Biographical

IAN EDWARD MACINDOE

(10/03/1935)

I was born on 10th March 1935 at Glen Innes in northern New South Wales, Australia. At that time my father, Stephen, was working at the Glen Innes Experiment Farm as a plant breeder and my mother, Edith (nee Hill), looked after me and was soon to have three other children: Ross, Helen and David.

 When I was aged four my brother, Ross, and I were left with our aunt, Eunice Macindoe, for a year or so while my parents spent a couple of years in the USA where my father was studying for his doctorate. From the age of six I attended Roseville Public School (School Captain in 1947) followed by three years at North Sydney Boys High and two years at Parramatta High (School Captain in1952). My not-so-illustrious Leaving Certificate results enabled me to accept a Teacher Training Scholarship and I spent two years at Wagga Wagga Teachers' College preparing for a career as a primary school teacher—not a felicitous choice, given my temperament and personality style. The children and I liked each other well enough, but the need for classroom discipline appealed to neither the kids nor the teacher. However, I developed several firm friendships from Teachers’ College days and they continue to the present.

 My five years of primary school teaching occurred in Drummoyne (two years) and Rozelle (three years) during which time my sanity was preserved by the grind of being an evening student at the University of Sydney. I continued with evening studies after moving into the Department of Education's Counselling Service (two years) from where I was seconded to the faculty of the Sydney Teachers' College to demonstrate psychological testing and to lecture students on intelligence testing and related topics.

 I finally made the big break with teaching by being appointed as one of several psychologists at Callan Park Psychiatric Hospital in the wake of the Royal Commission into that institution. My stint at Callan Park (now called Rozelle Hospital) was for just under three years, most of it at the Rozelle Psychiatric Unit (the intake unit for the hospital). The work was primarily testing and interviewing to assist in diagnosis, with some lecturing to nursing students and some occasional supportive therapy.

I recall this period (August 1962 through mid-1965) as a relatively happy and stress-free period in my mid-to-late 20s. Since 1956 I had taken an active part in the social life of those interested in the traditional jazz revival, was on the organising committee of the Sydney Jazz Club for a few years, and during the early 1960s gravitated to the intellectual scene of the Sydney Libertarians (University of Sydney) and the social scene of the Sydney Push (Royal George Hotel). I had several girlfriends, some serious and others casual, and saw myself as an independent spirit (despite my bourgeois concern to stay employed) with values to match my scepticism concerning conventional Australian life and the socialistic preoccupations of my parents and their friends. In other words, I was not unlike others of my time who felt something more vital was needed than the quietism of the 1950s or the vague promise of a better life in a socialist society.

During all these years I studied as an evening student, spending most of my weekends in libraries rather than the more mentally healthy pursuits of wine, women and song. I was most successful in English and History, but focussed on Psychology as the best insurance against a return to the classroom. After completing the pass degree (BA) I spent several more years covering the Honours work for Psychology. This involved two theses: an empirical thesis and a theoretical thesis. These were entitled, respectively, ‘Imaging in Spontaneous Hallucinators and Non-Hallucinators’ and ‘The Importance of Unconscious Processes in Neurosis: A Critical Comparison of Dynamic and Behavioural Theorizing About Neurosis, With Special Reference to Behaviour Therapy’.

 Two years on the faculty of the University of Sydney followed (Senior Tutor in Clinical and Abnormal Psychology) as well as involvement in the burgeoning dissent over our involvement in the Vietnam War.

 I decided to pursue a doctorate and was accepted at the University of Minnesota. Of course, I was not to realise, as I departed for the USA in August 1967, that I would spend the next eighteen years as an ex­patriate in America.

 My years in Minnesota can be divided into the first eight years prior to my first visit back to Australia, and the remaining ten years. They were rather different experiences, since the first period was one of being a graduate student at the time of psychedelic drugs, flower power, love-ins and experimentation with alternative lifestyles and relationship patterns, followed by the peaking of the peace movement and campus ‘strikes’ against the USA's policies in Vietnam, followed by Watergate and the downfall of President Nixon. As I have said many times, those first eight years in Minnesota were like having a ringside seat at the greatest show on earth.

