonstrated a high level of personal commitment to the profession of social work.
They include:
The Walter Tauss Memorial Prize in Indigenous Issues
The Margaret Stockbridge Memorial Prize – established in 1979 and donated by the AASW in memory of founding lecturer, the late Dr “Teddie” Stockbridge. Awarded to the student who, among those
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The Laksiri Jayasuriya Prize in Social Work Research – donated by colleagues of Professor Jayasuriya after his retirement, in recognition of his contribution to the then Department of Social Work and Social Policy. Awarded to the student who, among those completing the course for the degree of Bachelor of Social Work with honours or Master of Social Work with distinction or high distinction, submits the best honours dissertation.
The Grace Vaughan Award - funded by friends and colleagues of the late Grace Vaughan, UWA social work graduate, teacher, social worker and parliamentarian, and introduced to assist scholarship in areas promoting social justice.
The Kate Camins Scholarship – introduced in 2004 to commemorate social work graduate Kate Camins, who is on the discipline’s honour roll of fieldwork supervisors. Established to encourage scholarship and research at UWA into child protection in relation to drug abuse and poverty.
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BEST OF THE BEST Top, 2015 WA Social Worker of the Year Fran McGrath (second from left) with Awards patron Jan Stewart, Emma White, Director General at the Department of Child Protection and Family Support, and special guest Minister for Child Protection Helen Morton. Above, Professor Grady Venville, Dean of Coursework Studies, at the 2015 WA Social Worker of the Year Awards. Left, Audience at the 2015 WA Social Worker of the Year Awards.
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PART 3
BLOSSOM
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CHAPTER 1 Aged Care – Moving Forward
A Growth Area A key area moving forward for Social Work and Social Policy is the increasing role social workers can play in the rapidly growing field of aged care. The sector is regarded as an important and developing element of the discipline’s fieldwork program, with eight students placed into aged care settings for their practicums this year. It’s an innovation which excites Head of the School of Population Health,
Professor Colleen Fisher, as she looks to the discipline’s future. “This year is the first time we have had students in aged care and that’s going to be a huge employing sector for social workers moving forward,” Colleen said. “It’s about maintaining the wellbeing of the older person – so it’s not only getting them into care but once they’re in care, working to maintain their sense of wellbeing, working with the families if there are any issues between the family
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NEW DIRECTIONS Left to right, Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya, Jennifer Page (later Jenny Lefroy) and Professor Aubrey Yates on the occasion of Professor Yates’ retirement in 1987 as Chairman of the Board of Studies in Social Work.
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members around the person in aged care. “I guess there are two things – whether they’re in a community setting or whether they’re in an aged care hostel or nursing home. Certainly within the nursing home setting there’s a real need for social workers to be part of that. In a home care setting, they might be based in local government, for example, working with local government looking after the social wellbeing of people living in the
AGED CARE – MOVING FORWARD
community. “It’s not even about when people are needing a social worker, if you like. It’s about maintaining the health of the community, and social workers have a big role to play in that, I think.”
The renewed push to involve social workers in aged care is encouraging news for former Australian Association of Social Workers WA Branch president Jenny Lefroy (formerly Page), who with husband Dr Richard
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MOVING FORWARD Current Head of Social Work and Social Policy, Judy Esmond.
