Chapter Eleven - Fraser House Outreach
ORIENTATING
This chapter details the various ways Neville extended
Fraser House into wider society, and discusses how these varied social actions
were consistent with Cultural Keyline and fitted into Neville’s evolving
frameworks for fostering humane caring transitions in the global-local
social-life folk world. The term ‘Functional Matrices’ is defined,
and Neville’s evolving of them towards creating the Laceweb is discussed.
EXTENDING FRASER HOUSE WAY
Neville’s
intention and outreach after leaving Fraser House is neatly stated in his 1980
letter to the Therapeutic Community Journal:
The
Therapeutic Community model has been extended into humanitarian mutual help for
social change’ (1980b)
Recall that Maxwell Jones had written:
The psychiatric hospital can be seen as a microcosm of society outside,
and its social structure and culture can be changed with relative ease,
compared to the outside. For this reason ‘therapeutic communities’ to date have
been largely confined to psychiatric institutions. They represent a useful
pilot run preliminary to the much more difficult task of trying to establish a
therapeutic community for psychiatric purposes in society at large (1968, p. 86).
Having had his Fraser House experience, Neville was
commencing to do just what Jones had been intimating – establishing therapeutic
communities for psychiatric purposes in society at large. Neville began applying Cultural Keyline with the same
pervasively interwoven and ‘total’ pattern of action of Fraser House process in
many varied action research projects in the private sector. Neville created
many contexts where people were sharing experience and responsibility in
helping each other in evolving and sustaining social action research. In each
context, the social reconstituting potency of the ongoing action research was
as important, or more important than the outcomes. As
in Fraser House, Neville’s intention was to explore Cultural Keyline in action
- community processes for people embodying how to move towards being well
together. The different outreach actions were interconnected with each other,
as well as with Fraser House way. In each action Neville used all of the
aspects of Cultural Keyline mentioned above - in broad terms:
1. Attending and sensing and supporting
self-organising, emergence, and Keypoints conducive to coherence within social
contexts – monitoring theme, mood, values and interaction
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
A
framing theme in all of the action research outreach was:
‘Exploring what works in community-based reconstituting of society
through humane caring community mutual-help action - towards epochal change’.
Neville’s aims
were:
- to explore re-constituting process among people on
the margins within the old cultural synthesis, and then
- to move as far away as he could to evolve a new
cultural synthesis - first Sydney, and then the Australia Top-End.
The
ways in which Neville extended Fraser House processes into the wider community
include:
1)
Taking
on advisory roles with peak bodies in health and other areas – for legitimating
and protecting action
2)
Taking
Fraser House ways into the community by being
3)
Extending
intercultural action research towards global change by evolving links with many
Asian and African community groups in
4)
Evolving
(with others) festivals, gatherings and other happenings:
i)
ii)
The
Paddington Festival, and from this, the evolving of Paddington Bazaar (a
community market) for ‘villaging’ his first mental health centre (in
Paddington)
iii)
iv)
Other
community events
v)
Campbelltown
Festival
vi)
Aquarius
Festival
vii)
ConFest
(Conference Festival)
viii)
Cooktown
Arts Festival
5)
Forming
the Keyline Trust to spread the word on Keyline
6)
Contributing
suggestions which were adopted in divorce law reform, and spreading the use of
mediation
7)
Writing
newspaper columns called ‘Keylines’ and ‘Yeomans Omens’
8)
Introducing
Cultural Keyline implicitly to business and other organisations
9)
Forming
and evolving self-help groups
10)
Becoming
an election candidate
ADVISORY ROLES
During the Sixties and early Seventies, Neville
was very active in many advisory roles in mainstream organisations, including
peak state and national bodies advising government. Neville said (Aug 1999)
that he was intentionally very active on advisory bodies at this stage of his
life in order to have, and sustain a very high public and professional profile,
and to legitimate, protect, and support Fraser House and Fraser House outreach.
This was the same reason he went out of his way to be featured in a constant
stream of newspaper and magazine articles (1965a; 1965b). These links helped ensure Fraser House’s
survival for as long as it did (discussions Neville, June-Oct, 1998; interview
Cockett, April 1999).
Neville
advised a number of health organisations as well as organisations focusing on
softening drug and alcohol abuse, as well as Aboriginal Affairs and
criminology. Neville was the chairperson and founding director of a number of
them. For Example, Neville was a Member of the NSW State Clinicians Conference,
a founding director of the NSW Foundation for the Research and Treatment of
Alcoholism and Drug Dependency and a founding director of the national body of
the above organization, a member of the Committee of Classification of
Psychiatric Patterns of the National Health and Medical Research Council of
Australia and an advisor to the Research Committee of the New South Wales
College of General Practitioners (Yeomans,
N. 1965a, Vol. 12, p. 96). Neville hinted to
me (Aug 1998) that he had more than the twenty five advisory roles listed in
Appendix 24.