Of course, many other things were happening for me in those eight years, the most important being my involvement with the University of Minnesota (by coincidence the same University at which my father did his doctorate some thirty years earlier). By the end of 1971 my formal course work was completed and I began a project that was to lead to the doctoral thesis. The latter was entitled ‘The Alteration and Assessment of Human Male Erotic Interest’ and the project that led to it was the investigation of therapeutic work with sex offenders: how to change sex-related behaviours that the offenders and the public agreed were socially undesirable. This, in turn, led to my developing and conducting the first treatment program for sex offenders in Minnesota—at the Minnesota Security Hospital in St Peter, some 100 kilometres from Minneapolis.

Soon after starting the innovative program for offenders I married Vicki Kunerth on 9^th September 1972. I was then 37 years old and Vicki was 21 years of age. I had bought a house in Minneapolis, not far from the University, and Vicki and I lived in the finished attic, while the four bedrooms on the second floor were occupied by fellow students whose minimal rental paid the monthly mortgage payments. The ‘fellow students’ should be described as friends, most of whom I continue to keep in touch with.

The house was sold in mid-1975 and Vicki and I moved into a rented duplex (lower half of a two-storey house) right on the edge of campus. My project in St Peter finished up at the same time and I concentrated on completing the doctoral dissertation for the next five months. Starting on Boxing Day 1975 we spent eight months travelling around the world, including a couple of months in Australia. Without doubt these were among the happiest months of my life.

Our return to Minneapolis in August 1976 marked the start of my second period in Minnesota. Vicki had been accepted into Graduate School and I was unemployed and directionless. I felt no commitment to psychology as a profession and was no longer interested in working with sex offenders. I took the opportunity to ‘re-tool’ by returning to Graduate School in the Program for Hospital and Health Care Administration. For two years (1978-79) I was a full-time student, the second year consisting of a Master's thesis plus a residency to gain management experience. The Masters was entitled ‘The Relative Importance of the Administrator’s Characteristics in Community Mental Health Centres in Minnesota’ (Sabra M. Hamilton Award, best thesis for Class of 1979).

 By August 1979 both Vicki and I had completed our academic courses and we were lucky to be accepted for a nine-week ‘residency’ as students at a health clinic in Franklin in southern Louisiana. This proved to be one of the more amazing and fascinating times of my life, since Franklin is the centre of a vast sugar cane plantation area, with all the history of Black Americans in the South apparent in the legacy of its modern condition. Nearly all the clinic's patients were Black, as were a large part of its staff. We were in bayou[1] and Cajun[2] country, with all the exotic culture and cuisine of the Black, Creole and Cajun citizens who make up its population.

 After our stint in Franklin, we motored up the east coast of the USA, our two ten-speed bicycles atop the Volvo station wagon, and flew to Dublin for a three-week cycling trip in Ireland.[3] Cycling by day and bed-&-breakfast in Irish homes at night was definitely the way to go. We had started serious cycling only a year or so earlier and this trip was to confirm an interest and pleasure that has featured in my life since.

The ‘down’ side to this idyllic period of my life was that upon our return to Minneapolis I was once again unemployed for several months while job hunting in the area of health administration. Eventually I was employed by the Foundation for Health Care Evaluation, a private company of some 100 staff that had the Federal Government contract to carry out medical peer review for the state of Minnesota. For most of the next six years (1980 – 1985) I was a Project Director with the Foundation and was responsible for monitoring the quality assurance and utilisation review programs of some sixteen hospitals in the Minneapolis/St Paul metropolitan area.

 Early in 1985, following a Minneapolis visit a year earlier by Ross and his wife, Jennifer Hartley, I spent a month in Sydney to see my family again after nine years—including nieces and a nephew I had never before met. My father's 79^th birthday was celebrated at a family holiday mobile unit in Nambucca Heads. This was to be the last time we were together as it turned out. A partial reason for the trip was to make enquiries about job possibilities and to see how I felt about a probable permanent return to Australia, since Vicki and I had decided to dissolve our marriage. In fact, the divorce was finalised while I was in Sydney on this four-week visit in February-March 1985, so that upon my return to Minneapolis my circumstances were altered.

