UC Alumni and Friends E-newsletter – May 2011

In this issue:

Where are they now? Alumni Profile – John Rayner (1965) New author - Alumna Hana Schofield on her novel Goodbye Sarajevo and life after UC In memoriam - Maurice Till and Professor Ernst Badian UC Alumni events

Message from Sue Harrison South, your Alumni Relations Coordinator

Welcome to your May issue of UC for life. Your alumni connection with us is valued and we are interested in the journeys of our graduates through a lifetime filled with achievements. A university education is the start of a lifelong process filled with many milestones.

Inspirational alumni

We are inspired by our alumni who use their education to make a difference. In this newsletter, you can read about Hana Schofield and her book, Goodbye Sarajevo, and John Rayner, alumni and lecturer who lives in the US. We are a global university connected by alumni worldwide.

Inspirational students

Quin Tang’s Masters thesis was due on February 23. She was on the 5th floor of the CTV building when the earthquake hit on February 22 and miraculously walked out of the collapsed CTV building. Despite her experiences, she completed and handed in her thesis. Read more

Earthquake scholarship appeal update

Our University is about our students and we need to keep our brightest and best students at UC and attract the next generation. For this reason, our Vice-Chancellor chose scholarships to be the cause for our Earthquake Scholarship Appeal.

Thanks to the generosity of our alumni and friends, just nearly $38,000 has been raised so far to keep our best and brightest students at UC. A $100,000 corporate gift has also been received so we are well on track to provide a number of scholarships for deserving students. Very exciting!

If you haven't made a gift yet, you still can. View current campaigns

Events UC Alumni events are happening around the world in 2011. Bookmark our calendar as we are confirming details for events all the time. Coming up is a get together in Seattle on 6 June and our Wellington based alumni will be the studio audience for the hilarious Back Benches Show screening live on TVNZ 7 on 22 June. We have networks and get-togethers being planned on LinkedIn so connect with your UC Alumni group to hear about local events.

2011 events calendar

Remember to stay connected – with each other and with UC.

Kia kaha

Sue

PS- Congratulations to our recent Facebook winners Dave Cowl and Sebastian Meis who have clicked ‘Like’ on our page.

Where are they now? Alumni Profile - John Rayner PhD (1965)

Alumnus John Rayner (right) today and (left) representing UC at football in 1963

John Rayner is a UC alumnus having graduated with a PhD in Geography in 1965. He started life at UC as a lecturer in Geography, after arriving from his native England in 1961. He completed his PhD in 1965. We caught up with John recently and found out about life during and after UC.

Born in England in 1936, I graduated from the University of Birmingham in 1958 in Geography with ancillary subjects of Mathematics and Archaeology. With an Arctic Carnegie Scholarship, I completed an MSc in meteorology at McGill University in Montreal in 1961. There I worked on one of the early IBM computer mainframes. My first faculty appointment was at the University of Canterbury as a lecturer specialising in climatology.

Arriving at UC in July, I was just in time to meet the other faculty before they all deserted me for a conference and I had to supervise an undergraduate geography field week in Akaroa! Since I enjoy that kind of activity, the experience was not too bad although it would have been nice to have been able to name New Zealand flora, etc. The students did fly my pyjama bottoms from the school flagpole.

Valerie and I made some great friends in New Zealand and we still write to many of them. We found the working, living, and cultural environment thrilling. We tented in nearly every area of the country except north of Auckland because a tropical cyclone spoiled our plans that summer. We made the Haast Pass trip just after it opened in 1965. In fact, we always say we would have stayed had it not been for having ailing parents so far away in England. We have very fond memories of our time in New Zealand.

Geography is a broad discipline since it attempts to understand the environment as a whole. That means it contains specialists who might just as well be in other disciplines such as physics, or history, or psychology etc. At the core, however, we try to synthesize all these aspects into what we observe in the landscape. To that end, although I specialized in atmospheric conditions, my first research projects after my Masters degree involved working with Dr Jane Soons, a geomorphologist (later Professor and Head of Geography at UC).

Our work on storm damage in Canterbury was published in the New Zealand Geograher (1965). Then we set out to understand some aspects of erosion in the Southern Alps. With the aid of a NZ Grants Committee award, we instrumented a whole small valley to measure continuously the climate and runoff near the University Biological Centre at Cass. Many enjoyable days and weeks, often with students, were spent at that Centre from 1962-5. Some of our findings were published in Geografisca Annaler (1968). In 1961, I had registered for a doctoral degree at the UC. The research I chose was very different that mentioned above and involved analyzing large scale meteorological data for the New Zealand and surrounding ocean areas by spectral techniques. I had no adviser and the only people who seemed know anything about statistical spectral analysis were in Physics. Dr John B. Gregory and G.J.Fraser were planning to look at research ionospheric data from rockets sent up from Birdling's Flat using this procedure (I published a book on the technique in 1971).

