This chapter describes the
research methods I used to source and gather data about Neville’s life work,
and the processes I used in making coherent sense out of the diversity. The
chapter commences with how issues concerning being an insider looking in were
resolved. My data collecting, using a combination of interviewing, archival
research, on-site visits and prolonged action research is discussed. My use of
naturalistic enquiry is outlined. The chapter concludes with a discussion of
the processes I used for data analysis, the steps I took to ensure
trustworthiness, and the theoretical perspectives I used
in carrying out this research.
When I started this thesis I
sensed that I was an insider looking in, and that I had people’s trust. Since
the mid 1980’s I had special insider knowledge that an outsider may never be
given clearance to know. I had access to relevant people, and I had had a
massive amount of access to Neville. I sensed that I had a feel for what
Neville and the Laceweb were all about. I knew a lot. When I started
disciplined data gathering towards the PhD in July 1998 I had a concern that I
may be prejudiced, biased and selective in data gathering and analysis, even
with the best will in the world. Any outsiders attempting to do this research
would also bring their biases, presuppositions and prejudgments to the task. An
outsider may never find out about the Laceweb. People involved are in remote
places and go quietly about their work. Laceweb is difficult to recognise even
if you are surrounded by it. Outsiders would have potentially even greater
difficulty than I did in determining Neville’s and Laceweb process. Outsiders
would also have had issues with bias, and what to include and exclude. It could
be said that as an insider, I would be interested in promoting virtues and
downplaying shortcomings. I have a vested interest because of my close
connection to ensure that this research has rigor and substance. Only a very
good thesis would have ‘legitimising’ value. To address these issues I
endeavoured to be simultaneously close and detached. Neville specifically
worked with me on attachment and detachment. Before July 1998 I was at varying
times, by contextual circumstance and intentionally, an insider and outsider,
native and stranger. At times I felt this role fluidity as emotionally painful,
wearing and exhausting (Petford Working Group 1992). After July 1998 this ‘insider looking in’
issue became a matter of degree and being mindful of the issues. I had a strong
drive to have the thesis methodologically sound; the topic deserved this. It
turned out that I was not the insider I thought I was at the start of this
research. I did not at first realize I had scant knowledge, understanding, or
feel of Neville’s or his father’s way – even though I had been talking and
working with him for twelve years. Neville told me in early 1999 he had felt
despair with some of my pre-thesis writing. He said that my earlier writings
outlining Laceweb action did not convey the texture, the feel and the
tentativeness – I was being too definitive. (As examples, Neville’s poem ‘Inma’
starts with ‘There seems to be’ and ends with ‘I guess’; his poem ‘On Where’
starts with ‘Perhaps’.
For many of the early months
of this thesis I was overwhelmed. There appeared to be a dozen or more possible
theses. Which one was I doing? Focusing on my potential theses, and deciding
what I was, and was not doing, was important.
One of my challenges in this
thesis was how to write so as to not lose or overwhelm the reader or myself.
Linked to this was how I could convey the interconnections – how to weave it
all together meaningfully. The thesis has emerged as something beyond anything
I had contemplated, and it emerged through contemplative action, persistence,
and a lot of challenging work.
I was very aware that
everyone I spoke to who had worked closely with Neville said that his way of
working was incomprehensible. All that
they would say was that he was so fast, that he was way ahead of everybody, and
that they could not fathom how he did it. He would tell me stories about what
happened in the past. However, when I would seek information on how he did
things Neville would not explicate his way. When I would ask him, he would get
me to do things and tell me to read his father’s books.
My challenge was how to
explicate the inexplicable; on this, Martin Heidegger wrote:
To the common comprehension,
the incomprehension is never an occasion to stop and look at its own powers of
comprehension, still less to notice their limitations. To common comprehension,
what is incomprehensible remains merely offensive – proof enough to such
comprehension which is convinced it was born comprehending everything, that it
is now being imposed upon with a sham. The one thing of which sound common
sense is least capable is acknowledgement and respect (Heidegger 1968, p. 76-77).
I had to move beyond my
common sense and evolve respect for the incomprehensibility I was experiencing
in entering Neville’s strange realities. David Silverman in writing about
Castaneda’s account about entering into a Yaqui Indian, don Juan’s reality,
wrote:
Here we have an account,
written in English, which seeks to make a replica of how a Yaqui Indian himself
understands his knowledge. Yet the problematic of the book can in no way
express don Juan’s concerns. For Castaneda must seek to explicate an ‘order of
conceptualisation’ which to don Juan is not at all in need of explication (Silverman 1975, p. 88).
Beyond conceptualising, I
was seeking to understand subject, act and object as a melded phenomenon –
Neville as subject, Neville using his process and the interconnections between
all of the vast array of social things he evolved through action with others. I
sense Neville sensed not only that his way was not at all in need of
explication, but also that explication would fail to embrace his way. His way
had to be embodied to be understood and appreciated and once embodied, would
not need explicating. How these challenges were faced unfold in this research.
I wanted to interact
naturally with informants and not have detailed note taking interfering with my
attending. Taylor and Bogdan estimate that one hour of interviewing generates
around forty pages of typed data (Taylor and Bogdan 1984). Most of the time Neville and I talked very
fast. At the time I tested my speed of thought (timing the internal recall of
piece of writing of known length) at around 650 words a minute without any
sense of rush, and Neville was way faster than me. My guess is that our
discussion would have generated far more than forty pages per hour. Given that
I had well in excess of 150 hours of discussions with Neville, and many hours
with other interviewees, the most appropriate method was note taking rather
than tape recording. As my method, I followed Minichiello, Aroni, Timewell &
Alexander (1995) in relying on memory aided by the briefest note taking.
These notes were also what Burgess calls an ‘aide memoire’ for the next
interview (Burgess 1984).
While speaking by phone I
would type in key words and phrases into my computer in my own shorthand, and
type up my notes more fully directly the call was finished. In face-to-face
interviewing, I made brief notes throughout, concentrating my attention on
themes, key words, incidents, names, and ideas. I jotted these down as they
emerged in conversation.
Typically, I jotted down or
recalled the meanings of remarks rather than verbatim statements. Succinct
important comments were recorded verbatim. I used my own shorthand in note
taking. I always wrote up my notes on a computer within an hour of an
interview/discussion as Minichiello et al recommend (1995). They quote Bogdan and Biklen, ‘Researchers
who have mastered the above process can conduct up to two hours of interview
without the use of a tape recorder (Bogdan and Biklen 1982).’ I found I could do this.
During face-to-face interviews
with Neville between 1986 and 1998 I would also take cryptic shorthand. We
would speak for about 40 minutes before a break. I would then download my notes
and recall onto my computer. I would print these notes as my guide for the next
40 minutes. I found that my note taking enabled recording, coding, analysis,
interpretation and emergent design of my research on the run, and gave scope
for analysis and interpretation to be discussed as it emerged with informants.
This allowed commentaries about the mode of discussion, analysis and
interpretation to be exchanged then and there. Links between things were being
discussed as they arose. In using Minichiello et al’s benchmarks for this note
taking mode (1995). It was ‘fair’ to me and interviewees, the
data gathering was valid and effective, and it did aid in analysing the data.
