CULTURAL KEYLINE
The Life Work of Dr. Neville Yeomans
Thesis
submitted
24 December 2005
For the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
In the School of Social Work and Community Welfare
James Cook
University
Photo 1
Four stages in Dr. Neville Yeoman’s life
Top left: At
Fraser House, circa 1961
(Yeomans, N. 1965a, p. 81)
Top Right: As
election candidate, 1969
(Yeomans,
N. 1965a)
Bottom Left: Wedding
to Lien, November 1972
From Lien
Yeoman’s book – used with permission
(Yeomans
and Yeomans 2001)
Bottom Right: On
Atherton Tablelands, 1993 Yeomans Family photo
-
used with permission
Two
Poems Written by Dr. Neville Yeomans
Together
the following poems (Yeomans
2000a; Yeomans 2000b) provide a
feel for the subject matter of this thesis. I first knew of the existence of
these two poems when they were handed out at Neville Yeomans’ funeral on 7 June
2000.
The Inma
There seems to be a new spirituality going around - or a philosophy –
or is it an ethical and moral movement, or a feeling?
Anyway, this Inma religion or whatever it is – what does it believe in?
It believes in the coming-together, the inflow of alternative human
energy, from all over the world.
It believes in an ingathering and a nexus of human persons’ values,
feelings, ideas and actions.
Inma believes in the creativity of this gathering together and this
connexion of persons and values.
It believes that these values are spiritual,
moral and ethical, as well as humane, beautiful, loving and happy.
Inma believes that persons may come and go as they wish, but also it
believes that the values will stay and fertilize its area, and it believes the
nexus will cover the globe.
Inma believes that Earth loves us and that we love Earth.
It believes that from the love and from the creativity will come a new
model for the world of human future.
It believes that we have started that future - now.
I guess that if you and I believe these things we are Inma.
On Where
Perhaps somewhere there is an unimportant place caught
between East and West, North and South, past and future.
It is so far behind that it can only go forward.
Its Indigenous people are so badly treated they will risk anything for
a better life.
Its white overlords are so distant from the centre of their
own culture that they don’t know where to go except to
self-government.
It is wealthy, industrial, consumer, under-populated and chaotic.
It has tropical coasts and islands. It has cool mountains and
tablelands.
It is closer to Asian and Melanesian peoples than its own capital city,
and it often sees itself as the end of the earth.
Yet the desires of some of its citizens are:
to build the first free territory guided by global humane laws
to implement the UN covenants on Human Rights
to give migrants, visitors and native born an equal say
to accept ideas, people and music of living from all over
to welcome and respect every interested person
to love Planet Earth, and
to take a next step towards a happier more beautiful more human
community.
Maybe one such place is called Northern Queensland, Australia.
But an Aboriginal word meaning 'a coming together' is Inma.
CONTENTS
Acknowledging
Abstract
CHAPTER ONE – ON HUMAN FUTURES
The Thesis Structure
Three Interconnected Foci
On Global Reform
Keyline and Cultural Keyline
Research Questions
Life Changes
A Warm December Morning
Summary
CHAPTER TWO - NEVILLE’S MODEL FOR A 250-YEAR
TRANSITION TO A HUMANE CARING EPOCH
Introduction
A New Cultural Synthesis
Webs and Lacewebs
Summary
CHAPTER THREE – THE EMERGENCE OF
THERAPEUTIC COMMUNITIES AND COMMUNITY MENTAL HEALTH -
History, Types and Significance
Overview
The Emergence of Popular/Folk and Scientific Models
Nineteen and Twentieth Century Practice
Usa Experience
Early Australian Experience
Uk Experience
Evolving Therapeutic Communities
Uk Therapeutic Community Experience
Usa Therapeutic Community Experience
Social Psychiatry, Social Therapy and Milieu Therapy
Decline of Therapeutic Committees in the Uk
National Health System
Decline of Therapeutic Committees in the Usa
National Health System
Wider Applications of Therapeutic Community
Rehabilitation Services, Transitional Facilities and
The Move to Community Based Care
Community Mental Health - The Uk, Usa And Australian Experience
United States Experience of Community Mental Health
Community Mental Health in the Uk
Community Mental Health in Australia
Self-Help and Mutual Aid Groups
Organizations, Networks and Mutual Help Providing
Support and Sustenance to Marginal People
Healthy Living Centres
Everyday Life Mutual Help
Natural Nurturers in Everyday Life
Possible Futures
Shifts In Psychiatric Models
The Psychosocial Model, Therapeutic Governance and
Global Social Control
Summary
CHAPTER FOUR – ON METHOD
Overview
On Being an Insider Looking in
Explicating the Inexplicable
Data Collecting
Note Taking
Interviewing
Interviewing Neville
Interviews With Bruen and Chilmaid
Margaret Cockett and Other Interviewees
Prolonged On-Site Social Action Research
Archival Research
Engaging in Naturalistic Inquiry
Ensuring Trustworthiness
My Theoretical Perspectives
Using Emergent Design
Writing Through and Making Sense
Writing Through
Using Grounded Theory
Recognising Fractals and Holographs
Using Thick Description
Using Thematic Analysis/Narrative Analysis
Using Connoisseurship
Structure/Event Process Analysis
Emergence of Intuition
On Being a Scientific Detective
Crafting the Writing
Summary
CHAPTER FIVE - CONNECTING SUSTAINABLE
AGRICULTURE AND PSYCHOSOCIAL TRANSITION
Orienting
Inspiring Trauma
Water Telling Us What to do With it
Keyline Emerges
Creating Deep Soil Fast
Designing Farms
Links Between Sustainable Agriculture, Psychosocial
Change And Indigenous Sociomedicine
Tikopia - Celebrating Difference to Maintain Unity
And Wellbeing
Other Influences
Melding the Precursors
Summary
CHAPTER SIX - FRASER HOUSE MILIEU
Orientating
Introducing Fraser House
Window of Opportunity
Layout, Locality, and Cultural Locality
Assuming a Social Basis of Mental Illness
Locality as Connexion to Place
Cultural Locality
Sourcing Patients
Back Wards and Prisons
Aboriginal and Islander Patients
Family- Friends-Workmate Network as Focus of Change
Balancing Community
Being Voluntary
Re-Casting the System
Fraser House as Therapeutic Community
Staff Relating
For and Against
The Use of Slogans
Fraser House Wellness Norms
Handbooks on Fraser House Structure and Process
Family Therapy
Drug Use
Summary
CHAPTER SEVEN -
GOVERNANCE AND OTHER RECONSTITUTING PROCESSES
The Resocializing Program – Using Governance Therapy
Committees and Balancing Governance
Patient Administration
The New Role for all Staff
Flexible Rigidity
Patient Treatment and Training
Fraser House Training
The Canteen and the Little Red Van
The Domiciliary Care Committee and Domiciliary Care
Crisis Support
The Outpatients, Relatives and Friends Committee
Constituting Rules and Constitutions
Summary
CHAPTER EIGHT – FRASER HOUSE BIG MEETING
Big Group - Using Collective Social Forces
Preventing Session Creep
Big Group Layout
A Mood That Attunes
On Neville’s Role as Leader and his Group Processes
On The Side of Constructive Striving
Neville’s Sensory Functioning
The Far-From-Equilibrium Learning Organization
Gain, Loss, Threat and Frustration
Summary
CHAPTER NINE – FRASER HOUSE TRANSITIONARY
PROCESSES
Introduction
Social Category Based Small Group Therapy
Child-Parent Playgroups
Individual Therapy
Research as Therapy
Values Research
Psychiatric Research Study Group
Work as Therapy
Margaret Mead Visits Fraser House
Cultural Keyline
Attending and Sensing
Forming Cultural Locality
Strategic Design and Context-Guided Perturbing of
the Social Topography
Leaving Nature to do the Work
Cultural Keyline in Groups
Summary
CHAPTER TEN – CRITIQUING AND REPLICATING
Orientating
Critique of Fraser House in the Sixties
A Response
Replicating Fraser House In State Run Enclaves
- Kenmore Hospital’s
Therapeutic Community
Fraser House and Transitions to Community Self
Caring
A Follow-Up Service and Liaison
with Outside Organizations.