The extent of Neville’s advisory work evidences
firstly, the breadth of Neville’s acceptance in many spheres, secondly, his
acceptance at the highest level in these peak advisory bodies, and thirdly, the
breadth and inter-relatedness of his praxis.
COORDINATOR OF COMMUNITY MENTAL
HEALTH SERVICES
Despite extensive
enquiry, the best I could determine was that Neville finally left Fraser House
some time in 1968/9. He began extending the model of the Lane Cove and Ryde
Community Psychiatry Programs that he had energized prior to leaving Fraser
House. Neville focused his energies on extending the healing ways evolved at
Fraser House into ways of individual and communal self-help healing. He and his
personal assistant Margaret Cockett were extending the therapeutic community
option (as shown in Figures 1 and 3 in Chapter Ten) into the wider community as
dispersed (not all living together) urban therapeutic communities. This was the
precursor to the Laceweb as networked dispersed remote area therapeutic
communities and networks.
Prior to leaving Fraser
House, Neville had spoken continually of the need to create a new section
within the NSW Public Health System called Community Mental Health. While still
at Fraser House, Neville wrote a detailed monograph entitled, ‘The Role of a
Director of Community Mental Health (Yeomans, N. 1965x). This was a proposal, a ‘job description’ and a
‘CV’ all rolled into one. His suggestion was adopted and upon leaving Fraser
House he became the coordinator of the New South Wales Community Mental Health
Services. Margaret Cockett characterizes Neville’s leaving Fraser House as his
being ‘promoted upstairs’ - because he was becoming too well known, and also a
threat to parts of the Health Department hierarchy.
Neville made ‘Margaret Cockett going with him as his
personal assistant’ a condition of his taking the position of the first head of
Community Mental Health; this was accepted. As an indication of the lack of
support for this new section within the Health Department, Neville and Margaret
were provided with an unfurnished room a couple of blocks down from the main
Health Department building. According to Margaret Cockett (August 1999), some
evenings in the few weeks after Neville got this new position, passers-by would
have seen the two of them ‘spiriting’ ‘unwanted’ desks, filing cabinets, chairs
and other little needs to make their section a little more functional. Neville
and Margaret were finding it hard to get departmental cooperation. Neville said
(July, 1998) that his Fraser House detractors in the health department were
making things difficult for him in setting up Community Mental Health.
Neville set up
Photo 1. ‘Villaging’
the Church in Paddington – photo
by M.Mangold - reproduced with permission
Neville’s suggestion was to surround the Paddington
Community Mental Health Centre and the Church with a Saturday community bazaar.
This was fully consistent with the Fraser House model of imbedding the Unit
within the local community, as well as inviting the community into Fraser
House.
In Photo 31 the Vestry where Neville had his
first Community Mental Health Centre is the brick building on the left. The
Church is on the right. Between and around both buildings is where the
Paddington Bazaar is held each Saturday morning. Adjacent the Vestry was a hall Neville used for community
meetings. This is where Neville and his friends planned a series of Festivals (Mangold 1993, p. 4-11). Neville wanted to create the public space of a
small friendly village market reminiscent of Tikopia, where everybody knows
everybody and meets each other regularly. Neville wanted to replicate the
healing and integrative aspects of ‘small village life’ (Tönnies and Loomis 1963) of Fraser House around the vestry in
Paddington. The community mental health centre has long gone, though Paddington
Market survives to this day as a
Photo 2 Mangold’s
photo of where Neville’s Community Mental Health Centre was surrounded with
community - reproduced with permission
The
next section details Neville’s intercultural outreach.
Community
Health
In 1968/69 there were moves to merge the
Hospital’s Commission that ran the
Neville and Margaret began linking with as many
people as they could that were initiating innovative action in the community
towards health in the widest sense. Margaret said (Sept 2004) that when Neville
and Margaret went looking for those broadening the views of community about
‘community’, very prevalent among the community innovators were Fraser House
ex-patients and members of the Psychiatric Research Study Group. The late
Sixties and early Seventies were times when there was a great spirit of change
in the community and Neville and Margaret through their Fraser House action and
momentum were well placed to be catalysts energising and linking possibilities.
One aspect of this outreach by Neville and Margaret was forging links with the
Asian and African community in
EVOLVING
ASIAN LINKS
Neville’s interest in action towards epochal
transition within intercultural contexts is further evidenced by his extensive
involvement in cultural bodies during the late Sixties. He involved himself in
the bodies listed below in the following roles (Aug, 1998):
Senior
Vice President Japan -
Councillor
Council
member
Member:
Africa -
Australian Institute of Internal Affairs