My interviewees were telling
absorbing stories, and describing structure and process that were very
memorable. Listening for key themes and ideas encouraged my attending. With
counselling skills training I had received from Terry O’Neil and Neville’s mentoring,
I had well-developed interviewing and attending competencies. I had been
trained to para-professional status in counselling and interviewing skills by
O’Neil at the La Trobe University Student Counselling Unit, and had completed
18 months of work as a para-professional student counsellor at that unit. Terry
had modelled his counselling and group work on his experiences with Neville in
Fraser House. Once avid discussion with my interviewees was in flow, I would
use ‘reflecting back comment’, ‘paraphrasing’, ‘summarizing’,
‘para-linguistics’ and ‘minimal encouragers’ in supporting their flow of
consciousness.
As well, Neville and others
had enabled me to be firstly, proficient in information gathering using the NLP
language metamodel (Minichiello, Aroni et al. 1995) developed by Bandler and Grinder (Bandler and Grinder 1975), and secondly, competent in using
Ericksonian language patterns (Bandler, Grinder et
al. 1975; Grinder, De Lozier et al. 1977; Grinder, Bandler et al. 1981; Hanlon
1987) and patterns evolved by
Virginia Satir (Satir 1967; Satir 1972; Bandler, Grinder et al. 1976;
Satir 1983; Satir 1988). I used these competencies in my exchanges
with Neville and my other interviewees to support recall and aid thick
description (Geertz 1973). Often Neville and I would be so attuned
that we would have things flow without complete sentences, and we would finish
each other’s sentences as confirmation of empathetic shared understanding. This
notwithstanding, some things I took a long time to comprehend, namely -
community being the therapy, Cultural Keyline, and that Neville was
involved in evolving global epochal transition.
Neville and I had many
overlapping interests. He had competencies I sought to acquire. During the ten
years I knew Neville before commencing this thesis in July 1998, I had many
hours of ‘discussions’ with Neville that were informal, prolonged, in-depth
research interviews/dialogues. This was a mutually desired and supported
process. We did little by way of social talk unless it was networking related.
In fact for social exchange, Neville preferred the company of others, not me.
Minichiello et al (1995, p. 81) define in-depth interviewing as:
….conversation with a
purpose – a conversation between researcher and informant focusing on the
informant’s perception of self, life and experience, and expressed in his or
her own words. It is the means by which the researcher can gain access to and
subsequently understand the private interpretations of social reality that
individuals hold.
My use of in-depth
interviewing is consistent with my naturalistic inquiry frame and use of
grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 1967).
Before I began the research, prolonged interviews were
held face-to-face with Neville when I stayed with him firstly, in Bondi
Junction, New South Wales (1988-89), secondly in Yungaburra, Queensland (Dec in
1991, 1992 and 1993, and July, 1994) and thirdly, in Rapid Creek, Darwin (Feb,
1993). These face-to-face interviews were daily and sustained, often lasting
all day and well into the night. A couple of times in Yungaburra I stayed for a
fortnight. I stayed a week in
When I commenced the thesis
in July 1998, Neville and I agreed that interviews would be by phone and
typically four times a week. By common agreement we worked better on the phone.
Phone calls were typically around two hours or longer. In 1999, the holding of
interviews was dependent on Neville’s pain levels from his bladder cancer, and
during this period, we generally had discussions one or two nights a week.
During 1999 discussion length was generally between thirty to sixty minutes.
During the phone interviews I typed on the computer as we talked. The bulk of
the time we would have unstructured discussion and storytelling themes, rather
than question and answer. It emerged that thematic discussion was a fundamental
aspect of Fraser House change process (Yeomans, N. 1965a, Vol . 4, p. 50 - 54). My notes referred mainly to discussion
themes rather than specific questions and answers.
Most of these in-depth
interviews were recording Neville’s life history, with storytelling a large
part (Minichiello, Aroni et al. 1995, Chap. 7). These stories related to Fraser House,
Fraser House Outreach, and the Laceweb. We constantly jumped around in time.
Neville very much saw his life action as emergent, interdependent and
inter-related (Minichiello, Aroni et al. 1995, p. 152).
I was endeavouring to enter
Neville’s socially constituted world’s through his ‘precariously negotiated
subjective views of it’ (Minichiello, Aroni et al. 1995, p. 152), the stuff of Poole’s ‘intersubjectivity’ –
my experiencing of Neville’s experiencing of my experiencing of him (Poole 1972). These discussions did involve a mutual
inter-subjective exchange of information (Minichiello, Aroni et al. 1995, p. 179) - what Neville called co-learning. This in
turn has resonance with Gergen’s writing about meaning being jointly
negotiated. ‘Its meaning and implications are open to continuous reshaping as
relationships proceed (Gergen 2005).’ This is the way Neville and I related, and
it was also a frame I used throughout the research.
Often Neville would initiate
a new theme. During a December 1991 Yungaburra conversation,
Neville mentioned that he had adapted his father’s Keyline in evolving Fraser
House and extending Fraser House ways into the wider community. During that
conversation Neville referred to his Keyline adaptation as ‘Cultural Keyline’.
In December 1992, Neville
told me the story of his being lost as a three year old and his near death
experience. The conversation flowed to his second near death with the grass
fire. This led to a discussion about the evolving of his life quest. I had not
heard of these aspects being related to Neville’s psychiatric work before. Even
then, from December 1993, with so much storytelling and discussion going on, I
did not realize till around mid 1999 that up till that time I had so filtered
my hearing through my prejudices and preconceptions that I had understood
little of what Neville was saying. During 1998 and early 1999 I was still seeking
to find out the ‘change process’ that was used in Fraser House. I was still
thinking in terms of, ‘an expert using therapy techniques on the mentally ill’
frame. Neville had told me time and again that the change process was
‘self-help’ and ‘mutual help’ and that ‘community’ was the therapy. For
all this telling, I was still thinking – ‘Yes! But what was the real change
process? I was a slow learner.
Neville never spoon-fed me
with him telling me, as ‘fount of all wisdom’ what to do. He would set me
challenges and tasks.[1]
When Neville and I were together in Laceweb contexts he would never do
something if I could do it myself. I now know he was creating contexts for me
to embody learning. By the time I started my thesis, Neville was in his
Seventies and said his memory was failing. However, I suspect that often he
followed his Fraser House protocol, ‘give the tasks to those who have no
experience, so they learn by doing with support’. Sometimes he could have told
me things. Instead he let me find things out from my interviewees and then he
would respond to my crosschecking with him about what I had found out from
others.
Apart from Neville, my first thesis interviewees were
ex-Fraser House staffers Warwick Bruen and Phil Chilmaid. I had an interview
with Bruen and Chilmaid in October 1998, and further interviews with each of
them in March, June and July in 1999. Chilmaid was a Fraser House head
charge-nurse who continued at
I commenced my first two
interviews with both Bruen and Chilmaid with a series of questions that focused
on the specifics of the structure and process of Fraser House. As the
interviews progressed, discussion became more unstructured. I realized some
time after the second interview I had with each of them that many of my
questions were based on incorrect or naive assumptions. For example, I had asked
a lot of questions relating to the ‘change process’ at Fraser House. I was
continually returning to asking about the kinds of therapy and change processes
that were used. ‘Was it Gestalt? Was it Behaviour Modification? The response I
kept getting was, ‘It was not like that’. After the first two interviews with
both of them, I was still confused about the nature of the change process.
