C. THE ASOPA STORY

Can anyone find a time in recorded history where Heaven came as close to earth?”  - Henry Bodman, on his time at ASOPA, 2002

His name was Alfred Austin Justin Conlon. He was the man who conceived ASOPA.

In 1941, Alf Conlon, third year medical student and bon vivant, was asked to form the Army Education Service to improve the literacy and numeracy of recruits.

The smooth-tongued Conlon had never been in school cadets, still less the Sydney University Regiment, but it didn’t take him long to suss out the Army and convince the new commander-in-chief, General Thomas Blamey, that he needed a research section to tackle major strategic issues, such as what to do if the Japanese invaded. So in 1942, Conlon was appointed Major (later Colonel) to establish the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs.

Conlon, then as now, was recognised as a visionary and a formidable tactician. He thrived on intrigue and exuded privileged knowledge. To some he was an arch manipulator, to others a brilliant mind. In reality he was both. The downside, though, was resentment - created both by his avoidance of established lines of authority and the numerous ranking officers (mostly Lieutenant Colonels) he gathered around him who had never seen active service.

Charles Rowley [right] wrote later: “Alf was a born manipulator, but the thing I don’t remember is Alf  Conlon manipulating something in order to bring him personally a distinct material advantage…

“Among officers, none of whom knew him, Alf was probably the most unpopular man in the army. Many people, for instance who’d been in the Middle east, felt that Alf’s method of getting privates with special qualifications and making them majors or colonels in a day wasn’t the right thing to do at all. There was a feeling that here was fellow who was manipulating the sacred edifice of the army for his own purposes.”

For administrative convenience, when formed in February 1943, the Directorate was slotted into Military Intelligence. This was short-lived but created a ‘cloak-and-dagger’ aura which clung to the unit and led to later claims that John Kerr, who had been Conlon’s second-in-command, was a war-time intelligence officer and that the CIA was behind the dismissal of the Whitlam Government in 1975.

Conlon’s empire depended both on Blamey’s goodwill and on getting tangible results. The Directorate discovered, for instance, that there were no maps of the Northern Territory adequate for military purposes. ‘Conlon’s heroes’ made good the shortfall, just as they found substitute sources for quinine when Australia’s normal supplies came under Japanese control. The Directorate prepared reports on Army health and nutrition, battlefield terrain, dietary standards for Papuan carriers and trends in international relations. It provided policy advice on the post-war governance of the Trust Territory of Papua and the Mandated Territory of New Guinea. Conlon had a broad remit; he even anticipated PNG’s independence. Work of enduring value was performed.

At the end of World War 2, Conlon pressed for the establishment of a permanent centre to “provide the Australian Government with a team of Australians specialising in the training of officers to undertake civil administration in developing countries and provide advice on aspects of development”. The Government agreed and in 1945 Colonel JK Murray became the first ‘Chief Instructor’ of the School of Civil Affairs.

Soon after, however, Murray was appointed post-war Administrator of PNG and in 1946 John Kerr [left] emerged as the first Principal of the Australian School of Pacific Administration. Originally located at Duntroon, in May 1947 ASOPA was relocated to a group of Army huts on Middle Head.

On staff were Conlon’s bright young cronies and companions, many of whom he had originally recruited to the Directorate. In addition to Kerr there were anthropologists WEH Stanner, Ian Hogbin, AP Elkin and Camilla Wedgewood, lawyers Julius Stone and Hal Wootten, poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart, banker James Plimsoll, and librarian Ida Leeson.

Kerr returned to the Sydney bar in 1948 to become one of Sydney's leading industrial lawyers and Conlon took over ASOPA. He reportedly spent the next two years as an unhappy and unsuccessful Acting Principal (a position, many years later, I also held for a brief time) until historian Charles Rowley took up the position in November 1950.