My intention was to work for another 18 months or so before returning to Sydney. Three months after resuming work, however, the Foundation found itself in financial difficulties and implemented a drastic reduction of costs, including retrenchment of some ‘unessential’ staff of whom I was one.

I decided to remain unemployed to enjoy the Minnesota summer, to wind up my affairs, and make preparations for travel on my way back to Sydney earlier than had been my intention. A week before starting on my travels I received news of my father's death. The family urged me to continue with my travel plans.

 I flew out ofMinneapolis/St Paul on 17th September 1985, leaving behind many good friends and taking with me eighteen years of experience and memories. My sadness was leavened by my hope and determination, at the age of 50, to live the rest of my life in as full and happy a way as I could. My physical and mental health was excellent, and my attitude was that I was about to embark on the second half of my life. In my maturity I had developed the general attitude that, since I do not handle stress well, I should arrange my work and personal life to be as stress-free as possible.

 My travels took me to London (where I stayed with my Aunt Maude, Edith's elder sister, and her husband, John), Belgrade (where I visited with friends of many years standing), Athens, Egypt, the south of India, three weeks in China (on a conducted tour, followed by five days on my own in Shanghai) and a week in Hong Kong. I arrived in Sydney on 5 December 1985.

 For the next nine months of job searching I lived with my mother in her Balmain flat. Reconnecting with family, old friends and Sydney itself, gave me great pleasure. After 30 years of wishing, I finally taught myself to touch type, using a computer program.

 In September 1986 I started work as Management & Systems Review Officer (a fancy title for a kind of in-house management consultant) at Mount Druitt Hospital which had been opened only four years earlier. Soon afterwards I purchased a touring bicycle—almost identical to the one I’d cycled on for years in America—and resumed my cycling as best I could on Sydney's dangerous roads.

 I lived in temporary accommodation over the next three years, including two years with my youngest brother, David, in Kellyville. In May 1987 my mother, Edith, died. Her death, the result of a cardiac condition, occurred in Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and, while it left me sad, I was glad that, after eighteen years absence, I had been able to spend so much time with her upon my return to Australia.

 There were two other women who, since Edith's death, became more important in my life: my step-mother, Gertrude, who had moved back to her homeland, New Zealand, after my father's death; and Monika, who I met as she was coming out of a 20-year marriage that had been blessed with two sons.

 Gertrude made periodic visits back to Sydney to spend time with us all and, because of the affection we all felt for her and because of her concern and support for all of us, she was a pivotal force in the cohesion of the family in the absence of Steve and Edith.

 Monika and I were married on 10 December 1988 and moved into our home in Winston Hills six months later. The marriage required major adjustments for both of us, not only because we are of different cultural backgrounds (Monika was born and raised in New Delhi, India) but because we are rather different personalities with differing values and attitudes. We are determined and continue to work on our relationship. Thankfully, Monika has been warmly accepted into my family and I have been honoured to be accepted by the Indian community— and particularly by Monika's Indian friends— in Sydney. In December/January 1989/90 we spent two months in India, where I met Monika's relatives and friends and gained a better understanding of that wondrous society and Monika's upbringing in it. We also were able to visit Monika's two sons who, at that time, were boarding at the prestigious Modern School high in New Delhi. We have returned to India together several times since then.

 Gertrude had been ill, on and off, for some time with a heart condition (a pacemaker had been inserted) and we learned of her death on 2 October 1992. The last of our three parents (grandparents in the case of the younger generation) was gone. Monika and I were glad that we had spent a week or so with her in New Zealand a few years earlier.

 My job at Mount Druitt Hospital had undergone some changes and I came to be called the Management Services Officer—basically an administrative assistant to the Director of Administrative Services. Outside of work hours I developed a major avocation as an advocate for improved conditions for cyclists.