Neville had already told me the changes processes many times in many ways.
Therapeutic community was the process. I had not heard! He said to read
his father’s books on sustainable agriculture and read his archival material.
The first reading of the
books and archives left me none the wiser. That ‘experiencing and reconnecting
in new ways with a peculiarly ‘total’ community’ was the reconstituting process
was not initially conveyed by my reading of Neville and Alf Clark’s book. At
this time I had not read the
I cannot pin point the time
when I realized that in Fraser House ‘community’ was the therapy and
‘therapeutic community’ was the process, not a just a name. All of the
patient community governance and work by patients were change process. Everything
was change process. It was there in the archives, mentioned many times, but I
had just not sensed it.
Once I had this
understanding about socio-therapy and community-therapy and that Neville viewed
Fraser House as a complex self-organising living system, it became clear that
all that Neville had said about his father’s interest in living systems was
central and not peripheral. Neville had told me many times that he modelled his
way on his father’s work, and I had not read P. A.’s writings. During 1999 I
finally did read all of Neville’s fathers books so I had a growing
understanding of Neville’s adaptation of his father’s ‘Keyline’ concept into
Cultural Keyline. My research was naturalistic inquiry, emerging
connoisseurship and emergent design in action. These are discussed later. This
gave me a new framework for the third interview with Bruen and Chilmaid in June
1999.
It became apparent during
the June 1999 and the July 1999 interviews that I had some understanding that
Bruen and Chilmaid did not have. They had little idea that Fraser House was,
for Neville, a pilot for exploring global cultural and intercultural transition
with a time frame of possibly more than two hundred and fifty years. Neville
talked about this epochal transition meta-frame of Fraser House with me through
the late Eighties and the Nineties. That Neville had this metaframe in the
Fraser House years was confirmed by two other interviewees, Margaret Cockett
(April, 1999) and Stephanie Yeomans (Jan, July, Dec, 2002). After my increasing
understanding, my following engagements with Bruen and Chilmaid shifted from
question and answer to a more conversational exchange with increased
storytelling.
Apart from Neville, Bruen
and Chilmaid, I interviewed six other people linked to Fraser House, namely,
Margaret Cockett, Alfred Clark, Terry O’Neill, Stephanie Yeomans, as well as a
former Fraser House patient, and a former outpatient. Apart from the
outpatient, all of these interviewees were skilled psychosocial researchers and
used these competences in our exchanges. The Fraser House patient after leaving
Fraser house changed his focus from bank robber to having a career as a
research assistant to a leading Australian criminologist. Some of the feel of
Fraser House, especially the Big and Small Groups from a patient’s perspective,
was obtained from the former patient (June 1992) and the former outpatient
(July 1994, July 2001, July 2002 and December 2002).
I had interviews with
Margaret Cockett in April, June and July 1999. Margaret, a psychologist and
anthropologist was Neville’s personal assistant at Fraser House. Margaret
stayed on as Neville’s personal assistant in his subsequent Director of
Community Mental Health position and other outreach. Margaret later went into
private practice and was practicing from Neville’s Bondi Junction house when we
had the eighteen months of monthly gatherings during 1986 and 1987. I first met
her then (though Margaret did not participate in the Sunday gatherings).
Chilmaid, Bruen and Cockett each facilitated Fraser House Big Group and Small
Groups on many occasions and conducted research into aspects of Fraser House.
Another interviewee was
Terry O’Neill. He was a psychologist at
Another person I interviewed
(Jan, 2001, July, 2002 and Dec, 2002) was Neville’s sister-in-law, Stephanie
Yeomans (Neville’s younger brother, Ken’s first wife). She had been a
psychiatric nurse at
It was in September 2002 in
reflecting upon the social action contexts that I had been involved in since
1986 linked to this thesis that I suddenly realized for the first time that
Neville had set up for me an extensive range of contexts that were isomorphic
metaphors (matching form) for each and every type of social action he had enabled.
Appendix 2 is a table showing eighteen types of social action, with over fifty
examples of these types that Neville had been engaged in prior to my meeting
him. The third column shows over ninety mirroring contexts that he set up
and/or arranged for me to be involved in. Many of these were not just for me;
large numbers of people were also involved. This meticulous extensive strategic
thoroughness was typical of Neville. He knew that if ever I started a PhD based
thesis, I would have potentially embodied this extensive action research, and
may have this embodied experience to draw upon, as well as interviews, archival
research, narrative, autobiographical material and storytelling - all enriched
potentially by my own prolonged action research that I am continuing to be
involved in. I did not know it at the time that I had been adopting and
adapting Neville’s ways both in action research and in action in everyday life
in the social life world.
Gold (1958) writes of four possible roles for observers
ranging from complete detached observation to complete involvement and
participation in the site context. Neville arranged for me to be in the latter
role – being immersed in the action and regularly taking an initiating and
enabling role (1958, Vol. 36, p217-223). Neville engaged me in enabling and
supporting social action research a number of times in contexts approximating
Fraser House Big Group with between 100 – 180 people present, and in these he
cast me in the Big Group enabler role. Through the Nineties I have enabled over
200 experiential gatherings with between 40 and 180 people attending during
bush camp-out conference-festivals.
In keeping with indigenous
influences on Neville’s modes of action reseach he involved me many types of
actions that were resonant with Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s twenty five Indigenous
Research Projects (Smith 1999, p. 142-167) namely – creating, democratising,
discovering, envisioning, negotiating, naming, networking, reframing,
remembering, restoring, revitalizing, sharing, storytelling, and enabling and
fostering proactive action research, structural change and cultural change
In these social action
contexts Neville mentored me in taking on the same enabler, mentor and
‘supporter of others’ self-help and mutual help’ roles that he engaged in. This
social action had ‘research’ woven into the holistic emergent action. Actions
were being continually reviewed by me and other participants together. What
worked was repeated in similar contexts. What didn’t work so well was modified
and adapted so it did work, or it was dropped. The process was fractal,
merging, synthesising and iterative. Action, monitoring, evaluation, adaptation
and modification all took place in a merged holistic way appropriate to
emerging and emergent context, rather than as a linear process. The prolonged
continuous action research that I have engaged in since 1986 is isomorphic with
the prolonged continuous action research that Neville engaged in throughout his
life.
For Neville and his
‘Cultural Keyline’ way, prolonged continuous action research became an embodied
aspect of being – a way of living. It is resonant with Indigenous
socio-medicine. It became woven into his every day natural perceiving and
sense-making in relational social-place inter-action. Neville’s way was to have
people aware of their own body’s responses to unfolding experience (especially
what Neville called micro-experiences) of wellness generating action – what
Neville called ‘embodied understanding’. Head knowing without embodied
understanding was for Neville, of little significance.