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‘Dick’ Lefroy established formal aged care services in Western Australia – in the process elevating geriatric and dementia care from the marginalised and frequently dismissed corner of the health sector that it had occupied prior to the 1960s and 1970s. “Elderly people then, and sadly to some degree even now, were not seen as part of the normal social fabric of life, if you like, and not therefore in need of the same kinds of services,” Jenny said. “People used to talk critically about the fact that what happened to elderly disabled people was they were simply ‘warehoused’. And warehoused was the term used: in other words, shut up in big institutions with very little attention paid to them. “When we started I think there was a Commonwealth geriatrician and there were the Newcastle people and a man in Tasmania, but that was just about it. It only grew very gradually from there and there were no what are now termed career geriatricians - they came much later.” Jenny had trained in the UK and moved to Western Australia in 1960. After a spell working in Italy, she returned to WA in 1963 to become the first social worker to be employed with the state’s newly founded specialised geriatric service. After the establishment of the UWA Social Work course in 1965, she sought to build ties that would see more social workers move into the field. She received short shrift from founding lecturer Teddie Stockbridge (see Teddie Stockbridge profile, p 20), but developed a more productive relationship with Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya after his arrival in 1971. “I was the State President of AASW then and Laki needed some support at the time of his appointment to the school, so we worked together quite closely,”
Jenny said. “Perhaps partly because of that or partly because of genuine commitment, he really tried to include it in the teaching. “Then an American woman came over on sabbatical and she was very interested in aged care. She really interested two of the social work students, Kerry McDougall and Pat Hansen, in aged care, too, and from there on it flowed. I used to do a few visiting lectures as part of the social work course, in the psychology of ageing and aged care.” Jenny later completed a Master of Social Work at UWA, studying the Welfare of the Aged from Foundation to Federation. “Laki very kindly used to encourage me towards a more academic career, and I think he encouraged me to do that Masters,” she said. “But really I was incredibly fortunate in my job, because I had clinical work, I had research, I had teaching, I had policy-making, we worked throughout the State. I couldn’t have had a better span of work, and to leave that . . . academe did not beckon, I’m afraid. But Laki, I think, helped.” As part of their work in establishing formal aged care services in Western Australia, Jenny and Dick travelled throughout the state to speak personally with families who needed assistance. “There were no country services of course and we were the State department so we used to travel, because the principle was never to offer help to people who had not been seen and talked with and their family talked with,” Jenny said. “Gradually we started appointing social workers to country hospitals, but with the insistence that they played a major role in care of the elderly in those hospitals. “I regard us as incredibly fortunate in what we were allowed to do and what was there for us to do, but gradually more and more people
came in, particularly doctors and more social workers, more nurses who were interested in doing it. I mean, still in the early 1960s, people did not understand that health care was largely care of elderly people with chronic disease, or younger people with chronic disease - people were still expecting it to be dramatic acute medicine. It took a long time, I think, for people to accept the reality of what health care is. “You would have these requests from doctors that were really quite insulting to the patient - nothing about the person but ‘I want this person out of my bed.’ You know, ‘my bed’, not the public’s bed, but ‘my bed’. And I used to have this fantasy of ‘right, I will empty your Perth hospital of everybody over 60 and watch your Perth hospital go broke.’ It was a silly, juvenile fantasy but it used to take me at that time, because it was just so prevalent. “I can remember a matron of Kalgoorlie Hospital saying ‘We want you to come up and bring a bus,’
older Australians as a cost burden. The position paper called for a paradigm shift, saying: “While it is necessary and responsible to plan in this way, especially as the Australian baby boomers age, public policy has focused almost exclusively on concerns about the cost that Australia’s ageing population will present to the economy, to the point of excluding other important issues such as protecting the human and civil rights of older Australians and ensuring that the national legal framework adequately upholds those rights; recognising the real contribution older Australians make in the community, both in the public and private spheres of our society; (and) ensuring opportunities for social inclusion (not just support services) for all older Australians, including Aboriginal Australians, people of culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, people living in rural and remote areas, and the
Elderly people then, and sadly to some degree even now, were not seen as part of the normal social fabric of life, and not therefore in need of the same kinds of services ~ Jenny Lefroy meaning bring a bus to take all these people, because the idea was that these people from the country would be removed and brought back to Sunset Hospital and Mount Henry Hospital (out of their hair).”