Catchment Areas
Neville’s Actions to Phase Out Fraser House
The Decline of Therapeutic Communities
Fraser House Evaluation
Fraser House a Model for American Research
Ethical Issues in Replicating Fraser House
Inma and Fraser House
Networking
Ex Fraser House Patients and Local Self Help Action
Findings
A Powerful Influence
Summary
CHAPTER ELEVEN - FRASER HOUSE OUTREACH
Orientating
Extending Fraser
House Way into the Private Sector
Advisory Roles
Coordinator of Community Mental Health Services
Community Health
Evolving Asian Links
Sidney Opera House Support
Wellbeing Action Using Festivals, Gatherings and
Other Happenings
The Watsons
Bay Festival
The Second Festival – The Paddington Festival
Festival Three - Centennial Park
Festival
Festival Four - Campbelltown Festival
Festival Five – The Aquarius Festival
Festival Six – Confest
Festival Seven – The Cooktown Arts Festival
The Keyline Trust
Divorce Law Reform
Writing Newspaper Columns
Implicitly Applying Cultural Keyline in Business and
Other Organisational Environments
Evolving Functional Matrices
On Becoming an Election Candidate
Influencing Other States
Findings
Summary
CHAPTER TWELVE - EVOLVING THE LACEWEB
Orienting
Evolving the Laceweb
Aboriginal Human Relations Gatherings
The Self Organising Rollout for Bourke
Further Rollout for Armidale
Wider Networks
Evolving Small Therapeutic Community Houses in Far North Queensland
Further Travels
Australia South Sea Islanders and Other Networking
Speaking on the Indigenous Platform at the UN Ngo
Rio Earth Summit
Geoff and Norma Guest’s Aboriginal Youth Training
Farm
Developing Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Drug and Substance Abuse Therapeutic
Communities
Gathering
Lake Tinaroo Mediation Gathering
Small Island Coastal and Estuarine People Gathering
The Darwin
Top End
Unpo and Other Global Action
New State Movement Update
Indigenous People Linked to Confest
Cultural Healing Action
Using Ideas from the Laceweb Homepage
Summary
CHAPTER THIRTEEN –
EVOLVING THE LACEWEB SOCIAL-MOVEMENT
Orienting
Evolving the Laceweb as a Social Movement
Evolving Natural Nurturer Networks
Linking the Network into the Wider Local Community
The Enabling Network
The Sharing of Micro-Experiences Among Locals - A
Summary
On Global Reform
Three Transition Phases
Laceweb and Functional Matrices
Examples of Laceweb Action
Inma Involvement in Urban Renewal Project
Signing UN-Inma Memorandum of Understanding and
Treaties
East Asian Oceania
Linking
Summary
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - WHITHER GOETH THE WORLD
– HUMANITY OR BARBARITY?
Conclusions
Framing Values
Being in the Zone of Growth
Non-Expressible Knowingness
Creating a New Model of Human Future
Contexts for Growth
Appendices
References
Photo 2. Dr. Neville Yeomans at his desk
at Fraser House - Circa 1961 (Yeomans, N. 1965a)
ABSTRACT
This thesis researches psychiatrist barrister Dr. Neville
Yeomans’ lifetime action research into changing the social-life world towards
becoming more caring, humane and respecting of all life-forms. Particularly, it
researches Yeomans’ adapting of his father’s sustainable agriculture Keyline
processes to the human social life-world as ‘Cultural Keyline’.
After a brief
review of therapeutic community, community mental health and self-help networks
in the UK, USA and Australia, and a brief summary of Keyline and Indigenous
precursors influencing Neville, the research focuses, firstly, on describing
and analysing the structures/processes used by Yeomans in evolving Australia’s
first psychiatric therapeutic community ‘Fraser House’ in Sydney from 1959 to
1968. In particular, what contributions did Neville make to evolving social and
community psychiatry and clinical sociology in Australia? Secondly, the thesis
describes the community mental health outreach and other psychosocial wellbeing
related action research that derived from Fraser House. Thirdly, there is a description of the
Laceweb social movement and network, its evolution from Neville’s action
research and its current development.
Finally, there is some discussion of the significance of Neville Yeoman’s
life work. This research used the same
qualitative, ‘naturalistic inquiry’ method that Neville used including in-depth
interviews, archival research and action research.
Neville Yeomans’ methods of social action and research can
be traced to his collaboration with his father P.A. Yeomans (along with
brothers Allen and Ken). P.A is
recognised as the most significant person globally in the past 200 years in the
field of sustainable agriculture (Mulligan and Hill 2001). P.A. evolved Keyline sustainable agricultural practices
based around Keypoints in landform that have system implications.