The prolonged continuous
action research that Neville pioneered in Fraser House and Fraser House
outreach has resonance with what Deming termed ‘a culture of continual
improvement’ (2005). There is also resonance with what Senge calls, the ‘learning
organization’ (1992) and what Bateson called deutero-learning (1973). In some senses we all do this continuous
everyday action research – noticing and adjusting as circumstances change.
Neville did it exquisitely in a way that maximized emergent potential. He
noticed, responded to and supported the positive aspects of everyone’s context
role specific behaviours. While Neville monitored the unfolding context, he
stayed in his own meta-context (his personal context in the context). In a June
1999 conversation he spoke of being ‘context driven’ while maintaining his own
metacontext in these words:
I was context driven - if I go to ‘creative
context’ then ‘everything is creative’ - it worked like that.
He attended in a way that
‘soaked up’ what was there - responding in a resonant way, noticing the
unfolding action and flexibly altering and responding to responses as a natural
spontaneous flow. It was an integral aspect of his way of life – his ‘culture’.
While I had been told and
shown so much over the years I had known Neville, he only told me of his
collected papers in the Original Manuscripts Collection in the Mitchell Library
within the NSW State Library in
Neville told me that
archival material was in three places, the Mitchell Library within the NSW
State Library, in a private collection in Armidale in North East New South
Wales, and in his private collection in Yungaburra. Neville’s collected papers
in the Mitchell Library contained a range of primary sources including
Neville’s hand written jottings and diagrams, photographs, newspaper clippings,
meeting notices, monographs by Neville, staff and patients, and Neville and
Fraser House staff’s conference papers, research reports and Unit reports -
most of it original documents. Neville was well skilled in research methodology
and had created an archival researcher’s dream cache. There was a spread of
types of archival material and a spread of authors – Neville, senior staff,
junior staff, patients, outpatients, newspaper reporters and other interested
parties. It was not a large collection and it is not all in one place in the
‘Original Manuscript’ collection. Neville had obviously given thought to each
piece’s strategic significance. I had a strong feel that this cache was sent
ahead specifically for the likes of me. Additionally, there was a collection of
Nevilles father’s materials, and three further collections belonging to
Neville’s brothers, Allan and Ken, and Neville’s second wife, Lien.
On my first visit I did a
skim read of the collection to get a sense of what was there and took some
brief notes as a guide for the next visit. At this time I had no idea what
thesis I was doing, or the relevance of what I was looking at. I had two
further visits each lasting three days where I ‘poked around’ in the archive.
It was in August 2002 on my fourth visit when I had finished my first rough draft
of the whole thesis that I scanned, skimmed, and read the total archive of all
family members. By this time I knew what was relevant and what was
cross-confirming and where it would go in my thesis. Typically, I only wrote
down what I was going to use in my thesis.
As well, on this visit I saw
material that ‘stood out’ that I had never noticed before. Some small bits were
seminal. These I photocopied. While plainly there all along, I had never seen
just how many research papers and monographs Neville had written. I sense that
given the interaction between me, my interviewees, my thesis topic, and the
archive, the timing sequence was right as to when I went ‘in earnest’ into the
archive. The preliminary archival viewings had given me a feel for the collection. On those early visits the archive was
becoming familiar to me, though I had little sense of what was significant. My
approach and timing in the use of the Mitchell Library archives were consistent
with the principles of my emergent design, i.e. contextually determined, rather
than presupposed and prescripted. Some small bits of Neville’s handwritten
scribbling turned out to be potent; for example, the personal file-note ‘Mental
Health and Social Change’ which is Neville’s succinct half page early statement
about his thinking on global transitions (Yeomans, N. 1971b). I had not had the title’s significance
reach me - the culture’s margin is where social change starts. I spotted this
document on my first look at the archive, and then I had no idea that it was
one of two seminal linked documents. It was the precursor to the paper, ‘On
Global Reform – International Normative Model Areas (INMA)’ which was in
Neville’s Yungaburra Far North Queensland archives (Yeomans 1974). I found this second document in July 2000
after Neville’s death (30 May 2000).
Dr. Ned Iceton had archival
materials at his home in Armidale in N.E. New South Wales relating to the 1971
to 1973 Aboriginal Human Relations Gatherings facilitated by Neville. I was
able to get a photocopy of all of the relevant material so I could peruse them
at my leisure. As well, Iceton informed me that a collection of the Aboriginal
Human Relations Newsletters was held in the Australian National Library (I
perused these in Canberra) (Aboriginal Human Relations Newsletter Working Group
1971a; Aboriginal Human Relations Newsletter Working Group 1971b). I had two interviews with Iceton on
consecutive days. My questions focused
on the processes used to start and sustain group process at the Human Relations
Gatherings, given the presence there of both urban and remote area Aboriginals
and non-Aboriginal people. These interviews also soon became semi-structured
then un-structured. Through these interviews I confirmed that the 1971-73
Aboriginal Human Relations Gatherings were resonant with Fraser House groups
and fully consistent with Neville’s Cultural Keyline, therapeutic community and
other socio-cohesion frameworks.
By the time I was able to
get up to see the Yungaburra archive Neville had died. I was given the archive
to copy. The key document, ‘On Global Reform and International Normative Model
Areas (Inma)’ (Yeomans 1974) was in this archive; as well, there were
materials relating to Neville’s Lake Tinaroo Mediation Workshops.
This research is in the
style and mode of the naturalist paradigm following Lincoln and Guba’s book,
‘Naturalistic Inquiry’ (1985). I used this approach because Neville
himself engaged in naturalistic inquiry and helped pioneer this method in
Consistent with naturalistic
inquiry, I engaged in prolonged action research in natural settings and
obtained secondary source recollections and archival materials because, to
quote Lincoln and Guba, ‘Naturalistic ontology suggests that realities are
wholes that cannot be understood in isolation from their contexts, nor can they
be fragmented for study of the parts (1985, p. 39).’ My guiding substantive theory emerged
from, or was grounded in the data (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Lincoln and Guba 1985, p. 41). I set boundaries to the inquiry:
…on the basis of emergent focus because that
permits the multiple realities to define the focus…; because boundaries cannot
be satisfactorily set without intimate contextual knowledge, including
knowledge about the mutually shaping factors involved…’ (Lincoln and Guba 1985, p. 42).
I followed Lincoln and
Guba’s special criteria for trustworthiness, namely, credibility,
transferability, dependability and confirmability discussed below (1985, p. 43). Consistent with naturalistic inquiry,
Neville’s way of prolonged action research was based on the same beliefs and
associated principles of the New Paradigm as detailed by Lincoln and Guba (1985, p. 56) – refer Table 1 below adapted from Lincoln and
Guba (1985, p. 56).
I will show in the three
sections of this research that Nevilles and his father’s work is consistent
with the new paradigm’s beliefs and principles and that both men helped evolve
new paradigm action research in
Neville
was well aware of the holographic quality of his action research in interaction
between Cultural Keyline processes and social systems. For example, Lincoln and
Guba could well have been quoting Neville when they wrote:
Information is distributed throughout the
system rather than concentrated at specific points. At each point information
about the whole is contained in the part. Not only can the entire reality be
found in the part, but also the part can be found in the whole. What is detected
in any part must also characterize the whole. Everything is interconnected (1985, p. 59).