One reason for Conlon’s unhappiness may have been that the politicians of the time seemed hell bent on shutting down ASOPA. At the end of World War 2, confronting the first of many threats to the School’s existence, John Kerr had written: “The idea [of ASOPA] was opposed, and opposed in influential quarters… We were determined that what had been created should not be destroyed. In this we succeeded.” Throughout ASOPA’s 27-year history that success had to be earned time and time again.

Conlon, his nephew later told me, had a sure-fire stratagem for getting the politicians off his back. When called to Canberra for discussions, he would load the boot of his car with red wine with which to ply his interrogators. A successful Principal he may not have been, but he kept ASOPA afloat until Charles Rowley came on the scene. Rowley, who had served as a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Australian Army in PNG during the war, remained as Principal until 1964, when Jack Mattes succeeded him.

It was not until 1954 that ASOPA began to train Australian teachers for service in PNG and the Northern Territory. For some time the training took place at distant Bathurst Teachers’ College. The training course was eventually transferred to Middle Head in 1958 and trainees were designated ‘Cadet Education Officers’.

Rowley turned out to be a great Principal. Margaret Westwood later wrote: “[He] brought to his principalship an already outstanding record in academic achievement and scholarship together with a wide experience and competence as an educator, administrator and historian. These qualities enabled him, during his 13 years as Principal, to establish for ASOPA a reputation for sound scholarship among academic institutions in Australia and overseas. He was able to attract a small but outstandingly able staff.” These staff continued to be recruited by invitation rather than by formal application and they were expected to engage in research and publication for at least two days a week.

Rowley’s own published work focused on New Guinea (Australians in German New Guinea 1914-21, The Lotus and the Dynamo and The New Guinea Villager) and the Australian Aboriginal (The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Outcasts in White Australia and The Remote Aborigines) – this trilogy being the first major attempt to assess the history of white and indigenous contact in Australia.

Staff at ASOPA had a great freedom. In some ways, it was a freer institution than the universities and a complete contrast to the narrower vision of Balmain Teachers’ College, which provided teacher training support for ASOPA. When one history lecturer moved from Balmain to Middle Head he referred to the experience as “the transfiguration of Noel Gash: I remember very clearly having the curious feeling that my mind was physically expanding”.

Charles Rowley passionately defended academic freedom against attacks by politicians who wanted more control over what ASOPA taught and published. In 1972, he looked back to his time at the School: “The freedom in teaching was never abrogated, though it was often attacked. This allowed us to retain for a few years those brilliant scholars who were certain, sooner or later, to go on to higher appointments in universities….”

The traditions of research and publication and inviolability of academic freedom persisted throughout the history of ASOPA and a great deal of the credit belongs to Charles Rowley for his tenacity and example. His own personal views on Aboriginal Australia and PNG were sometimes in conflict with government policy, and this personal involvement added steel to his argument as he struggled on behalf of his staff.

In the early 1960s, the Australian Government realised that independence in PNG would come sooner than previously anticipated and ASOPA moved into an intensive period of training young Australians to accelerate the pace of development in its territories.

In its final years, ASOPA introduced training for secondary teachers and more specialised administration courses. There was a major change of focus in 1970 as, with Papua New Guinea independence looming, the Australian Government turned to ASOPA to help correct a serious lack of trained indigenous administrators.

In 1973, the year in which Australia granted self-government to Papua New Guinea, ASOPA became the International Training Institute (ITI) within the Australian Development Assistance Bureau, a division of the Department of Foreign Affairs. ITI provided management training for professionals from developing countries in the Pacific, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. A final shift – and change in name to Centre for Pacific Development and Training - saw the Middle Head campus used as a base for consultants operating in the South Pacific until this role came to an end in 1997.

The history of ASOPA, and its successor institutions, paralleled the changing global political milieu during the 40 years after World War 2. ASOPA began as a school for Australians training for leadership positions in its territories. In middle life, it offered courses to people from developing countries. And finally, it was base for Australians consulting to the developing world.

It was, despite its strange beginnings, truly a grand institution.