A New Paradigm Pejorative views of aged care persist, with a 2013 submission by the Australian Association of Social Workers to the Senate Inquiry into the Aged Care (Living Longer Living Better) Bill and associated bills calling on policy-makers to stop viewing
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LGBTI (Lesbian Gay Bi Trans and Intergender) population.” The AASW also argued that any reforms to the sector needed to be properly funded and urged the Government to take account of the need for skills training for staff responding to the needs of the increasing number of people reaching old age – including those with mental illness, dual diagnoses and/or intellectual disability; and to ensure fair and reliable processes that did not cause hardship and safeguarded older people’s welfare
AGED CARE – MOVING FORWARD and ability to be independent. The position paper acknowledged there had been significant achievements in promoting the health and wellbeing of older Australians, but said there were many areas where older people continued to face challenges, including age discrimination, elder abuse, social isolation, access to suitable services in rural and remote areas, access to mental health services and dementia care, and access to services that were sensitive to the needs of specific groups. Former Discipline Chair Mike Clare, who retired in 2009, has since been involved in two projects examining elder abuse. He agreed there was a strong role for social workers to play in the aged care sector, particularly in supporting and advocating for vulnerable older people. He said projected changes in Australia’s demography estimated there would be a significant drop in the 0-64 aged group by 2050 (from 86.5 per cent of the population now to 77.4 per cent in 2050), with significant rises in the 70-84 and 85+ age brackets (up from 9.4 per cent to 17.4 per cent and 1.6 per cent to 5.1 per cent by 2050, respectively). “It is vital to recognise the social policy and community development implications of the increasing number of fit and well older Australians who will be involved in the paid and volunteer workforce and not involved as recipients of welfare services - other than accessing their national pension,” Mike said. “Embedded in all of this is the vulnerability of some older Australians - particularly those who are isolated and dependent on family care and in need of protection.” New Head of UWA Social Work and Social Policy, Associate Professor Judy Esmond, said social
workers, with their broad and readily transferable set of skills, were well positioned to lead the way in dealing with such changes and challenges. She is this year supervising a student unit which has eight students on placement in an aged care facility. “Aged care is a growth area we’ve never really explored before,” she said. “Increasing numbers have required us to look at things differently, and it means looking at placements differently and at opportunities to do placements that are not traditional, but will definitely bring social workers employment. “Aged care is now a huge area. Not many social workers are in there yet, but we now have eight students in there who when they finish will be thinking of aged care differently.
person to find a solution - whether that was locating a suitable nursing home, hospital or service. It was a role that required detailed knowledge of the pros and cons of the various services and places available, so that social workers could help arrange the best match between an individual and a service or facility. “However, the function of linking individuals and families with aged care placements had been replaced by brokers. “I gather that kind of role (for social worker) is absolutely gone now,” Jenny said. “Someone I had contact with recently was telling me that now they are in touch with what they call the broker in residential care – which to me was both sad and shocking, because not only are there the practical details, but there’s all the emotional
Aged care is now a huge area . . . in the future the need for social workers to do the social thing between family, home, the person in the facility, the organisation – that’s really, really strong ~ Judy Esmond “It’s going to open up the link between family and the person in aged care and the aged care organisation. In a sense they become an advocate between those people. “That hasn’t happened and it’s slowly happening now, but we need to be leading into that as well, because in the future the need for social workers to do the social thing if you like between family, home, the person in the facility, the organisation – that’s really, really strong.” Jenny said that for decades, the role of social workers in aged care had been to assess people and then work with the family and the
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turmoil and support that people need through that situation. The sad thing was there were never enough of us to continue that for as long as ideally one would have liked to help people settle in.” She said the idea of reinventing social workers’ involvement with the sector by having them work within residential care was brilliant. “It’s always seemed sad that we don’t have enough training in residential care for staff at various levels,” she said. “(This new approach) certainly is extraordinarily valuable, if they’re actually going to go and work within it.” •
CHAPTER 2 Moving on Up – Population Health & Beyond
W
hen Social Work and Social Policy staff packed up their boxes and files in early 2012 and trekked the few hundred metres up Stirling Highway to throw in their lot with the School of Population Health, nobody could be sure how things were going to pan out. After all, the discipline had had a long history of not feeling especially welcome, either within the Faculty of Arts - where it sat for close to 30 years – or the wider University, where it faced occasional attempts to oust it altogether. Some worried
about the symbolism of being edged off the main campus to the satellite campus at Nedlands. Others worried they might be swallowed up within the machinery of another school, no longer identifiable as a discipline in their own right. In the three years since, however, any fears Social Work and Social Policy staff may have had have proven unfounded. On the contrary, Population Health, which sits within the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, has welcomed the discipline with open arms.