In researching Cultural Keyline, the thesis
details how its precursor, Keyline agricultural practice, recognizes, respects,
and makes use of natural forms, functions and processes in nature - especially
landform, gravity, as well as self-organizing and emergent aspects of natural
systems. The research outlines how Keyline practice fosters nature’s tendency
for thriving, and documents and analyses Neville’s adapting of Keyline as Cultural Keyline in fostering emergent and thriving
potential in social systems. Four non-linear interconnected inter-related
aspects of Cultural Keyline are identified:
1. Attending and sensing self organising,
emergence and Keypoints conducive to coherence within social contexts
2. Forming cultural locality (people
connecting together connecting to place)
3. Strategic, design and emergent
context-guided theme-based perturbing of the social topography
4. Sensing and attending to the natural social
system self-organising in response to the perturbing, and monitoring outcomes.
In developing
‘Cultural Keyline’, Neville adapted his father’s Keyline to the social life
world. Neville pioneered therapeutic community in Australia. Neville worked with
inmates he had arranged to be transferred to Fraser House from asylums and
prisons in New South Wales. As part of their rehabilitation the inmates
were effectively placed in charge of every aspect of Fraser House
administration. The research documents how, within eighteen months, these
inmates and the Unit’s staff developed a style of community psychiatry
practice, psychiatric nursing, collective therapy (large group as crowd and
audience) and psychiatric training.
The research also
traces Neville’s use of his Cultural Keyline model in pioneering family
therapy, suicide/crisis telephone services, counselling and family therapy
within family law, community mental health (becoming the first NSW Director of
Community Mental Health, and starting Australia’s first Community Mental Health
Centre), psychosocial self-help groups and networks, multicultural festivals,
cultural healing action, mediation and mediation therapy.
The thesis then explores Neville’s development of a number of small
therapeutic community houses in North Queensland, as well as evolving what
Neville termed an ‘International Normative Model Area’ or ‘INMA’ in northern
Australia that continues as a micro-model exploring linked local, regional and
global governance as an aspect of epochal transition. An outcome of Neville’s action research has been the emergence of informal
Laceweb networks amongst Indigenous and other intercultural healers in the
northern Australia
and in the East Asia-Oceania-Australasia Region. The thesis details how these
networks are evolving and supporting self-help and mutual-help amongst
Indigenous/Oppressed trauma survivors. Yeomans’ writings about his macro-framework for global epochal transition
over the next 250-500 years, and potential global futures are detailed in the
context of Cultural Keyline and linked to unfolding action.
I have elected to generally use Dr. Neville
Yeomans’ first name throughout this thesis as a mark of my profound respect for
him. For me he was Neville, not ‘Yeomans’.
This thesis explores
Neville’s claim that his lifelong action research was towards enabling gentle
transitions to a new humane, caring,
life-affirming global intercultural
synthesis - towards epochal transition - a two hundred and fifty to three
hundred year plus project towards a more caring and humane future. Neville’s
claim was that he devoted 70 of his 73 years to this dream. For Neville, the term ‘enabler’ simply meant ‘someone who
supported others to be able’.
This thesis focuses upon three interconnected foci of action by Neville:
Firstly, the precursors guiding Neville and the structures/processes he
used in 1959 in establishing and evolving Australia’s first therapeutic
community, ‘Fraser House’, in North Ryde Psychiatric Hospital, Sydney.
Secondly, Neville’s Fraser House outreaches; and
Thirdly, the history, theory and practice leading to Neville supporting
the evolving of the Laceweb Social Movement among Indigenous and intercultural
healers throughout the East Asia Oceania Australasia Region.
The research explores
Neville’s role in evolving social action in each of the above three foci. The
thesis traces Neville’s envisaging of new forms of social realities respecting
and embracing diversity and having resonance with traditional Indigenous
relating to the web of life. One fundamental aspect of this Indigenous-based
change explored by Neville is fostering regionality (‘connecting to region’)
and locality (‘connecting to place’) in a life-world (the world of living
systems) where humans are recognizing, respecting, celebrating, fostering, and
sustaining both the inter-connectedness of humane nurturing values, and the
diversity of all life forms and networks.
To
quote Neville’s poem (Yeomans
2000a):
It believes
that these values are spiritual,
moral and ethical, as well as humane, beautiful, loving and happy.
The first of the three parts of the thesis
is about the precursors influencing Neville’s pioneering in Australia of
community therapy and his global pioneering of full-family residential
therapeutic community practices within the therapeutic community based
psychiatric unit, Fraser House (Yeomans 1961a, p. 382 - 384;
Yeomans 1961b, p. 829 - 830; Yeomans, Hennessy et al. 1965b). Neville set up
this Unit at North Ryde Psychiatric hospital
on the North Shore
in Sydney, NSW
in 1959, and became its founding director and psychiatrist. Neville and other Fraser House staff claimed
that Fraser House practice established that extremely dysfunctional people could be the prime source of their own
reintegration and move to wellbeing functioning (Yeomans 1961a; Yeomans 1961b; Madew, Singer et al. 1966; Clark 1969;
Clark and Yeomans 1969). Neville’s
pioneering in Australia
of both therapeutic community and full family therapeutic community are
documented and compared to overseas therapeutic communities. Fraser House’s
role in Neville’s epochal transition project is specified.
In the second part of the thesis, the
research documents the spread and influence of Fraser House’s guiding frames of
reference, structure, processes and practices into the wider community. The
claims by Neville and other ex-Fraser House staff that Fraser House’s
structure, processes and practices had a substantial effect on mental health
practice in Australia
are investigated. The inter-related way in which Fraser House outreach fits
into Neville’s epochal transition project is specified.
The third part of the thesis traces the use
by Neville of Fraser House’s frames of reference, structures, processes,
practices and outreach in enabling the evolving of the Laceweb Social Movement
spreading among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and other kindred
minorities in the remote regions of Far North Australia. The research documents
the psychosocial and other histories of Laceweb social action since the early
Seventies; it also traces the extending of the movement throughout the East
Asia Oceania Australasia Region and discusses the Laceweb’s role in Neville’s
epochal transition project action.