I wrote my own computer programs for my research. In order to do the calculations, I needed lots of IBM 1620 time. This I obtained by receiving the keys to the computer centre at Ilam in the evening, working through the night, and then handing them back in the morning. (Most of the University was still located in the old buildings downtown. Incidentally one of those buildings had a plaque commemorating the work of Rutherford very much like the one I was familiar with at McGill.) The IBM technical support person soon got fed up with me calling him late at night so he allowed me to pull the machine apart and replace components! I now build my own desktop computers from scratch. These of course, would have done all of my doctoral calculations, that then took hundreds of hours on the IBM 1620, now in a few minutes. I was awarded my degree in 1965.

I was always involved in sports at UC. I played soccer until I tore an ACL while playing here in the USA. I captained the McGill University team. In the cricket photo two of the other members I would rate as my best friends. They are Reginald G. Golledge, (third from left in back row), originally from Australia, and Leslie J. King, second from left front row, originally from Canterbury. Both were geographers and were also here at the Ohio State University. Reg and I had numerous research grants and publications together. He died recently. Les ultimately became Vice President at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada and was recently with us for our son's wedding celebrations.

University of Canterbury Association Football Club Winners C.F.A. 1st Division Championship 1963

Back row: J.N. Rayner, A.W. Ross Middle Row: R.D.Lill, R.M. Allen, P.J. Rimmer, D. Bloor, C.F. Davidson Front row: S.N. Molnar, D.H. Lee, J.A. Campbell, G.J. Lewis, F. Adams, Y.H. Sue Absent: S.E.E. Varatnam

Share your story of life after UC

Email us if you’re interested in appearing in one of our e-newsletters on mailto:[email protected].

New author - Alumna Hana Schofield

Hana Schofield (2002) on her recently released book Goodbye Sarajevo. A true story of courage, love and survival. Last week, it was the #1 international non-fiction bestseller in New Zealand.

In May 1992, twelve-year-old Hana is put on one of the last UN evacuation buses fleeing the besieged city of Sarajevo by her elder sister Atka. Two years later, having lived as a refugee in Croatia, Hana arrived in Christchurch speaking no English. Fast forward ten years. In 2002 Hana graduated from UC with degrees in Law and Russian.

This month, Hana, together with Atka, celebrated the release of Goodbye Sarajevo, their account of the bloodiest European conflict since World War Two. Published by Bloomsbury (and written in Christchurch), Goodbye Sarajevo is a great achievement handled with honesty, humour and compassion. Hana speaks directly to her fellow UC alumni.

Q. You graduated from UC with a first class honours in Law and a bachelor’s degree in Russian. Why did you choose this combination of subjects to study? It was a mixture of different reasons. I knew I wanted to have a professional career and since I've always enjoyed writing/languages, Law seemed like a natural choice. I was also influenced by the fact that UC has a highly reputable Law Faculty and having other friends enrolling in the same course. Russian? I thought it would be good to have something creative to balance the study of Law.

Q. Did your childhood experiences have an impact on your choice of degrees and subsequent career? Absolutely. My Dad always used to call me a 'lawyer' when I was younger, I had a tendency to 'argue' my case if I wanted something... But it was the experience of living in Croatia as a refugee for two years which made having a career and financial security extremely important to me. With a law degree, I knew the likelihood of having a secure job and a steady income was higher.

After practising law for five years, I felt that I earned the right to set time aside to do what I was passionate about - to write a book with Atka, something that we'd wanted to do for several years.

Q. You wrote Goodbye Sarajevo with your sister Atka who is married to a New Zealander. How did this creative and collaborative process work for you? We actually wrote the book at the Christchurch City Library - both of us were living in the city at the time and most of our family are still there. The process was cathartic and immensely enjoyable. Atka and I missed out on having some carefree times together as young adults because of the war - writing the book gave us that time together and we become even closer friends. Both of us are married to NZers and now live in Auckland.

Q. Career highlights so far? As a lawyer, working for one of the leading law firms in NZ, Chapman Tripp, and in London for a City Law Firm.

As a writer, having our first book, Goodbye Sarajevo, published by a prestigious international publisher such as Bloomsbury.

Q. Goals for the future? Personally, I think it's really important to keep reinventing ourselves, both professionally and personally, through all the different stages of our lives. My goals? To keep doing my best, write another book, help others...