 In 1987 I was instrumental in founding the Cyclists' Action Movement WEST (or CAMWEST) which is now recognised as the advocacy group representing cyclists' interests in the far western suburbs of Sydney. Cycling advocacy basically involves interfacing with government authorities (primarily what was then the Roads & Traffic Authority of NSW), politicians, bureaucrats, and local government councils to raise awareness of cyclists' needs and to see that the system caters to those needs. In more than twenty years that I have been involved I have witnessed a major improvement in attitude on the part of government agencies as well as substantial progress in ‘tar on the road’ and off-road cycleways. Cycling advocacy is, however, a slow and laborious process, involving written submissions, letters, meetings, telephone calls, and published articles. At the start of the third millennium, after leading much of the cycling advocacy associated with public cycling access to the 2000 Olympic Games, I cut back my activities in advocacy, balancing it against more riding.

 My cycling interests do not start and end with advocacy. For example, in April 1993 I took part, along with 1500 other cyclists, in the 9-day Big NSW Bike Ride from Port Macquarie to Sydney. My tent mate was Dr Laxman Prasad, an Indian friend who was also the principal doctor on the ride. I took part in this annual ride again a couple of years later. Shorter, one-day or half-day rides, were also enjoyable, and continue occasionally even now.

 In my early 70s I became the enthusiastic owner of a new bicycle that had an electric-assist motor mounted on the front hub. This means that, as I would begin to climb a steep hill, I could press a button that activated the motor to help me pedal up the hill without undue strain on my heart and legs. After about seven years I became somewhat disillusioned with the heavy electric-assist bike and sold it, replacing it with my current bicycle—a light 24-speed road bike that has given me a renewed enthusiasm for cycling.

 My concerns to improve conditions for cycling tie in with my concerns for the environment and for a more sustainable and sane development of urban life, with less urban sprawl and dependence on private cars. Transport planning and human-scale urban living permeate my cycling advocacy work.

 Clearly, my work life has been somewhat piecemeal. I have never considered myself to have had a ‘career’ as such. My aversion to teaching, and scepticism about the value of much psychology that is practiced, has led to my need for employment dominating any potential ambition I may have harboured. If I had wanted a career I should have followed the advice of vocational counsellors who told me, as I prepared to leave high school, that I was suited for a career in law or journalism. Looking back it seems to me that my interests and skills are more in line with ‘investigative journalism’ or ‘human rights law’ or some aspects of literature, history or social policy.

 The last six years of my working life were spent as the Publications Officer for the Transcultural Mental Health Centre which is a statewide service aimed at ensuring that people from other cultures are not disadvantaged, by reason of language skills or cultural prejudice, from having access to mental health services. As the Publications Officer I did a great deal of on-line editing of manuscripts and advising authors on the development of their publications. I was responsible for publishing the books and reports that were associated with the Centre. This work was by far the most satisfying of the jobs I had taken on over the years. Apart from various reports, the books for which I was the Executive Editor are: ‘Nobody Wants To Talk About It — Refugee Women’s Mental Health’; ‘Deeper Dimensions — Culture, Youth and Mental Health’; ‘Diversity and Mental Health in Challenging Times’ and ‘Asylum Seekers and Refugees: Issues of Mental Health and Wellbeing’. My swansong in 2003 was to co-edit with Professor Wai-On Poon ‘Untangling the Threads: Perspectives on Mental Health in Chinese Communities’. On retiring in February 2004 the Centre gave me a wonderful farewell party attended by various friends and relatives, and featuring a three-piece jazz band.

 Not long after retiring Monika and I left on a five-month trip that took in India, Greece and the Greek Islands, Sicily, the Aeolian Islands (just off the coast of Sicily), southern Italy (Capri, Sorrento, Naples etc.), Umbria (an hour or so north of Rome), northwest Italy (the Cinque Terre coast, Florence etc.), Rome, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Oxford (UK), Baltimore/Washington DC and New York City, and finally a visit with Monika’s relatives in Toronto. It was an absolutely wonderful trip and we have a written summary of it, plus digital photos, for anyone interested to know more.