Chapter One introduces
Neville’s life work and discusses the significance of the topic, outlines the
nature of the research and the research questions, and discusses why they are
important. It also discusses briefly the story of how I became involved with
this project, and the way my biogeography has led me to undertake this
research. An outline of the rest of the thesis is included. Because of the expansiveness of the subject, some of the
matters that will be treated in some depth in this research are introduced
briefly in this first chapter. As a further background to this research,
Chapter Two introduces Neville’s macro aim of epochal change. Chapter Three
provides a very brief literature review of the development of therapeutic
community, community mental health and self-help groups in UK, USA
and Australia
as a way of differentiating Neville’s work from others. Chapter Four discusses
the method used in completing this thesis, including processes used in data
collection and analysis. It also identifies and gives brief backgrounds of the
people interviewed. Chapter Five discusses precursors for Neville’s life work
including Keyline and Indigenous influences on Neville and his father. It also details
Neville’s significant life experiences, academic study and reading, as well as
his theoretical and pre-theoretical reflecting. Chapters Six to Ten contain the first section of the research -
detailing Neville’s evolving Fraser House as a Therapeutic Community. More
specifically, Chapter Six outlines Fraser House’s structure and processes while Chapter Seven discusses Fraser House’s Self Governance and other re-constituting
processes. Chapter Eight explores Fraser
House’s Big Meeting process, Collective Therapy, and Neville’s group process. Chapter
Nine details Fraser House’s other change processes and specifies Cultural
Keyline processes evolved at Fraser House. Chapter Ten explores criticisms of
Neville and Fraser House as well as the steps taken by Neville to set up
transitions from government and private sector service delivery to community
self-caring. Fraser house evaluation is briefly outlined along with a
discussion of American research using Fraser house as a model. The
Chapter concludes with ethical issues in replicating Fraser House. Chapter
Eleven contains the second section of the research, the extensions of Fraser House and
other outreach by Neville into the wider community and their implications. The
third section of the research is in Chapters
Twelve and Thirteen - exploring the nature, the evolving, and the history of the Laceweb
and its potential. Chapter Thirteen is integrative; it
introduces Neville’s two hundred and fifty year model of epochal transition and
provides glimpses of future possibilities for Laceweb praxis in every aspect of
the social-life-World. Chapter Fourteen contains my research conclusions.
In 1973, Neville wrote
perhaps his most significant paper called ‘On Global Reform – International
Normative Model Areas (INMA)’ (Yeomans 1974). In that paper Neville sets out his
strategy and action processes for global epochal transition. This research has
used that ‘On Global Reform’ paper as a key document in tracking down seemingly
unconnected action and in understanding and integrating together Neville’s
extensive and diverse innovative doings.
The Concise Dictionary (Hayward and Sparkes 1984) defines ‘epoch’ as ‘a stop, check or
pause; a period characterized by momentous events; an era’, and defines
‘epoch-making’ as something ‘of such importance as to mark an epoch’. An epoch is also a turning point. An ‘epochal
transition’ is a time marking a shift between two long eras such as the epochal
shift between feudal society and industrial society in the UK. An epoch is a highly
significant keypoint – a turning point in human affairs. I refer to Neville’s
‘Cultural Keypoint and his father’s ‘Keypoint’ later in this chapter.
Dr. Neville Yeomans was born in 1928 to
Percival and Rita Yeomans and died in Brisbane
on 30 May 2000. Neville grew up in a stimulating household. As an adolescent he
worked in sustainable agriculture with his father P. A. Yeoman’ who was
described by the world famous English agriculturalist Lady Balfour in the
1970’s as the person making the greatest contribution to sustainable
agriculture in the past 200 years (Mulligan and Hill 2001, p. 194). P.A. Yeomans worked closely with his son’s Neville and Allan
(and later with his third son Ken) in pioneering a sustainable agriculture
process called Keyline (Yeomans, Percival. A. 1955; Yeomans 1958b; Yeomans 1958a; Yeomans, P.
A. 1971b; Yeomans, P. A. 1971a; Yeomans 1992b; Yeomans and Yeomans 1993).
Neville adapted Keyline as ‘Cultural
Keyline’ and pioneered this in the fields of social psychiatry and community
psychiatry, clinical sociology, sociology of medicine, social psychology,
psychobiology, intercultural studies, future studies, peace studies,
humanitarian law and global governance. Neville discussed with me many times
(December 1991, December 1993, July, 1998, August, 1999) about how he had
adapted his father’s sustainable agriculture work into what he called ‘Cultural
Keyline’. Cultural Keyline is a core model and concept underlying Neville’s
life work, and an integrating theme in this research - a model for sustaining
biopsychosocial wellbeing in inter-relating and inter-acting with others.
Neville Yeomans’ ‘Cultural Keyline’ adapts Keyline to human life (psychosocial,
personal, interpersonal, communal, cultural and intercultural). The thesis
details how Keyline agricultural practice recognizes, respects, and makes use
of natural forms, functions and processes in nature, especially landform,
gravity, and self-organizing and emergent aspects of natural systems. Keyline
practice fosters nature’s tendency for thriving.
The Yeomans set out to ‘harvest’ all
water falling or flowing onto their farms. They recognised the three primary
landforms - main ridge, primary ridge and primary valley. On the main drainage
line at the head of the primary valley is a small (often a metre square) patch
of land where each of the three land forms meet. P.A. called this the Keypoint.
A Keypoint is on the fall line in the
primary valley on the contour above the first wider gap between the contours at
the higher end of the valley. The Keypoint and
the contour line through the Keypoint (called the Keyline) have many special
properties detailed in my thesis.
The Yeomans discovered many
processes and ways to design their farm - creating contexts for nature to
thrive. A key understanding is that the Yeomans set the farm up so that nature
did the change work – it was self-organising. I took the following photo in 2001 at the spot where the Yeomans first
discovered the significance of the Keypoint.
Photo
3. The place where the Yeomans discovered the
Keypoint – Photo I took during July 2001
The photo
is the view up towards the main ridge at the top of a primary valley with the
primary ridges down either side of the primary valley. A smaller partial ridge
splits the head of the valley above the Keypoint. The Keypoint is on the left
of the far end of the dam. The Keyline is the contour marked by the edge of the
water.
As Keyline fosters emergent farm
potential, Cultural Keyline is a rich way of fostering emergent and thriving
potential in social systems. Keyline is
detailed in Chapter Five. How Neville evolved Cultural Keyline in Fraser House is introduced in Chapters Six to Eight and detailed
in Chapter Nine.
All of Neville and his father’s
work was informed and guided by a relational familiarity with Australian
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander wisdom about the social and natural
life-worlds. While non-Aboriginal people had seen Australia as a harsh and hostile
place to be conquered and tamed, Aboriginal and Islander people had a loving
and affectionate relating to Earth as their mother who nurtures them – a
profoundly different relating. Neville encapsulated this relating in the
following words of his ‘Inma’ poem:
Inma believes that Earth loves us and that we love
Earth (2000a).
‘Earth loves us’ comes first.
Neville and his father’s work and way were guided and informed by this ancient
loving caring respecting tradition.