The quote aptly describes the holographic and fractal
quality of the way Neville interacted with connexity in a two-fold sense.
My
definition of ‘connexity’ is as follows:
Connexity’ embodies the notion
that everything within and between natural contexts and everything within and
between people and context (culturally and inter-culturally) is
inter-dependent, inter-related, inter-connected, inter-linked and interwoven –
whether we recognize it or not.
New Paradigm Basic
Belief |
Associated Principle |
|
Complex Heterarchic Holographic Indeterminate Mutually causal Morphogenetic Perspectival |
Real-world
entities are a diverse lot of complex systems and organisms. Systems
and organisms experience many simultaneous and potentially dominant orderings
– none of which are ‘naturally’ ordered. Images
of systems and organisms are created by a dynamic process of interaction that
is (metaphorically) similar to the holograph. Future
states of systems and organisms are in principle unpredictable Systems
and organisms evolve and change together in such a way (with feedback and
feedforward) as to make the distinction between cause and effect meaningless New
forms of systems and organisms unpredicted (and
unpredictable) from any of the parts can arise spontaneously under conditions
of diversity, openness, mutual causality, and indeterminacy Mental
processes, instruments, and even disciplines are not neutral |
Table
1. Basic Belief and Associated Principles of the New Paradigm
Neville maintained connexity
perception in relating with the unfolding connexity. I found that Fraser House
can be seen in Neville’s Festivals, community markets, smaller therapeutic
community houses, and in his networking, and simultaneously Keyline can been
seen in Cultural Keyline and both in Fraser House, Fraser House outreach,
Cultural Healing Action and Laceweb Networks. I return to this theme in
discussing holographic generalization below.
To ensure trustworthiness in
my research I endeavoured to establish truth value by the test of isomorphism (Lincoln and Guba 1985, p. 294), namely, that I have revealed the form,
structure and processes of the focal multiple social constructions adequately
in a way that would be credible to the co-constructors of those multiple
realities. In respect of external validity, again following Lincoln and Guba, I
make the assumption that, ‘at best only working hypotheses may be abstracted.’
Neville used to continually exhort me to keep everything tentative and up for
continual review. On another trustworthiness criterion, ‘consistency’, I use a
number of processes set out below to ensure replicability and dependability.
I had sustained prolonged
engagement by investing ample time to become immersed in the focal milieu. I
learned the cultures. I have built respect and trust. I was around long enough
to detect the subtle and non-obvious aspects (even then, with considerable
difficulty). I had ample time to detect my distorted and selective perceptions
and misconstructions of what Neville and others were saying; time to ‘render
the inquirer (me) open to multiple influences – the mutual shapers and
contextual factors (Lincoln and Guba 1985)’. This prolonged time also enabled the
building of trust in some people who were extremely cautious about me. Some are
still very cautious and hold back for very good reasons. There are some things
I do not need to know. (As discussed in Chapter Twelve,
in
While engaged in prolonged action research, I believe
that I have never ‘gone native’; I have never lost what Lincoln and Guba (Lincoln and Guba 1981) call ‘detached wonder’. I also engaged in
persistent observation to add salience so as to:
.…identify those characteristics and elements
in the situation that are most relevant to the problem or issue being pursued
and focusing on them in detail. If prolonged engagement provides scope,
persistent observation provides depth (Lincoln and Guba. E. G. 1981; Lincoln and Guba 1985, p.
304).
These two forms of
engagement enabled me to come to terms with what Eisner calls the ‘pervasive
qualities’ (Eisner 1975), in this case the ‘pervasive qualities’ of
Neville and his social action, and to sort out what really matters. In my
writing I have endeavoured to specify in detail the exploring I carried out,
and how I sought out salience.
Another aspect of my method
to ensure trustworthiness was the use of triangulation. Following Denzin (1978) I used different sources and different
methods. Comments made by one interviewee were crosschecked with the other
interviewees. As well, comments were crosschecked with archival material,
on-site visits, and immersion in ongoing social action with me taking on the
enabling and mentoring role for others, with Neville as my mentor. Archival
materials were also crosschecked.
I engaged in peer debriefing
(Lincoln and Guba 1985) with a number of people who were
disinterested, though resonant. I also carried out ongoing member checks with
my interviewees, both formally and informally, after typing up my interview
notes, and when the first and later drafts were finished (Lincoln and Guba 1985). This was in the early work to provide, ‘an
initial and searching opportunity to test working hypotheses, to correct for
error, to provide them opportunity to ask challenging questions, probe for
biases, question meanings, check the need for further information or
clarification, and to give them an opportunity to give an assessment of overall
adequacy (Lincoln and Guba 1985).’
My method was resonant with
Neville’s own research methodology outlined in the next two segments.
When I first met Neville one
of the first things he did was to discover that we shared some of the same
theoretical perspectives. We were both informed by a study of phenomenology,
hermeneutics and the sociology of knowledge. I had had sociology of knowledge
as my substantive topic in each year of sociology for my social science degree.
For both of us, meaning emerged out of our shared relational
inter-subjectivity. For Neville, re-constituting and mediating relational
meaning was a core activity of the Fraser House community re-socializing process
(Gergen 2005).
A part of my theoretical
stance was using Neville’s way of action research. I have used qualitative
methods from within Neville’s worldview to provide some glimpses and feel of
his way. Neville’s primary focus was on the ‘action’ part of action research.
From a research point of view, Neville was not into critique of society as in
‘critical sociology’. While Neville assumed a social basis for mental illness,
he was neither into criticizing society nor promoting his own solutions. If
anything his work was in the general area of cultural studies, and within that,
the study of ‘cultural emergence’ and ‘intercultural connexity’. His work is
wider than cultural science (geistwissenshaftlich); his action was linked to
many of the ‘disciplines’.
Neville engaged marginalized
people in inter-subjective awareness (living experience) of the shared act of
working out in everyday life how to live together well. The way of life they
were co-re-constituting together was:
·
Action
researched using emergent design
·
Subjected
to constant review and evaluation
·
Evolving
transitional community using transitional concepts
·
Guided
by values of respect for human dignity, respecting all life forms and being
humane and caring
·
Documenting
the action research, specially what works and what does not work
Neville fostered emergence
by creatively utilizing the liminal (at the threshold) tension between the
actual and the possible.
The fluid freeness in
Neville’s methods mirrors the fluid freeness in the ways of living Neville was
enabling through cultural emergence.
Neville’s way embodies a paradigm
(Kuhn 1996) fundamentally different to the logical
positivist and similar paradigms pre-occupied with categorisation, universal
prescriptive inter-contextual algorithms - and manipulative knowing (so we can
predict, and control) (Pelz 1974; Pelz 1975). Anyone looking through the filter of a
logical positivist and similar paradigms at Neville’s tentative connexity way
perturbing self-organizing systems typically find little that makes sense in
Neville’s life work. It may appear a confused uncontrolled mess.