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NEW HOME School of Population Health.
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Current lecturer and former Discipline Chair Dr Sue Young told Legacy & Promise that despite some anxiety ahead of the move, the experience so far had been positive.
MOVING ON UP: POPULATION HEALTH & BEYOND
We were like a fish out of water in Arts. They didn’t know what to do with us and we didn’t know how to fit in, really, but when it was suggested that we move here, we weren’t quite sure what to expect . . . they’ve been very welcoming and accommodating and including of us – Dr Sue Young “We were like a fish out of water in Arts,” she said. “They didn’t know what to do with us and we didn’t know how to fit in, really, but when it was suggested that we move here, we weren’t quite sure what to expect. There was a little bit of hesitation as well because Social Work is more than health, and we were a bit concerned that we were going to get pigeon-holed into health. However, very quickly and even before we came, it was quite clear that they actually saw that we were broader than health and that was one of the benefits they thought we could bring. “Overall it’s been a very positive move. They’ve been very welcoming and accommodating and including of us.” Similarly, current lecturer and fieldwork education coordinator Dr Sue Bailey worried about the medical influence before the move. “One of the things I was concerned about, not knowing much about Population Health at the time, was that the medical model would come to dominate and we would have to resist that because our work is much more holistic, not just medical,” she said. “But it’s actually been quite nice because they’re embracing that more. They very much focus on the social determinants of health so what Social Work talks about makes a lot of sense to them. So
it’s not around limiting how we think about Social Work but more embracing what we can bring to it.” Professor Colleen Fisher, Head of the School of Population Health, said she had been quick to reassure Social Work after her arrival in September 2014: “When I took on Head of School I made sure the first meeting that I had was with the Social Work team, just to reinforce, ‘yes, you are a valued and an equal discipline within this school.’” Having had some exposure to social work study herself – she completed the first year of the Curtin University social work course in 1998 before family circumstances took her interstate - Colleen understood the discipline better than most senior non-Social Work academics. “That was one of the things coming in as Head of School, I think I was able to walk the line, if you like, between Public Health and Social Work,” she said. “We knew at that stage that Nursing was being taught out, so it would leave us these two disciplines within the school. I think having that background has enabled me to have a bit of an understanding of what Social Work is, what they do, how their courses are structured and things like that. “Plus I’ve had lots of involvement in community agencies – I’ve been chairperson of a women’s refuge for 12 or 13 years, so I’ve had quite a bit
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FINDING A WAY Current lecturer Dr Sue Young.
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of involvement in the community sector as well.” Associate Professor Judy Esmond, who was appointed Head of Social Work and Social Policy in February 2015, said Population Health’s accepting attitude was encouraging but not surprising given the gradual migration of social work courses across Australia into the health sciences. “If you look at social work in a lot of other universities the movement of it here to the health sciences is nothing unusual,” she said. “It follows the pattern of many others, because social sciences at other universities, including Curtin, were uneasy, they didn’t click. They’re in
health sciences at Curtin now too, with occupational therapy. So it’s not strange for me to come here and find that it is in Population Health - plus we happen to have Colleen, who is extremely supportive. She gets it.” Reflecting the wider trend, the two areas have found substantial common ground since the move. Researchers on both sides are already entering mutually beneficial partnerships; and academics from each discipline are
“Certainly in the hospital setting there are lots of crossovers between what a hospital social worker would do and, say, someone promoting health. There is actually crossover in a whole lot of areas, particularly at that end that looks at the social determinants of health, so looking at housing, looking at education, looking at employment – all those issues are Social Work issues also.” On the service delivery front, the move has enabled logical staff
FUTURE FORWARD Current staff Assistant Professor Karen UptonDavis. Left, inside the Social Sciences building.
teaching into various units of one another’s courses. Colleen said there were many ways in which the work and research interests of Public Health and Social Work and Social Policy were entwined. “Public Health is a fairly broad stream, really,” she said. “You’ve got everything from disease surveillance to what almost impinges on community development - which is a really big overlap with Social Work. And Public Health looks at social determinants of health and equality and works towards equity in health delivery; it thinks about the most disadvantaged people in the community.