In preparing for his humanitarian
life work, Neville obtained degrees in zoology and then medicine – extended to
psychiatry. He completed postgraduate studies in sociology and psychology,
accompanied by extensive reading in history, anthropology and peace studies. He
followed these studies with a degree in law, specializing in humanitarian law,
and law studies in mediation as an alternative to adversarial law in dispute
settlement (Carlson and Yeomans 1975). During the 1970s, he studied spoken and written Chinese
and Indonesian, as well as Chinese painting. As part of his quest to become
sensitive to the intercultural nuances of the East Asia, Oceania, Australasia
region, Neville studied the Indonesian language at a Technical College
for eighteen months and the Mandarin language for twelve months - both of them
as spoken and written languages. Amongst his other studies, Neville studied 12
months at the Criminology Law School
at the University
of Sydney. He remained an
avid reader and engaged in continuous action research throughout his life.
Neville commenced his endeavours with what
he called (Dec, 1993 and July, 1998) the ‘mad and bad’ people of Sydney. Neville used these
terms to aid my understanding of the patient population at Fraser House. Neville well knew the potency of labelling, especially the
potency of using terms like ‘mad’, ‘bad’, ‘patient’ and ‘mental asylum’
– their potency in constituting and reifying aspects
of people’s response to themselves, each other, and their place in the world.
On the issue of labelling, Neville preferred the term ‘resident’ rather than
‘patient’. However, in Neville’s words (Dec, 1993), ‘not to use ‘patient’ was
just too hard within the hospital milieu at the time’. All patients who arrived
at Fraser House already arrived with
a life history of negative labelling as ‘psychosocial baggage’ that they had to
live with. In Neville and the other interviewees’ view, the combined Fraser
House process easily outweighed the effect of all this negative labelling.
Neville said (July, 1998) that he
recognized that in 1959, with considerable upheaval and questioning in the area
of mental health in NSW, and a Royal Commission being mooted into past
practices, there was a small window of opportunity for innovation. Neville
started his epochal quest in earnest by setting up the psychiatric unit, Fraser
House, in the grounds of the North
Ryde Psychiatric
Hospital in 1959. He obtained permission to have
half of the patient intake from asylum back wards and half from prisons.
Neville wanted to explore self-help possibilities among both the ‘mad and bad’
at the fringe of society (July, 1998).
The thesis researches Neville’s role firstly, in evolving social
psychiatry, community psychiatry and clinical sociology
in Australia.
Secondly, the research traces Neville’s role as a pioneering Australian
innovator of therapeutic community, full family therapeutic community,
mediation therapy, community mental health, and large group therapy. Many of
the iconoclastic practices that he introduced into psychiatry have become
standard practice in Australia.
He pioneered suicide support and other life crisis telephone services,
multicultural community markets and festivals, and other multicultural events
and alternative lifestyle festivals. Neville also influenced the introduction
of family counselling and family mediation into family law in Australia, and mediation into
Australian society. Through initiating the Psychiatric Research Study Group
(discussed in Chapter Nine) and positioning
Fraser House as the leading social science research facility in NSW, Neville
was also responsible for energizing praxis networks in such diverse, though
related fields as social work, criminology, family counselling, community
services, community mental health, prison administration, business management,
intercultural relations, psychosocial self-help groups, social ecology, futures
studies, self organizing systems, qualitative method, as well as world order,
and global, regional, and local governance. Neville attracted people involved
in researching these varied themes and disciplines to participate in the
Psychiatric Research Study Group and Fraser House Groups.
While the many things Neville
pioneered are now known by many in Australia and around the World, very
few know he was the initiator. The (Sydney) Sun newspaper included Neville’s
groundbreaking work in psychiatry and therapeutic community with six other
Australians under the heading, ‘The Big Seven Secrets Australians were first to
solve’ (1963). Neville was included with people like Sir John Eccles, Sir Norman Greg
and Dr. V. M. Coppleson. How all the
above diverse social actions by Neville are related and were interlinked by him
and others are the foci of this thesis.
After detailing Fraser House
structure/process and outreach, the research traces Neville Yeomans fostering
of the emergence of a social movement he called the ‘Laceweb’ evolving amongst oppressed Indigenous/Small Minorities in the East
Asia, Oceania, Australasian Region. The
research documents wellbeing action by Indigenous/Small Minority and
intercultural psychosocial healers and natural nurturers that has been evolving
informally in the Region for over 45 years.
While aspects of this
endeavour have been the subject of a PhD (Clark 1969) and other research and writings in the
past (Yeomans 1961a; Yeomans 1961b; Clark and Yeomans 1965;
Yeomans, N. 1965a; Clark 1969; Clark and Yeomans 1969; Watson 1970; Paul and
Lentz 1977; Yeomans 1980a; Yeomans 1980b; Wilson 1990; Clark 1993, p. 61, 117), this will be the
first research that attempts to draw the many aspects of the above and related
social action research together.
It took
a number of months of reflection after discussions with Neville and my
Supervisor for three ‘natural’ parts of Neville’s epochal transition action to
emerge - Fraser House, Fraser House outreach, and the evolving of the Laceweb.
The
research questions are:
1.
What is Cultural Keyline and its precursor Keyline? How do you
make use of them? With what potential outcomes?
2.
What were the theoretical and action precursors to Neville Yeomans
evolving the therapeutic community psychiatric unit Fraser House?
3.
What change processes, innovations and social action evolved in
and from Fraser House? How do these differ from processes used in other
psychiatric therapeutic communities? With what effect?
4.
What was Neville’s outreach from Fraser House?
5.
What is INMA? What is the Laceweb? What are the Laceweb’s
structure and process, and how has it being evolved and sustained?
6.
Were each of the above an aspect of Neville’s action research on
epochal transition?
7.
What patterns and integration are there linking aspects of Neville
Yeomans’ work - Fraser House, Fraser House outreach and the Laceweb? Was
Cultural Keyline used in all of the above aspects?
8.
What possible futures may emerge from Laceweb praxis towards
epochal transition?
9.
What is the significance of Neville’s life work?
As the thesis is
investigating something with so many facets, I had to make decisions about my
research focus, and what was to be included and excluded. I have elected to
report extensively on structure, process and their interconnectedness while
providing a broad feel for their fit in the mediums and interstices of
Neville’s massive endeavour. In order to cope with the extent and complex
richness of my focal interests, the following are excluded.
Firstly, while outlining
and answering the criticisms others have made about Neville and Fraser House, I
do not engage in identifying shortcomings, or criticizing his life work. I have
gathered together material that others may use for further research, critique,
and evaluation. The limits I set to my research have still left me with a
massive endeavour.
