V L Meek

Arthur O’Neill

At some time in the mid or late 1970s (memory dims) this American bloke, enrolled as a doctoral student at Cambridge University, sought approval to undertake a research study of the University of Papua New Guinea, my employer of the day. Maybe we didn’t know what we were letting ourselves in for (I, for one, had not the faintest idea what sort of carnivore a sociologist was) but why not agree? UPNG took its first students into a Preliminary Year of studies in 1967; and the offer of undergraduate degree programs started in 1968. We reckoned UPNG had evidenced its repute by the time Lynn Meek arrived. If you want to know what he made of us and of the sort of institution we helped to make, I suggest you get on the internet and buy the printed version of his thesis: The University of Papua New Guinea: A Case Study in the Sociology of Higher Education (QUP, St Lucia, 1982).

One of the things you learn from this study and from Lynn’s later work on the pre-Dawkins Gippsland Institute of Advanced Education – Brown Coal or Plato? (ACER Research Series No. 105, March 1984) – is the double indemnity that comes from close acquaintance with the methodological brand called ‘participant observation’. For researchers you are an informant – lent a sympathetic ear in exchange for confidences. For denizens of these institutional woods, researchers intrude on their sacred groves, though they can be imagined having their uses in advancing various causes. It’s a tricky business this participant observation, easy to run off the rails and end up in a partisan ditch or, worse, to confound the subject of your study with the object of your research. But Lynn ranks high indeed as an exponent of what was, at first, a gift of anthropology to social inquiry and what became in Lynn’s early studies an enlightening fieldwork method.

At the start of 1988, having obtained indifferent results in a BA pass degree thirty years earlier, this 51 years old Australian bloke sought approval of the University of New England to undertake full-time PhD research under Lynn’s supervision and with Grant Harman as co- or back-up supervisor. My subject was to be the education of alternative health practitioners – chiropractors, osteopaths and traditional acupuncturists – and my method was participant observation. Full of uncertainty about my quality and qualifications I was going to have a bet on being up to the task. And Lynn was prepared to have a bet on me. He was always ready to comment, discuss, advise, but never to influence me to fall off the wagon (I had given up the grog in pursuit of my study).

Lynn didn’t offer me an easy ride, and he did not take an easy supervisory ride either. In the following three-and-a-half years (I submitted in July 1991) he never let up as informed and informing supervisor; and he never told me what to do or how to do it. He eschewed parasitical relationships between students and their supervisors. Lynn didn’t want dependants.

John Kleeman, a colleague and friend at UNE, once talked about a company of owls nesting in a tree on his small farm. Walking on one of his fields in the early evening, he saw a line of owlets on a branch of the tree with a parent owl perched behind them. The parent moved sideways and in turn each of its progeny fell off the branch. One fluttered to the ground at John’s feet. After a while it got upright and flew away, not to be seen again by John.

The last thing Lynn would ever do is impress a course of action or demand an alteration of approach. His signal worth was to question but never to impose; and to make plain that a supervisor was there to assist, not to tell a student what to do. Lynn helped me find manners of thought that were fitting to the study of academic tribes. It was up to me to do the job of researching and reporting.

But he did oblige me to fly.

Arthur O’Neill says that undertaking a PhD degree with Lynn Meek as his principal supervisor was the best thing to have happened to him during his employment in higher education institutions (including nine years at UPNG); and second-best was being made redundant many years ago by his last employer, La Trobe University. According to Arthur the first served to promote a flowering of intellect and the second to preserve it by his removal from that particular academy.

Contact: arthurjhj65@live.com.au