The typical responses to
Neville’s actions from those within the above paradigms have been to intervene
to have their paradigm applied through negation, denigration, condemnation,
subversion, imposition and control (typically through imposing a fixed predetermined
agenda). Some examples are firstly in organising the NSW festivals (authorities
seeking to curtail location and energy); secondly, at both the 1992 gathering
at Geoff Guest’s place (Petford Working Group 1992), and at the 1994 Small Island Gathering on
the Atherton Tablelands (where non-grassroots oriented people sought to impose
top down control through imposing fixed agenda (Roberts and Widders 1994); and thirdly, all the above responses
happened constantly in relation to Fraser House.
Neville’s way and Cultural
Keyline has to be experienced and embodied from deep within the associated
paradigm, value and behaviour system; mentoring is valuable. Neville in no way wanted
to answer my questions about Cultural Keyline when he first mentioned the term
in Decembr 1991; rather he mentored me and set up a stream of
micro-experiences. Cognitive ‘head’-based knowing will never lead to a
substantive understanding of Neville’s way; it has to be embodied. Neville’s
way survives and thrives in the lived-life experience of natural nurturers and
those who are continuing living their caring human values in supporting
wellness action. The above is the reason I mirrored Neville’s way in carrying
out this research
In keeping with Neville’s
use of naturalistic inquiry, my research design was emergent rather than
preordinate (Lincoln and Guba 1985, p.208). Meanings emerged from unfolded and
unfolding contexts, and multiple realities; for example, from Indigenous and
grassroots life-worlds throughout East Asia, Australasia, and
My design emerged from
continuous data analysis and writing as I went. I was under way for almost a
year before I decided what thesis I was doing – that it would be in three
parts, Fraser House, Fraser House Outreach and the evolving of the Laceweb.
Recall that initially, I was looking at the archives and not knowing what I was
looking at or for, or what was, and was not significant. Consistent with
emergent design, I allowed the emerging data to be both a stimulus and guide
for my review of literature. For example, it was after realizing the way
Neville and his father worked holistically with emergence in self organizing
systems that I had the literature as a ‘stimulus for thinking’ (Minichiello, Aroni et al. 1995, p. 71). Consistent with Neville and his father I
was letting the archive tell me what to do.
I engaged in writing through rather than
writing up. While I would make many file notes, right from the start of the
thesis I started writing the actual thesis. I constantly added and reworked -
as if it was a moist pliable clay statue. This is consistent with my emergent
design. It did mean constant rereading of the latest draft, and as it got
larger, it meant that I had to have the latest version ‘in my head’ all the
time. As I gathered more data and
reflected, I was constantly looking for where things fitted and whether they
still had a place.
In making sense of, and
writing through my research I combined ‘grounded theory’ (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Lincoln and Guba 1985, p.
204-205), holographic generalization (Lincoln and Guba 1985, p.125), ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973), ‘thematic analysis’/‘narrative analysis’ (Kellehear 1993, p. 38; Miles and Huberman 1994), ‘structure/event process analysis’ (Neuman 1997, p. 433; Neuman 2000) and Eisner’s concept of ‘connoisseurship’ (Eisner 1991). After discussing each of the above, I
outline processes used to support my intuition and being what Neville called,
‘a scientific detective’.
Lincoln and Guba describe ‘grounded theory’ (Glaser and Strauss 1967) as a ‘theory that follows from the data
rather than preceding them’. ‘The theory that is developed is then said to be
grounded in the data’ (Minichiello, Aroni et al. 1995, p. 103).
Lincoln and Guba make the point that this is a ‘necessary consequence of
the naturalistic paradigm that posits multiple realities and makes
transferability dependent on local contextual factors’ (1985, p. 205).
Along with researching the
transferability of Neville’s Way (including Keyline and Cultural Keyline)
between many contexts, a central theme of this thesis is the fractal and
holographic quality of Neville’s action. Lincoln and Guba (1985, p. 204-205) refer to Schwartz and Ogilvy’s (1979), comment that ‘the metaphor for the world is
changing from the machine to the hologram’.
Lincoln and Guba point out
that a characteristic of holograms is ‘that any piece of the hologram contains
in it all of the information found in the whole’ (1985, p. 204-205). While recognizing the limits of metaphor,
Lincoln and Guba make the case that any part or component gathered is a
‘perfect sample in the sense that it contains all of the information about the
whole that one might hope to obtain; that imperfect (blurred) information from
any source can be improved (clarified), if one has the appropriate filters or
other processes for so doing’ (1985, p. 204-205). Chapter Five discusses the fractal quality
of the Keypoint) where information distributed in land topography is present at
the Keypoint where the three main landforms meet. Chapter Nine discusses the
fractal quality of Cultural Keypoints.
It was some time before I
started to see the fractal quality in everything Neville was doing and how all
the diverse bits were parts of the whole.
The ‘base of information’
that is appropriate for holographic generalization is suggested by Lincoln and
Guba as Geertz’s ‘thick description’ (1973). I have endeavoured to obtain thick
description of the many and varied contexts in which Neville worked. I then
used Keyline, Cultural Keyline and other ‘filters’ or ‘lenses’ to focus and
clarify what I had found and to help in form and pattern recognition.
These processes in turn
helped clarify the ‘filters’. I found the ‘filters’ permeated through the
various objects, events, processes, happenings, and structures that Neville set
up and enabled, and their varied contexts. I then started seeing aspects of
each of the particulars in the general, and the general in the particulars.
In working with thick description and holographic
generalization I used thematic analysis (also called Narrative Analysis). In this I was guided by Miles and Huberman’s
themes below (1994, p. 245-261):
·
Look
for repetition
·
Note
themes and patterns
·
Make
metaphors and analogies
·
Check
if single variable, events, experiences, are really several
·
Connect
particular events to the general
·
Note
differences and similarities
·
Note
triggers connecting meditating variables
·
Note
if patterns in the data resemble theories/concepts
Neville used each of the
above processes in naturalistic inquiry. I also recognized that in large part I
had been using each of them in my prolonged Laceweb action research from 1986
onwards, and increasingly using them during this thesis research. Naturalistic
inquiry was for me, becoming a way of being.
In speaking of ‘thematic
analysis’, Kellehear writes that ‘validity is tied to how well a researcher’s
understanding of a culture parallels the way that a culture views itself’, and
that the ‘central meanings the researcher attaches to objects, actions and
relations should reflect the beliefs of insiders’ analysis’ (1993, p. 38). These aspects were used to increase
trustworthiness along with carrying out ongoing member checks (Lincoln and Guba 1985, p. 314) with all of my interviewees. I also checked
and confirmed my ‘central meanings’ – such as ‘Cultural Keyline’, ‘connexity’,
and ‘emergence’ - with others involved in the focal action. When I had
understanding and meanings that my interviewees did not have, I checked and
confirmed the ‘fit’ of these with my interviewees and relevant others.