Secondly, I report on Neville’s extensive life work and public persona
and the public life of Fraser House staff. I exclude research concerning his
personal life while acknowledging and recognizing this was, and is fundamental
to an understanding of the man. In fact, Neville recognized and made restricted
file notes on issues in his and other Fraser House senior staff’s private lives
that were reflected in the dynamics of Fraser House. Neville drew attention to
the ethical dilemmas involved in research where adequate writing up of a case
would give sufficient material to identify focal people to their potential
harm. (In some contexts confidentiality should be paramount.) Neville made
suggestions in a short monograph to the World Health Organization that may
address these dilemmas about research protocols, including anonymity of
individuals, institutions and nations, where
important, though socially delicate research, is being conducted (Yeomans, N. 1965a, Vol 12, p. 129 - 130).
Thirdly, while Neville’s evolving
of the Laceweb and its nature as a social movement are researched, the Laceweb
networks themselves have not been researched. I have scant links to these
networks and I am not cleared to share information.
Fourthly, while the social
action being researched has drawn on East Asia, Australasia
and Oceania Indigenous socio-medicine and other social and community social
cohesion knowledge and way, this thesis only briefly describes some of these
without going into detail. I do not re-present or speak for anyone.
I was privileged to be mentored by Neville over a fourteen and a half
year period from August 1985 to December, 1999. Neville arranged for me to
engage in sustained action research into (what I sense was) every aspect of his
life work. I researched and wrote this thesis with his blessing, encouragement,
cooperation and support. Further, I carried out this research in part so that
Australians and the World would know more about this man. With the issues
facing the World, Neville’s lifework is timely, practical, seminal and potent.
This thesis contributes to making his life work more accessible.
Chris Collingwood confirmed by email (Sept,
2004) that I first met Neville in August 1985 at a psychotherapy workshop
Neville was co-facilitating with Chris Collingwood and Nelson Pena Y Lillo in
Balmain, Sydney. At first, all I knew
about Neville was that he was a psychiatrist who had just come back from doing
an interesting workshop in the USA
facilitated by Steve and Connirae Andreas. That workshop had been on powerful
brief therapeutic processes based upon sensory submodalities (Bandler 1985; Andreas and Andreas 1987). At the time I
knew nothing of Fraser House or Neville’s wider work.
The topic of that Balmain workshop
was the therapeutic potential of sensory submodality change processes. It
turned out that Neville had always been interested in the functioning of the
minute parts of the hypothalamic limbic region of the brain in sensory
submodality and cross-sensory processing and the therapeutic potential of these
understandings (Yeomans
1986).
(Examples of sensory submodalities are size, form and direction of internal
visual imagery. An example of cross-sensory processing is in hearing drumming
and then moving to the rhythm (auditory-kinaesthetic crossover)).
The processes for therapeutically
using sensory submodality processes that Neville had just been studying in the
United States are a part of Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) evolved by
Richard Bandler, John Grinder and others (Bandler
1985; Andreas and Andreas 1987). NLP is
the study of the structure of subjective experience (Dilts,
Grinder et al. 1980). Neville
also referred to NLP as ‘Natural Living Processes’ and ‘Natural Learning
Processes’ (Nov 1989, Nov 1993; June 1998).
Neville had attended NLP workshops
regularly overseas since their inception in the mid Seventies - attending in USA, England
and in Bali. In a 1986 video interview of
Neville recorded in Darwin in the Australian Northern Territory (Yeomans
1986)
Neville states that while he had an extensive range of therapeutic
interventions he could use, his gaining of NLP experiences in the Seventies and
Eighties had enabled him to have, in his words, even greater brevity and
precision in his work with individuals and groups. Neville also said that NLP
gave him frameworks for understanding what he had done intuitively back in the
Sixties. Over many interviews and discussions during the time I knew Neville,
he told me that he viewed NLP as such a powerful modality, that in his NLP
workshops and his own use of NLP with clients, personal and client social
ecology was paramount. At the Balmain workshop Neville defined ‘social ecology’
as constantly checking ‘the personal safety, integrity, and respect of everyone
by everyone in any interpersonal exchange’. During the workshop sessions I was
taken with Neville’s attention to social ecology; he was precise and thorough,
and incredible quick in sensing everyone in the group. I had never met anyone
like him.
Neville kept himself abreast of all
of the innovations in NLP during the Eighties and Nineties and continued to be
an avid reader of neuro-psycho-biology till his death. Neville made good use of
the Internet in keeping abreast of psycho-neurobiological research. During 1998
and 1999 he told me that he was especially monitoring the small sensory
sub-systems in the hypothalamic-limbic region, and their implications and
potential use in therapy.
During the Balmain workshop Neville singled
me out as a resonant person. At lunch on both days of the workshop we shared
life stories relating to working with groups and change processes. He
specifically engaged me on my academic and work experience. In July 1998
Neville told me that when he first talked with me at the workshop lunch on both
days in Balmain in 1985 he could see immediate and potentially useful ‘fit’
between his life work and many aspects of my background. By the end of the
lunch of the second day in Balmain, he knew I had a Social Science degree in
Sociology, and that my sociological theoretical perspectives and action
research (based in part on clinical sociology and sociology of knowledge) were
resonant with his own. He found out that my Behavioural Science Honours Degree in
Psychology entailed research in clinical psychology and that I had completed
postgraduate studies in neuro-psychology. He knew I had been eligible to do PhD
level research since 1981. He was also interested in the potential relevance
for his life work of my prior degree-level industry studies in actuarial and
financial services to become a Fellow of the Australian Insurance Institute by
examination. He also saw resonance in my Diploma level studies in Personnel
Management and Organizational Training and Development. I was for a time a
member of the Australian Institute of Personnel Management and the Australian
Institute of Training and Development. Neville delighted in my revelation that
I had been sacked from most of my jobs for provoking the system to change. At
the time I did not know that Neville specifically sought out people who were
living on the margin of society - those who, according to Neville, were
‘dysfunctionals laden with potential’. At that first meeting, I had no idea
that Neville was a constant networker and that he was checking me out as to how
I might fit and be interested in the social action he was engaged in. We
discussed my consulting work supporting chief executive officers of
multinational companies in resolving psychosocial issues between members of top
management, and my use of clinical sociology and psychosocial group process at
the senior executive level. I had been for ten years chairperson of the
Australian Insurance Institute – Life Branch Management Discussion Group. I found out later that he had seen ‘fit’ in
all aspects of my background including my security consulting work in
electronic article surveillance.
I had my training in counselling from Terry
O’Neill at the Student Counselling Unit at La Trobe University in the late
1970’s and was an on-call para-professional crisis counsellor in the La Trobe
University Student Counselling Centre for eighteen months. I found out shortly
after meeting Neville that Terry’s counselling was based largely upon his
voluntary work at Fraser House and the influence of Neville in the 1960’s. When I told Neville about Terry training me
in counselling, this further strengthened his interest in me as a potential
resource.