crossovers as well, with Social Work and Social Policy academics including Sue Young and Dr Mark Sachmann teaching Public Health students, and Colleen teaming up with Social Work academic, Assistant Professor Karen UptonDavis, to do a session on family and domestic violence. Sue has also taken on the postgraduate research coordination role for the whole school, and academics from each discipline are jointly supervising higher degrees by research students. There have been joint grant applications, too, in areas of research overlap – a form of collaboration expected to occur more and more. Colleen said a key aim moving
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forward was to break down discipline barriers to provide more cohesive, efficient and collaborative ways of working. “We don’t want to be seen as Social Work and Public Health,” she said. “We want to be the School of Population Health, and this is what we do: we teach and we research in these areas; we do work around disadvantage; we do work around disease prevention; we have the skills to do things like health economics and examine things like the cost effectiveness of an intervention that might be labelled Social Work or it might be labelled Public Health. “So at a broad brush what we’re trying to do is break down that artificial separation between Public Health and Social Work. We want people teaching to their expertise, whether that’s in a Social Work course or a Public Health course, so that real integration across our disciplines is what we’re trying to achieve both in teaching and in
MOVING ON UP: POPULATION HEALTH & BEYOND caught back in the 70s or the 80s or the 90s in terms of the way that it’s delivered, I don’t think it’s going to be attractive to the students that we want to attract to Social Work and to the degree. “But that systemic-type thinking, the working across layers, from individuals to groups to communities to policies, underpinned by a sense of social justice and equity and all those things – I don’t think that’s going to change at all. Those things are still going to be there.” Associate Professor Judy Esmond agreed that Social Work had to evolve in order to remain relevant
research. You know - who is best placed to do it?” However, she said that didn’t mean Social Work and Social would simply become absorbed into the school and lose its identity: “It’s more about being seen as an equal partner within the school rather than losing an identity.” Similarly, Colleen said the need to modernise the manner of course content delivery – for example, delivering some content online – and to partner with new and previously unconsidered sectors and agencies would not mean a dilution of Social Work fundamentals and core values. “A change in the way the course is taught is an absolute must,” she said. “There needs to be an alignment of the teaching that happens in the Social Work program in line with Education Futures, which is the vision for the University, and part of that is having teaching practices that align with what students of the 21st century are wanting – and they’re not wanting eight hours face to face in the classroom.” She said with some social work
courses in Australia now fully online, UWA’s course would need to follow. “Admittedly it’s a slow change but there are people who are saying we need to be teaching our students in a way that’s going to equip them for professional practice moving forward, so giving them skills in virtual and remote learning will, I think, set them up well for the way they might be interacting with their clients or fellow team members in the future. It may not always be face to face. It’s going to be in a virtual environment, and it’s going to be collaborating through a multitude of as yet unknown platforms. “But I can’t see how changing the way you teach something undermines things like social justice and equity and all those values that social workers have. I can’t see how expanding out is going to change the premise on which the discipline and the degree, the Masters, are based. It’s central to it.” She said that if the course did not adapt, it would be doing a disservice to the students, the discipline and the degree. “If it’s seen as something that’s
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DEDICATION Students gather around the School’s frangipani tree, above, and left, current staff Rosa Catalano.