I drew on Berger and Luckman’s notion of ‘typification’ (1967) in looking for what Eisner calls,
‘structural collaboration’ - ‘recurrent behaviours or actions, those theme-like
features of a situation that inspire confidence that events interpreted and
appraised are not aberrant or exceptional, but rather characteristic of the
situation (1991, p. 101)’.
I was guided by Eisner’s
references to a number of aspects that all of the social sciences have in
common:
…. the search for pattern in
the qualities they observe, the effort to illuminate and display what has not
been previously noticed, and the attempt to account for what has been seen (1991, p. 230).
In exploring diversity -
seeking Bateson’s ‘patterns that connect’ (1980) in respect of each of Eisner’s three aspects
mentioned in the previous paragraph, I endeavoured to continually improve my
capacity to engage what Eisner (1991, p. 63) calls ‘connoisseurship’, defined by him as ‘the ability
to make fine-grained discriminations among complex subtle qualities’.
Connoisseurship is ‘the art of appreciation’. A fundamental aspect of
connoisseurship is ‘allowing the situation to speak for itself, that is, to
allow for an emergent focus’ (1991, p. 176). This
involves enriching perception, the sense and significance we make from all that
is streaming through all our senses. In this I was mindful of Pelz’s remarks
about the German word ‘erscheinung’ meaning ‘appearance’. This word contains
the German, ‘schein’ that also contains for the social scientist the caution
that appearance may deceive, ‘for schein, because it shines and glitters,
reveals and deceives. It denotes something better and worse, more and
less than appearance’ (1974, p. 88).
Pelz speaks of a particular
mood in searching for understanding where appearance can reveal and deceive. In
this, Pelz introduces another German word, ‘stimmung’ having, as one of its
meanings, ‘a mood that attunes’ (1974, p. 89). I sensed that when I was engaged with
Neville, Laceweb prolonged action research and this thesis, I worked best when
I entered this attuning mood. I also explored attuning moods in group contexts
(in both senses – that is exploring constituting stimmung and notice its
spontaneous emergence).
My capacity for being a
connoisseur was enriched through in-depth interviewing, prolonged engagement,
and persistently observing someone like Neville in action. He was a connoisseur
par excellence. The observational challenge was that I only saw the output of
his connoisseurship, not connoisseurship per se. The perennial questions were,
‘How did he do that?’ and ‘How did he come up with that?’ To this endeavour I
brought my understanding of ‘understanding’, honed by my three years of study
of the sociology of knowledge with sociologist Werner Pelz. He speaks of a
contemplative mode of knowing that has some resonance with connoisseurship,
where, Pelz’s (1975, p. 232, 238) ‘contemplating as mode of knowing’ is:
a kind of
intellective-emotive compound of seeing-hearing-smelling-tasting-feeling. It is
appreciative and savouring. It leaves things as and where they are.
It neither proves or
disproves, though it may approve or disapprove. It is the psychic equivalent of
eating, drinking, and breathing. Contemplation does not wish to handle its
subjects and need not therefore concentrate on looking for a handle. It is not
exclusively interested in categorizing them according to function and utility
within a conceptual framework designed by and for sectional interests.
Following Pelz
‘contemplation’ as a mode of knowing, I have endeavoured to use the German
concept ‘kennen’ - not a ‘provable’ manipulatable knowing (the German concept
‘wissen’), rather kennen implies a knowing to become better acquainted
with Neville’s way – to become even more familiar with it – ‘to kennen’
following Pelz is ‘denoting something personal [and inter-personal],
subjective, unfinished and unfinishable, involving me and interesting me’ (1974, p. 80-83). It is relational knowing (Gergen 2005).
Allied to this is a process
Jeremy Narby calls defocusing (1998). As a metaphor for defocusing, Narby speaks
of those stereo pictures where the three-dimensional image only appears
suddenly with the relaxed defocused gaze. Examples of defocusing approaches are
daydreaming, nocturnal soliloquies, and following Pelz, contemplation. Pelz (1974, p. 80-83) goes on to say that:
The fate of one man, one women, one child,
during a vast international upheaval or natural disaster, faithfully and
sympathetically represented, can inform us more thoroughly concerning the reality
of that situation than any number of statistics or objective descriptions.
One of the challenges in
writing was what Eisner called ‘the untranslatable’ – ‘there is no verbal
equivalent for Bach’s Mass in B Minor’ (1991, p.235). Prose cannot encapsulate the
co-reconstituting lived-life emotive richness of Fraser House. Since an aim of
this thesis is to reveal, I endeavoured to understand ‘the limits and uses of
the forms used to represent what connoisseurship makes available’ and to
recognize and be mindful of how ‘each form shapes content – that is by leaving
out what it cannot represent’ (1991, p.235). I endeavour to give at least a ‘pale cast’
of milieu, mindful that description and explanation are always inadequate. The
derivation of the word ‘explain’ hints at this – Latin ‘ex-planus’ meaning ‘out
of the two dimensional’ (from a 1978 discussion with Werner Pelz) - that is,
conveying an impoverished representation of the multidimensional; I was
constantly challenged by making sense of rich interwoven complexity.
There
is a German expression that links to connoisseurship,
‘Dichter und Denken’ (Pelz 1974). As an example, some
very talented creative people are called 'dichter und denken'. When using this
term to refer to say a poet, the speaker is suggesting that the listener merges
in his or her reflection the poet, the poem making and the poem. This is
calling for us to engage in a very rich form of reflective contemplating about
process. It is about our intersubjectively responding to the intermingling of
the three elements, i.e., the poet, the poem making and the poem. In doing the
research I contemplated Neville as Dichter und Denken. I endeavoured to enter into
a threefold mode of understanding, intermingling three views of Neville, for
example, in the guise of evolver of community psychiatry, secondly, Neville in
the process of evolving community
psychiatry, and Neville’s version of community psychiatry – and then
inter-subjectively linking with all of that.
As
another example, merge Neville, as community wellbeing innovator, the evolving
and sustaining of Fraser House processing, and Fraser House as an unfolding
placed social life world. Do the same with Fraser House outreaching and the
evolving of Laceweb networking. Note that it is easy to think about any of the
three aspects of the above sets’ separately. Thinking of two simultaneously is
more 'work', and merging the three in contemplation towards relational knowing
(kennen) is typically a challenge - though a worthwhile experience into a new
(higher?) more connexity-based mode of reflecting/perception (making sense of
the senses).
Another
resonant process for subtle sensing I endeavoured to use was Wolff’s twin
concepts of ‘surrender’ and ‘catch’ (1976, p. 20). For Wolff,
‘surrender’ involves ‘total involvement, suspension of received notions,
pertinence of everything, identification, and risk of being hurt’. In
surrendering one leaves oneself open to ‘catch’ - meaning ‘the cognitive or
existential result, yield or harvest, new conceiving or new conceptualising – a
new being-in-the-world’. Werner Pelz introduced me to surrender and catch
during 1978 and I have explored this ever since. Suspension of received notions
is a major experiential shift.
Wolff refers to Tolstoy’s
writing of the character Levin being with his beloved Kitty in Anna Karenina:
Then for the first time, he
clearly understood...that he was not simply close to her, but that he could not
tell where he ended and she began (Wolff 1976, p. 20).