In December 1993 in Yungaburra, Queensland
Neville specifically broached my potential to research his lifework towards a
PhD. Key things for Neville were that I
was eligible to do a PhD and also, that I had experienced major trauma in my
life; I knew about trauma self-help from my personal experience. In that
December 1993 conversation, Neville went thoroughly into all my background
again, although the chatting was laid back. Little did I know then how my
entire blend of background ‘fitted’ his interests and foci. It seems that I was
potentially the person he had been looking for, for more than 20 years (Yeomans 1980a, p. 64 ; Yeomans 1980b). He tentatively suggested the possibility of me doing a PhD
on his life work a number of times in the following years.
By 1997, he was keen for me to get started
as he knew he was in real trouble with his health and that it was life
threatening. When I told him in July 1998 that I was starting a PhD on his life
he was elated. I could literally see his mind working. He was doing a final
check for fit. Then he said a big, ‘Yes!
Your background is perfect!’ I knew in large part this was because of the
combination of trauma in my life and my experience and abilities. As discussed
throughout this research, Neville had great faith in the dysfunctional fringe.
On hearing I was starting the PhD we immediately revisited our extensive
discussions during December 1993 where he ‘briefed me’ – now he started filling
in my understanding. While I had engaged in research since I had met Neville,
July 1998 was a very busy month of discussions to get me started
on disciplined seeking of data towards a PhD.
This thesis is about people connecting with
each other, and discovering and learning from and supporting each other. I will
share a few things that may support you in connecting with the pith and moment
of this research and how I came to be doing it. It is a warm December morning
in 1993 and Neville Yeomans and I are eating paw paw in Yungaburra. We are
surrounded by the lush greenness of the tropics of Far North Queensland, Australia.
We are talking about the origins of the passions that have energized and
interwoven our lives. Neville has no hesitation in saying that a defining
moment in the origins of his passions occurred in 1931 when he was three years
old.
In December 1993 Neville and I had sat at the bench in photo 5 below as
we ate paw paw and talked. Neville recalls becoming separated from his parents
and being lost in the hot arid desert
of Western Queensland.
Photo
4. The Mango Tree Outside of Neville’s Yungburra House - A photo I Took in
June 2001 a Month after Neville Died.
Photo 5. A photo I took in Neville’s Yungaburra House on 30 May 2001.
Neville takes me back in time with him in wandering
away from his parents as a three year old – this is Neville’s story taken from
my file notes at the time:
Back there now I am absorbed in minutia - looking at the
little plants and pebbles. After a time my body is demanding my attention away
from the pebbles. I am becoming parched under the desert sun. My mouth and lips
are becoming very dry. My attention flits again to the pebbles. Then everything
begins to shimmer. Every direction seems the same. My legs rapidly are going to
jelly and the world begins to tilt all over the place as I feel myself
collapsing to the ground from heat exhaustion.
Neville is vividly relating his near-death
delirium.
Being a bright little three year-old, I know about death and
that I am about to die. I am desperately longing to live to make the world a
better place. In delirium, emotions are sweeping over me. Awful dread mingles with
immense love - and all this is reaching out for
love and nurturing and all their possibilities. I am seeing now a shimmering
black giant coming towards me and feeling being gently picked up. I melt into
the giant’s gentleness - strong yet soft - and presently I savour the cool
fresh water that is being poured on my body and gently touching my lips -
beginning now to assuage my raging thirst. Still in delirium, I feel being
carried for a time and being now passed to a nurturing Aboriginal woman by the Aboriginal
tracker who had found me, and I feel truly home again among the Aboriginal
women and my yearning is being full-filled.
Photo
6 Neville lost in the bush
Neville went on to tell me that this gentle
nurturing supported his recovery from the delirium and trauma. Three-year-old
Neville in the care of those Aboriginal women had personal experience of
Aboriginal socio-medicine. He knew from his own experiencing of it that
Aboriginal socio-medicine is powerful. Neville had had conversations with
psychiatrist Richard Cawte and had read his writings about Aboriginal
socio-medicine (Cawte 1974; Cawte 2001). Australian
Aboriginal socio-medicine entails a wide range of social processes with a
central aim of community social cohesion and wellbeing. Aboriginal
socio-medicine links the psychosocial with the psychobiological through special
forms of embodied social interaction. Neville experienced and embodied this
linking. Neville spoke of how, during the years of his childhood, he constantly
returned to his desert delirium experience as he was forming his very big dream
of doing things that would make the world profoundly different. The dreaming
evolved as an action quest towards enabling humanity in transitioning to a
humane new global epoch on Earth.
Neville said that from that traumatic
experience, what he was exploring and mulling over all the time as a child and
later as an adolescent, was how he could enable a sustainable transition to an
enduring new global epoch. He was talking of enabling a shift of the magnitude
of the one from the Feudal System to the Industrial System – though earth wide.
He read up on how that epochal transition occurred in the UK. He was passionate about how he
could link with others in enabling a global epochal transition to a humane,
nurturing, sustainable social-life-world. He was talking about a life-world
that is respecting, celebrating and sustaining diversity of all life forms and
networks on the biosphere. He kept asking himself, how would someone do that?
How could he do that? He realized that it might take up to 300 years to do. And
if it takes a few life times to do this, what could he do that would set up
action that would be self-energizing and self-organizing; processes that could,
no - would withstand the withering
ways of the current epoch in decline, as it seeks by any means to maintain its structure
and process. What processes could enable reconstituting to continue inexorably
through time, to establish and sustain a caring and humane global intercultural
synthesis?
Even on hearing Neville saying words like
these in 1993, it never occurred to me that that was what he was really attempting to do. It never
occurred to me that someone would actually take on such a task. It was too
immense. Subsequently, a number of people I interviewed about Neville all
confirmed the epochal focus of his social action. Margaret Cockett (April,
1999), his personal assistant at and after Fraser House, Stephanie Yeomans, his
sister-in-law (Jan, July, and Dec, 2002), and Stuart Hill (July 2000), a
professor of social ecology at University of Western Sydney, all said that
Neville had said similar things to the above in talking with them about the
emergence of his quest from his three year old childhood sociomedicine
experience. As well, Paul Wilson implies the same understanding of Neville’s
quest in his writing (1990, Ch. 6).