to modern students and enable it to thrive. She said that since the move, the discipline was increasingly heading in the right direction, with a phenomenal increase in numbers – almost 60 enrolments in 2015 compared to a critical low of 12 a few years ago. “Here we have a situation where this year there are more students than ever before, and we’re forecasting more than that next year,” she said. “What that means is that we have a wonderful opportunity to grow in all sorts of ways that are not purely about the struggle for numbers, which really is significant. “When you’re struggling for numbers, all your energy goes into trying to attract enough people to make it look viable. But the numbers game is looking good and looking better. That doesn’t mean we don’t
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market and use that. We have a whole psychology course where people never see a person that we can market to. We have a growing number of international students. We have all sorts of ways that we can do that, but we’re not fighting for numbers – to be able to say that the numbers have doubled, even though 60 doesn’t sound like much, is very significant. That to me sounds really exciting.” With funding arrangements soon to change – Social Work and Social Policy has been centrally funded by the University since 2011 but will move to an expenditure target budgeting system under the aegises of the school from 2016 – Colleen confirmed that the discipline had already made substantial inroads into ensuring its sustainability. With the impressive increase in numbers, combined with other initiatives including the planned social policy hub, the expansion of the field program into new and exciting areas, and increased partnerships and collaboration, Colleen said she could see nothing but positives for Social Work and Social Policy’s future. “Social Work has been part of the history and it will be part of the future,” she said. “The things we are putting in place currently really augur well. I think the embracement of social policy as part of Social Work and Social Policy is really important; I think the increasing trend in high student numbers is positive; I think the esteem the graduates from our program are held in within the sector is really positive and augurs well for the future; and I think the way the alumni have been kept involved is really positive as well. “It’s a very rosy future for Social Work at UWA.”
An International Flavour The increasing international element within the Social Work
and Social Policy demographic is another indication of the discipline’s continuing evolution and potential for growth. Social Work at UWA has always been associated with multiculturalism – due in part to the strong influence of long-time head and multiculturalism pioneer Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya – and has always attracted students from a variety of cultures. Most of those, however, were Australian residents rather than the international feepaying students increasingly arriving specifically to study the course. Associate Professor Judy Esmond said the 2015 first year’s student group included students from Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Malaysia, China, Australia and others: “We are becoming the United Nations of Social Work students!” She said the growth was likely to continue, with more international students expressing interest in joining the course. “I’m doing admissions for next
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year and I know we’ve had many international students apply. Some don’t qualify but we’ve had an increasing number of enrolments.” Professor Colleen Fisher said she wasn’t sure when the trend started but it was certainly more noticeable with this year’s cohort, and with the number of international applications in the works. “How many of them will convert to students locally over time we will see, but it does seem to indicate that international students are applying to social work courses and wanting to get the qualification, then go back and use it in their communities,” she said. “I think it’s a big growth area.” First year student Jess Roscic said the broad cultural mix made the course even more interesting. “There is quite a big cohort of students that haven’t lived in Australia all that long and they just come to study,” she said. “A couple of them are saying they want to take that degree back home – they’re not planning to work in Australia, but wanting to take the skills back to Tanzania or whatever country they are from and work with the communities there, which I think is really brilliant, because obviously they’re coming FACES OF THE FUTURE Some of the current student group - a diverse international mix.
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Frangipanis are tough plants that can survive neglect, heat and drought and still fill the garden with a wonderful perfume ~ allthingsfrangipani.com and realising that, especially that community development stuff, they can put it to good use. “And when you’re talking about completely different cultural upbringings, let alone different religious beliefs, and tossing all that into, say, conversations about abortion – it gets very interesting.”
Ready to Bloom The optimism felt by Colleen and others for Social Work’s future at UWA has found tangible expression in a serendipitous project initiated
by new Social Work and Social Policy Head Associate Professor Judy Esmond, who looked out of her office window one day in mid-2015 and noticed a bleak and neglected corner of the Population Health courtyard. The area had been decimated in the 2010 hailstorms, with the existing plants pummelled and parts of the ground washed away beneath the building behind. The old plants had been removed and a couple of sad magnolias half-heartedly transplanted from elsewhere in the garden and left to their own devices amid a triangle of patchy grass. It was a sorry sight. Judy thought it would be nice to rejuvenate the area by creating a contemplation garden to mark Social Work’s 50th anniversary. It would be both a gift and a symbol of Social Work’s transition to Population Health. She contacted UWA horticulture supervisor Jamie Coopes, who had just the thing - a mature but unwanted frangipani tree which had been pulled from elsewhere on the campus a year earlier and