Q. What are some of your memories of your time at UC? There are many fond memories from my time at UC. I loved being surrounded by contemporaries who were eager to learn, do well, but at the same time make the most of our youth and social side of life at UC. I've formed lifelong friendships and met my now husband at the College of Law cafe :)

Anything else you would like to add? My tertiary education at UC has been my ticket into the world and a great career. It's enabled me to work in a top law firm in NZ and made a career in law in London possible. Working as an equal with graduates from Cambridge and Oxford universities in England reassured me about the quality of education we received at UC. I'm very proud to be a UC graduate.

For more information about Goodbye Sarajevo, visit the Goodbye Sarajevo website

Connect to Hana via the Goodbye Sarajevo Facebook page

More UC Alumni profiles

In memoriam - Distinguished alumni

Maurice Till

Internationally acclaimed pianist Maurice Till died on 26 March aged 84 years.

A former dean of music and fine arts at the University of Canterbury from 1981 to 1992, he was bestowed the honorary degree of Doctor of Music in 2000. Read more

Professor Ernst Badian

Photo courtesy of The Press

One of Canterbury University’s most distinguished alumni passed away in February after a fall at his home in Quincy, Massachusetts, USA at the age of 85.

Ernst Badian was born in Vienna in 1925, but in 1938 emigrated with his Jewish family to New Zealand. He received a BA Hons with first class in Classics at Canterbury University College in 1945, and an MA in 1946, whereupon he left for University College, Oxford to gain a BA in Litterae Humaniores (again with first class) in 1950. Still at Oxford, he was awarded a D. Phil. (1956), under the supervision of a New Zealander, the stellar Roman historian, Sir Ronald Syme. Appointments followed at the universities of Sheffield, Leeds, Durham, New York at Buffalo, and, in 1971, Harvard, where he was to become the John Moors Cabot Professor of History until his retirement in 1998.

As one of the greatest ancient historians of the twentieth century, he was the author of six seminal books, of which perhaps the first, Foreign Clientelae (Oxford 1959), was the work for which he will be remembered most. Based on his Oxford doctoral dissertation, it has become the classic and indispensable study of Roman imperialism in the Republic.

His vast range as an ancient historian was illustrated when he turned to ancient Greek history as well as Roman, most famously challenging the prevailing romanticised image of Alexander the Great, demonstrating the contradictory nature of our sources for him, and his ruthlessness. Out of piety, he edited two of the seven volumes Syme’s Roman Papers (Oxford 1979). His scholarly oeuvre exceeds 200 items.

In the US, he was a tireless promoter of Classical Studies, being among other things a cofounder of the Association of Ancient Historians (1974) and the American Journal of Ancient History (1978).

In scholarly debate he was known to be formidable and often devastating. It was a mark of his passion for rigorous logic and truth (however unfortunate it was that this could on occasion be hurtfully expressed). Less than well known is his extraordinary generosity as a benefactor to all the institutions which had supported his progress from Vienna. He was always grateful to his alma mater in Christchurch, and endowed the Department of Classics with an essay prize, in honour of and gratitude to his Canterbury University College Professor, L.G. Pocock; with a fund to supply essential reference works and texts in the Departmental library; and with many donations, which, in accordance with his wishes, remained unpublicised.

His affection for the University and the Department was unswerving, and the award in 1999 of an Honorary Doctorate brought him boundless pleasure. At the award ceremony, he had been asked to keep his acceptance speech to one minute, and in fifty-eight seconds of superb and penetrating oratory scanned his whole history from Nazi Austria to the present moment, including en passant a mention of the following week, when he was to fly to Vienna to accept the Austrian Cross of honour for Science and Art. The applause was deafening.

He visited the Department several times after 1999, never failing to share his knowledge and advice. The Department will miss him sorely, and have named after him the room housing the library that he funded.

He is survived by his wife, Nathlie, their two children and their grandchildren and great- grandchildren.

Obituary by Professor Graham Zanker, School of Humanities, University of Canterbury

UC Alumni events

There are a range of UC Alumni events you can attend in New Zealand and around the world.

We would love to see you - please forward this email onto fellow alumni you think would be interested in attending.

Coming up in June:

2 June, Seattle - Get-together 22 June, Wellington - You can be part of the live filming of Back Benches, the TVNZ 7 Political Show 29 June, Christchurch - Christchurch Alumni Association AGM - Upstairs at JDV, Aikmans Rd

2011 UC Alumni events

Contact us for more information on mailto:[email protected]

Join your UC Alumni Facebook page and win!

Everyone who joins the UC Alumni Facebook page goes in the draw to win a prize each month.

You can connect with your fellow UC alumni online – who knows who you might be able to find?

Congratulations to our recent Facebook winners Dave Cowl and Sebastian Meis who have clicked ‘Like’ on our page