Neville went on to tell me a story that was
similar to his being lost in the bush; it again involved trauma followed by
recovery through Indigenous female nurturing. In 1943, Neville’s father
co-purchased with his brother-in-law Jim Barnes, two adjacent properties
totalling 1000 acres at North Richmond, one hour West of Sydney in NSW (Mulligan and Hill 2001, p. 191-202; Hill 2002a; Hill 2002b). In the next year when Neville was sixteen, a second
defining episode occurred. Neville was out riding on the family’s pet horse
Ginger on one of their properties with his Uncle Jim (Barnes) when they were
caught in a grassfire that was being fanned by powerful winds. Neville told me
(December, 1993) that Jim yelled to Neville to dismount and squeeze into a
hollow in a tree trunk and cover himself to shield the radiant heat. The
firestorm was coming towards them at phenomenal speed. The fire front was long.
Jim on his horse could neither outflank it nor out-race it. Being too large to
squeeze through the gap into the stump, Jim rode straight at the fire –
attempting to ride through it. The horse went from under him, and Neville,
watching from within the tree stump saw his Uncle burn to death. Amid the shock
and horror was the dread of his own impending horrible death. Neville said that
he slumped into traumatized delirium consumed with dread, laced with pervasive
love similar to his experience when lost as a three year old. He described
being on the edge of oblivion and again yearning for a better reality for all
people. When found, physically safe, Neville was profoundly traumatized. Ginger
his horse, though singed, survived.
Photo 7 P.A Yeomans and Ginger the horse that
Neville was riding during the fire - copied with permission (Yeomans P.A. 1954,
p121, Plate 4)
Circumstance created another similarity. At
age three it was the Aboriginal women who gave nurturing care. During the time
of this grass fire there happened to be an Islander women staying with the
Yeomans family as a housekeeper-support for Neville’s mother. The woman was an
Australian South Sea Islander - Kathleen Mussing.
It was in Kathleen’s nurturing care that Neville found enfolding love.
Neville attributed his healing from this
second trauma in the months following the fire, to the nurturing socio-medicine
of this housekeeper, Kathleen. In essence, this entailed love, care, nurturing
and affection as the central components of psychobiological healing. Neville
re-met Kathleen Mussing when she was old and dying and she didn’t recognize
him. Neville described (July 1999) that meeting as one of the saddest
experiences in his life, though permeated for him with immense love.
In the ensuing years up till the Yungaburra
1993 conversation, Neville had progressively involved me in aspects of his
quest. Even so, I knew very little. It was a bit at a time. I did not find his
‘On Global Reform’ paper on global epochal transition till after his death in
2000.
Neville had written a letter to the
International Journal of Therapeutic Communities in 1980 providing an overview
of his work (Yeomans 1980a; Yeomans 1980b; Hill 2002a; Hill 2002b). This short letter published in the International Journal
of Therapeutic Communities is reproduced in full below:
From the Outback
Dear Sir,
Since A. W. Clark
and I produced the monograph ‘Fraser House’ in 1969, I have moved to private
practice in Cairns,
North East Australia. This is an isolated area for this country, but is rapidly
becoming an intercultural front door to Melanesia and Asia.
‘Up North’ the
therapeutic community model has extended into humanitarian mutual help for
social change. Two of the small cities in this region have self-help houses
based on Fraser House. An Aboriginal Alcohol and Drug hostel is moving in the
same direction, as are other bodies.
These are
facilitated by a network called UN-Inma, the second word of which is aboriginal
for Oneness. Actually, aborigines have discussed offering one of the Palm Island
group off the North Queensland coast as a
model therapeutic community prison.
The Director of
the Australian Institute of Criminology has the support of the United Nations
Secretary-General for the idea of an international island haven for otherwise
condemned political prisoners. Our proposal is an application and extension, in
which the Institute Director is ‘extremely interested’.
The main
conditions sought by the Indigenous group are that selected aborigines in
Australian prisons also be permitted to complete their sentences on such
islands; and that therapeutic self-management with conjugal rights be the
administrative model.
One of our major next steps is to bring together a
psychosocial evaluative research team to monitor the development of this
regional community movement. Such may take some time as social scientists are
fairly uncommon in the area.
Some years ago, I arranged a cost-benefit analysis of Fraser
House, compared first with a traditional Admission unit in another psychiatric
hospital, and second with a newly constructed Admission unit which some felt
might be a pseudo therapeutic community.
Somewhat to my surprise Fraser House was not only more
effective but also cost less than the other two. The traditional unit was next
cost-effective and the ‘pseudo’ unit least. Unfortunately this report was never
publicly circulated. Until recently I was unable to locate a copy. One has now
been found and it seems I may soon have a manuscript (Yeomans 1980b).
This thesis revisits the above letter in
documenting the flow-on action from Fraser House. Note the reference in the
letter to bringing together:
a psychosocial evaluative research team to monitor the
development of this regional community movement. Such may take some time as
social scientists are fairly uncommon in the area.
Neville had been looking for someone like
me at least from 1980.
In November 1999, Neville asked whether I
would have the thesis finished by February 2000. He was very keen to read it,
though only when it was finished. When I told him it would not be finished by
then he said that was regrettable. Neville never did read any versions of my
thesis. In December 1999 there was inexplicably no reply on his phone for two
and a half weeks. Then one morning Neville’s daughter answered the phone and
said that Neville’s bladder cancer, which had been in remission, had rapidly
moved everywhere in his body, that he would die very soon and that they were
shifting him from hospital to his former wife (his second wife) Lien’s place in
Queensland. His daughter said he was so bad I would not be able to speak to him
again. This was devastating news. I rang the hospital for a status report and
was knocked further emotionally to be put directly though to Neville without
knowing this was about to happen. Neville spoke and sounded the best I had ever
found him. He was clear, calm, relaxed, poised and centred. He said:
Les, have you heard! The cancer’s gone everywhere! I have just
received a massive dose of morphine and I am going up to be with Lien (his
second Wife) and Quan (his son). I can’t help you any more. Goodbye.
I said, ‘Goodbye.’ Those seconds were our
last chat. Then he hung up. Quan said in April 2000, ‘If Neville died this
instant it would be a mercy’.
He died about 4
weeks later on 30 May 2000. Neville’s Obituary, written by a friend Peter
Carroll was read by Carroll at the funeral on 7 June 2000 at Eastern Suburb Memorial Park in Military Road
Matraville, NSW. The Obituary appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald (Carroll 2000). Providing a succinct summary of Neville’s life and
achievements, it is included as Appendix 1.
This chapter has briefly
discussed the significance of the topic, outlined the nature of the research
and the research questions, and why they are important. It has explored how I
became involved in the project and the way my biography has led me to undertake
the research. The next chapter introduces Neville’s model for a 250-year
transition to a humane caring epoch.
Photo 8.
A Yeomans family photo of Neville in his later years