Wolff uses this quote in
making the point that ‘in surrender as in love, differentiation between
subject, act and object disappear - an example of the suspension of even
essential categories among our received notions (Wolff 1976, p. 22).’ He is
talking about realizing connexity. Wolff refers to ‘subject, act and object’.
These are the three aspects of dichter and denken. Wolff’s undifferentiated
surrendering merges the richness of perceiving subject and act and object in an
undifferentiated melding.
With Structure/Event Process
Analysis I was looking for connexity within and between events and other
happenings, and their form/structure and processes, and the nexus between
people constituting these unfoldings. I was looking for fractals, emergence and
mutual-causality (Neuman 1997, p. 433).
After the emotional turmoil
of learning of Neville’s impending death, I allowed everything I had done to
just ‘settle’ inside, to give it all room to sort itself out. It was nearly a
year later when I had a feeling that I was ready to make more sense of it all,
including his death; I had busied myself in the meantime with reading more
extensively about qualitative methods and the Keyline literature. As well, I
reviewed the the following literature areas - Prigogine & Stengers, ‘Order
out of Chaos’ (1984); secondly, on fuzziology, commencing with
Dimitrov (2002); thirdly, on deep ecology commencing with
Arne Naess (1998); fourthly, on emergent properties commencing
with Fritjof Capra (1997); fifthly, on holistic open systems
commencing with Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1950) and Fred Emery (1969); and sixthly, on self organizing systems and
autopoiesis commencing with Maturana (1970). Insights from this literature review are
interspersed throughout this thesis.
Beveridge (1950) speaks about having a purposeful break in
these terms:
The most characteristic
circumstance of an intuition are a period of intense work on the problem
accompanied by a desire for its solution, abandonment of the work with the
attention on something else, then the appearance of the idea with dramatic
suddenness and often a sense of certainty.
I did have clarity and
sudden insights ‘out of the blue’ after this long break. Other sudden insights
occurred unexpectedly throughout the research. A key thing I found with the
sudden insights was to write them up immediately they occurred as they had a
tendency to disappear beyond recall as fast as they came. I also found that not
reading my writing for a number of weeks would allow me to see with ‘fresh
eyes’. I could far more easily spot things like clumsy expression, ambiguity,
punctuation errors and the like when the material was less familiar.
Neville was right when he
said that my Laceweb writing was, ‘like a scientific detective story’. Neville
in no way did things for me. I had to do lots of detective work. Complicating
my task was that Neville and his father’s actions and ways were largely
non-linear, and mirrored nature; these actions and ways were pervasively
inter-connected, inter-woven, interdependent and inter-related – what I have
defined as having connexity. Neville and his father were both ‘groundbreaking’
- to use an appropriate metaphor - world leaders in their separate, though as
it turns out, very related fields. There was scant literature that I could find
on links between Indigenous wisdom, sustainable agriculture, psychosocial
wellbeing and epochal transitions. As well, a lot of what they were doing was
not mentioned in their writing. For example, Neville and his father were both
pioneers in the evolving studies of chaos, self-organizing systems, emergence,
uncertainty and complexity, and yet none of these themes are mentioned in
Neville’s or his father’s writings. As well, Neville never mentioned either of
the terms Keyline or Cultural Keyline in any of his Fraser House writings.
While ‘Cultural Keyline’ is such a central concept to Neville and his way, I
have found no mention of this term in any of his other writings either.
However, Cultural Keyline is implicitly present throughout Neville’s
writing if one understands the term and how to discern it.
Another complicating factor
was that there were fractal forms and other resonant aspects to everything
Neville and his father were engaged in, though these are not immediately
obvious. If this fractal quality and connexity is not recognized, as it was not
recognized by me for halfway through my research, an inquirer would miss the
inter-related essence and inner potency of Neville (and his father’s) work. Any
amount of analysis of the parts that missed their connexity, or laboured to
make links when they are already pervasive, would again miss the essence.
Consistent with Neville’s
way of enabling self-organizing, he would create contexts where I would
discover his way and the things he had done. For example, the first time I knew
that Neville wrote poetry was when I was handed two of his poems at his funeral
by his second wife Lien. These are included at the commencement of this thesis.
My sense is that these two poems introduce the thesis artistically and
succinctly. In some sense they say more than my first chapter! They are typical
of Neville’s potent minimalism. I found out from Neville’s son Quan that
Neville had written over 2000 poems and he never told me about them. He knew I
would find them if I was thorough and persistent. As at writing I have not had
access to these other poems.
In our December 1993
Yungaburra conversations, Neville said that he was very conscious of not
overloading people. Neville well knew how much lay behind his simplicity,
brevity and strategic precision. He said that if he was linking with an
Aboriginal natural nurturer for the first few times and started talking about
Fraser House and epochal change, he would likely overwhelm her and he would
probably never see her again. He very slowly mentioned things over months and
years. The same applied to me. He had very slowly shared aspects with me. I was
it seems, a slow learner.
While I had been writing
through rather than writing up, I came to the time when I thought incorrectly
that the thesis was essentially finished. Even then, resonant with Neville’s
scrupulous writing, I carried out sustained reshaping of the manuscript,
especially looking at the sequencing and juxtapositioning of ideas. Creating
headings and subheadings helped in both sequencing and thematic analysis. At
one stage I made good use of Microsoft’s ‘Outline’ program that allowed me to
look at the words at the start of each paragraph to check sequencing and sense.
When I essentially ‘knew
what was in the research document’ I particularly used Neville’s notion of the
‘survival of the fitting’. As I scoured my file notes and musings ‘what fitted’
‘survived’ and was woven in to the document. Similarly, what was already ‘in
the document’ was tested for ‘fit’ and placement. If it did not fit it was
reframed, repositioned or discarded.
A final period of writing
entailed weaving everything together in a tighter, finer weave – so it was
appropriately web-like. This phase lasted another eighteen months. My
Aboriginal interviewee Marjorie Roberts told me:
It has to be a fine weaving; anything less
than that would not reflect Neville’s life work.
Consistent with Neville and
his father’s ‘letting nature tell them what to do’, in the final months my
thesis was ‘telling me what to do.’
This chapter has described
the research methods used in data collecting. The chapter commenced with a
discussion of my being an insider looking in. My note taking and interviewing
methods were outlined. Data collection (using a combination of interviewing,
archival research, on-site visits and immersion in holistic social action) was
discussed. My theoretical perspectives and Neville’s research methods were
detailed. The chapter concluded with an outline of my use of naturalistic
enquiry, the steps I took to ensure trustworthiness, and the processes I used
for analysis.
The following chapter
explores the precursors of Neville Yeomans’ way of psychosocial being and
action, and their emergence and adaptation from the joint work Neville did with
his father and brother Allan in evolving Keyline sustainable agriculture
practice, and the family’s drawing from Australian and Oceania Indigenous ways.
[1] Milton
Erickson the therapist would also use assignments of tasks and challenges Hanlon, W. D. (1987).
Taproots: Underlying Principles of Milton Erickson's Therapy and Hypnosis.
London, W.W. Norton & Co..