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was looking for a new home. The pair created a design for the spot, envisioning a private amphitheatre-style space ringed by graduated layers of greenery, with the branches of the central frangipani tree wrapping around a special seat dedicated to the Social Work students and educators who had come before. Neither was cognisant of two remarkable ironies: one, that (like Social Work) the frangipani tree had been uplifted from the Faculty of Arts - surplus to requirements in the wake of renovations; and two, that the qualities and myths surrounding frangipani trees contained more than a few parallels to the Social Work experience. The website allthingsfrangipani.com describes a resilient tree ruled by Venus and associated with love, loyalty, immortality and healing powers. The Aztecs believed that when mixed with other plant materials and the organs of animals known for their cunning, strength and bravery, the flowers contributed to a powerful potion against fear, lethargy and faintheartedness. The Vietnamese use the frangipani for its healing qualities, while traditional Ayurveda practice uses warming oils from frangipani and other fragrant flowers to calm those suffering from fear, anxiety, insomnia or tremors. Believed to have been brought to Australia, in part, by Torres Strait Islander people and Polynesian missionaries and slaves, the tree is particularly known for its hardy nature. “Frangipanis are tough plants that can survive neglect, heat and drought and still fill the garden with a wonderful perfume,” the website states. Frangipanis are reportedly so hardy that they won’t burn except in extreme temperatures (500 degrees or more), and can survive for hundreds of years, turning into huge, gnarled giants. While Colleen was not initially aware of the stories associated with frangipani trees, she said the analogy of the growing tree on the point of flowering was particularly apt. The tree, with surrounding plants (including Indian Hawthorn – another resilient species), has been in the ground since mid-August and is expected to flower this summer. “It looks absolutely fantastic and I think that growing tree there is actually a really nice metaphor for Social Work moving forward, that it is growing and expanding and the future looks really bright.” Judy just saw a spot that was bleak and neglected, and chose to do something about it. “I was looking out the window and said we have to do something about this. So we did.” Just like a social worker. •
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR TAMARA HUNTER Tamara Hunter is a journalist with more than 25 years’ experience across a broad range of news and feature areas. She worked for The West Australian for 16 years, leaving to take up a more flexible freelance lifestyle after having children. Over the past 12 years she has continued to write regularly for The West Australian and a variety of other publications. In 2012 she joined the media team at UWA, working over the next 2.5 years to support the media and publicity needs of individual academics, faculties and the wider University and writing for University publications including Uniview and UWA News. One of her earliest media releases for UWA brought her into contact with Violet Bacon, who features in this publication. Tamara is passionate about writing and relishes projects which allow her to delve into and help illuminate the endlessly fascinating, colourful and inspiring stories of people from all walks of life.
Acknowledgements I’d like to express deep gratitude to Maria Harries, for her continual support and guidance throughout what at times seemed an insurmountable project; former UWA News editor Lindy Brophy for introducing me to the project; the School of Population Health, and Social Work and Social Policy, for entrusting me with the important and inspiring job of bringing this history to life; the many people associated with Social Work at UWA, past and present, who generously contributed their time, assistance and memories in gathering the material for this publication; the earlier work of UWA Social Worker editor Pip White and Looking Back author Jenny Gardner, whose efforts provided invaluable material with which to work; the very patient Gabi Mills and her team at Premium Publishers for allowing me the time needed to complete the writing; and my long-suffering but wonderfully supportive family, for whom this book cannot be published soon enough.
ABOUT THE COVER ARTIST SUE CODEE Sue Codee is an artist and designer based in the beautiful historic City of Albany WA. With over 25 years in the arts industry since completing a Fine Arts degree at Curtin University (Perth) in 1988, her experience has included public art projects, arts consultation, and exhibition curation. She has also worked with communities nationally and overseas as a community artist. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally resulting in her work being represented in many public and private collections as well as being awarded. Sue discovered papercut only a few years ago while in treatment for cancer. The papercut designs explore narrative themes of human fragility, stories of place, environment, people and community, while touching on personal and more universal themes. Currently she runs a design studio- “This Papercut Life”- in which she creates artwork, jewellery and home wares which are stocked in galleries and shops around Australia. Visit suecodee.com.
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Notes
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LEGACY & PROMISE 50 YEARS OF SOCIAL WORK AND SOCIAL POLICY AT THE UNIVERSIT Y OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA
This book is dedicated to all the Social Work Graduates and Staff who have gone before and all those who will join us in the future. (2015 - 50th Anniversary Year)
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