PARLIAMENTARY HISTORY ADVISORY COMMITTEE AND STATE LIBRARY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA Transcript of an interview with Ian Alexander Birth date/death date STATE LIBRARY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA - ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION DATE OF INTERVIEW: 1998 INTERVIEWER: Erica Harvey TRANSCRIBER: ERICA HARVEY DURATION: 3 hours REFERENCE NUMBER: OH3084 COPYRIGHT: Parliament of Western Australia & State Library of Western Australia NOTE TO READER Readers of this oral history memoir should bear in mind that it is a verbatim transcript of the spoken word and reflects the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The Parliament and the State Library are not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for the views expressed therein; these are for the reader to judge. Bold type face indicates a difference between transcript and recording, as a result of corrections made to the transcript only, usually at the request of the person interviewed. FULL CAPITALS in the text indicate a word or words emphasised by the person interviewed. Square brackets [ ] are used for insertions not in the original tape. This is an interview with Ian Alexander recorded by Erica Harvey for the Parliamentary Oral History Program and the Battye Library Oral History Collection on the 9th of June 1998 at Ian Alexander's home in Perth, Western Australia. ALEXANDER Ian Alexander, born in Leeds, England, 1947. Came to Australia in 1951 on the P & O liner the Stratheden. EH Did you have brothers and sisters? Where were you in the family? ALEXANDER Middle, Erica. Elder brother who is two-and-a-half years older than I am and a younger brother who was born in Kalgoorlie actually, after we came to Australia in fifty-four - he's six, seven years younger. EH Could we talk a bit about your parents and your early life? Probably memories of Leeds are not very great. ALEXANDER No, not very clear - just a few cows walking across a walking track, but I think that's been implanted in the brain by parental stories rather than actual memories. EH Your parents, what were their occupations and interests, and perhaps your impressions of family life? ALEXANDER Yes, well my father was a doctor and that's why we came to Australia, because he got a job with the Commonwealth Medical Service. He qualified during the war, I think, where he met my mother who was a nurse - classic wartime romance I guess - and they got married during the war. Yeah, my memories of family life are mixed because there was always a lot of interest in the household and my father would bring home sort of interesting issues and/or people, with him quite often, and they were certainly interested in sort of issues outside of just domestic ones. So I guess there would quite often be discussion at the dinner table, particularly of a weekend, about sort of contemporary issues; but I do remember my father got increasingly conservative as he got older. He died in the late sixties, at which time he was fifty-five, but he'd gone from being very radical when he was in England - I don't have memory of that of course - but to quite conservative by the time that he established himself in medical practice here and became a private pathologist, which probably influenced the way he looked at the world. We occasionally talked about politics, he and I, but he was more concerned that I should get on with my school work, which I wasn't very keen to do at various times, so I have a lot of memories about discussions - or heated discussions - about that sort of thing as well. EH Migration - do you know why the decision to immigrate, and why Australia - Western Australia particularly? TAPE ONE SIDE A ALEXANDER 2 ALEXANDER Western Australia I think they ended up in by chance. Australia I guess, because there were opportunities. My father, I think this must have reflected his increasing change politically, became concerned about the British medical service which was nationalised - or the National Health was set up wasn't it just after the second war, I think - and he didn't particularly like the impact it was having on the medical system, so he started to look elsewhere and I think at the time Australia was running a big recruiting campaign for migrants and they joined that. My father had to go to Sydney, where we joined him, and he flew out, and we came out by boat - me and my two brothers - no only one at the time - because he had to do a course in tropical medicine. And then, of course, bureaucrats being what they are, sent him to the desert in Kalgoorlie - far from the tropics where he couldn't practise any of his newly learnt skills - but he worked in the Commonwealth health laboratories in Kalgoorlie for two or three years, then met a medical practitioner in Perth who subsequently became his partner, when the family moved to Perth. So I think it was chance that we ended up in Western Australia rather than design - although I guess the choice of Australia was more deliberate than that. EH Ian your mother, what interests did she follow? ALEXANDER Well, she wasn't in the paid work force by the time we got to Australia. She gave up work as nurse I think probably about the time they got married - as most women did at the time. I know it was a bit of a culture shock for her coming to Australia from England. She was in her thirties at the time and had spent all of her life up to then in England, and particularly ending up in Kalgoorlie on the edge of the desert. She was mainly preoccupied I guess with bringing up three boys - who probably took up an awful lot of time and energy - and she set up a beautiful environment for us; but later on she went back to work as a librarian at the school we were at, actually, and worked there part time for a number of years, and then went in to other sort of community-oriented activities - Save the Children fund and those sorts of things that were quite active locally. EH How long were you in Kalgoorlie? ALEXANDER Only three years. Yes, so I was six, or seven, when we came down to Perth. EH Early memories of - I guess it's a sense of time and place from your childhood - have any of these stayed with you and influenced you, particularly as you later went on to do geography. ALEXANDER Yes, I think - I mean Kalgoorlie, to a small extent - although again, the memories are fairly, you know, scant - because I was so young when we were there - but I guess it was sort of a relatively remote town, a fairly tough town, just little fragments of memories of miners and mines, and cycling actually, I did a lot of cycling in Kalgoorlie. TAPE ONE SIDE A ALEXANDER 3 My father rode a bike at the time, so that probably sparked an early interest in sort of, other than car transport, which remains until today. And then I think in Guildford, where I was brought up - the family lived in Guildford - it was almost like living in the country really, because it was a distant suburb. We were surrounded by rivers and there was quite a bit of river land where you could get free access to - a great place to be a kid, or a young boy anyway with those sort of outdoor interests and a bunch of contemporaries who were all interested in running around and exploring the environment. So that I suppose gave me a bit of an interest in the natural environment. I ended up doing geography, I think, not so much because of that but because it was one of the few subjects I really took to at school and had a geography teacher in the upper secondary anyway, who was really keen on pushing students, and so geography was then one of the subjects I took on when I went to university, although I didn't really know what I wanted to do with geography or with any of the other subjects that I took - history, English and something else. Geography again came through as a subject that I did best in, so I thought "Well, why not?" EH Where did you go to school? ALEXANDER Guildford Grammar - yes I have mixed memories of; very authoritarian regime and I didn't really enjoy the cultural experience of Guildford at all - very authoritarian, very hierarchical - and apart from people like the geography teacher I mentioned, and a few others like Bill Bunbury who taught me English in my later years at school, they were a pretty dull and uninspiring lot of teachers, and often not very well qualified to do the job. They appeared to be people who couldn't get jobs in the State system - I might be maligning them - but ended up at private schools like Guildford. So the myth was that you get a superior education, I think actually that the opposite was probably true. But my parents thought they were doing the right thing by sending me there, and my brothers, and I guess it did ... Guildford has this sort of philosophy of supposedly of encouraging people to serve the community. I've always resisted the notion that they might have pushed me in a particular direction because I didn't enjoy the experience of being at school for all those reasons - bullying and very uncivilised behaviour - but possibly that might have struck a chord somewhere and sort of opened my eyes to the fact that there were things that you could do in the community - beyond oneself and one's family sort of thing.