 Another major change that Monika and I experienced in the new millennium was our sponsorship of the move to Sydney of Monika’s niece, Sandhya (or Neelu as we call her), and her husband, Tamman, and their two children, Tara (then about 10 years old) and Tanya (8 years old at the time). The Shenoys (their family name) treated us royally for years whenever we visited India. Now they live only ten minutes’ drive from us, so we see them frequently. Both Neelu and Tamman are working and, of course, we follow the progress of Tara (Art-Law at Australian National University in Canberra) and Tanya (Arts at the University of Western Sydney). We are immensely proud of them and we are so glad that we’ve been able to help in their migration and adjustment to Australia.

 Much of our travelling within Australia in the first decade of the new millennium was done with our pop-top caravan. We have been twice to Tamworth to experience the annual Country Music Festival. In October 2005 I went with my two brothers, Ross and David, on a one-week caravan trip following the original route of the Cobb and Co coaches through Dubbo, Nyngan, Bourke, Walgett, Coonamble, the Warrumbungle National Park, Gulgong, Mudgee and many places in between. A year or so later the three of us took the caravan on a holiday down the south coast as far as the border with Victoria.

 Monika and I have taken the caravan on various trips, often enabling us to visit relatives and friends.

 Since 2005 Monika and I have taken computer courses with Computer Pals for Seniors in the Hills District, enabling us to learn skills in word processing, the manipulation of digital photos and graphics, the use of the Internet and so on. They hold monthly meetings and occasional social events.

 I continue to learn about and listen to jazz and classical music; and Monika and I share an enthusiasm for good quality films and theatre.

 It has occurred to me that a list of organisations that I have been involved with over the years since my return to Australia would give some idea of my interests and commitments. So, here they are (more or less in alphabetical order):

• Aboriginal Native Title and Reconciliation

• Australian Republican Movement

• Bicycle New South Wales (Life Member)

• CAMWEST (Cyclists’ Action Movement WEST) (Life Member)

• CASSE NSW (Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy – NSW Chapter)

• COTA (Council of the Ageing) (joint member with Monika)

• Computer Pals for Seniors --- The Hills

• Dying With Dignity NSW (previously Voluntary Euthanasia Society of NSW) (Life Member)

• EXIT International (Dr P. Nitschke’s end-of-life decisions organisation) (Life Member)

• Friends of the ABC

• Greenfleet (plants trees to offset carbon emissions from cars)

• Henry Lawson Society of NSW

• National Seniors Association

• PARRACAN (Parramatta Climate Action Network)

• Reconciliation for Western Sydney (working for reconciliation with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people)

• Sydney Jazz Club

• Sustainable Population Australia (concerned with environmental problems)

• Transition Parramatta (Parramatta Transition Town)

I place a high value on a rational approach to life. A sceptical view of belief systems underpins my ‘rational secularism’. I think that the planet already has a gross imbalance of human beings and do not regret for one second my avoidance of adding to that imbalance.

Recent developments in the so-called former Socialist societies have caused me to re-examine my previous preference for Socialist economics; I have for years been critical of the political and social policies of Communist countries. The jury of history is still out on the broader questions, I feel, and I certainly will not live to see the evolution of human societies, whether for improvement or not, in coming decades. I am sceptical of the global or national ability to avoid some of the worst outcomes of global warming, or the ability to change to a steady state economy. Social and political developments in the early 21^st century, both globally and in Australia, leave me pessimistic about the future. Human kind, it seems, is not capable of common, sustained rational decisions, but rushes headlong down the paths that serve self-interest, regardless of the effects on others or upon the planet as a whole.

I continue to think that humankind should try to provide an equivalent standard of living for all, with as much education, culture and humanity as each person feels they are capable of. Along these lines I currently have a project of developing a global vision for the future, entitled ‘The Human Right to Material Equivalence’. This quite idealistic project is an attempt to discuss how human societies might strive to give each person a standard of living equivalent to that of every other person on the planet.[4]

Unfortunately this is not the way societies currently function, leaving me feeling that I am part of a social condition of which I largely disapprove. My philosophy is that one does what little one can on this earth to make it a better place, and one tries in one's relationships to do no harm and, where possible, to make life easier and more pleasant for others.