OBITUARY OF DR. NEVILLE YEOMANS
PSYCHIATRIST 1928 – 2000
Posted Jan 2001 Updated April 2014.
Neville Yeoman's affection
for and empathy with the original inhabitants of Australia began very early in
his life when, at the age of 3, he was saved by an Aborigine after he had
wandered off and become lost in the bush in far north Queensland. This rescue
from certain death, laid the foundations for his later work with Indigenous
communities as a carer, with an intense interest in the peoples and their
cultures. He was a co-healer rather than a prescriber and believed in
approaching the problems of mental health, alcoholism and drug addiction from a
community perspective. He devoted much of his life to providing counselling and
treatment to those most under-privileged and handicapped especially women,
alcoholics and drug addicts. After 1975, he extended these activities to
northern Australia, from the Atherton Tablelands to the Kimberleys, from Arnhem
Land to Central Australia. In a sense it was a repetition of his childhood
years when his family travelled like ‘gypsies’ throughout the northern parts of
Australia with his prospecting father.
Neville Yeomans was
born in Sydney on 7 October 1928 to Percival Alfred ("P.A.") and Rita
Yeomans. It was the depression and life was hard. His father, Percival A.
Yeomans, a mining engineer (who later became famous for his contributions to
farming including Keyline Farming, City Forest, Shakaerator plough and other
farming developments) took the family around northern Australia trying their
luck at prospecting. These were important years for Neville Yeomans when many
aspects of his character were moulded.
The vagabond
existence of the family meant that they were never in the one place for long.
Experiences such as attending 13 schools in one 12-month period, taught him
that friendships were ephemeral and superficial.
He completed his
schooling at Scots College in Sydney and then went to Sydney University from
where he graduated as a Bachelor of Science (Biology) in 1948. He wanted to
work with and heal people and he went on to obtain his Bachelor's degree in
Medicine and Surgery in 1956. But it was people's minds that fascinated him
most and he completed a Diploma in Psychological Medicine in 1959. In the same
year he won an overseas scholarship that enabled him to meet with some of the
World's leading psychiatrists. Neville Yeomans was a brilliant and sensitive
man who understood things in their context, and he had an ability to see things
from different perspectives to those commonly held.
He was appalled by
the methods used at the time to treat psychiatric disease (especially shock
treatment which he regarded as a crime) and on his return from overseas he
established and became the Director of Fraser House at North Ryde Psychiatric
Clinic, Australia's first family Therapeutic Community with accommodation for
some 86 adults and children. It was a revolutionary contextual approach that
treated psychiatric disease on a family and community basis instead of
treatment of just the individual. Patients were able to be rehabilitated and
return to society rather than being locked away out of sight and restrained
with drugs and straightjackets. Many of his peers did not understand this
radical approach to treatment and Neville was frequently vilified for being out
of step with the main stream of things. It is interesting to note that 40 years
later, his approach to psychiatric treatment has become the norm rather than
the exception.
During the period
from 1959 to 1972, he ran "healing community" courses for Aboriginal
and Islander peoples in Sydney, in country New South Wales and at Alice Springs
in Central Australia.
He was the
Co-ordinator of Community Mental Health for New South Wales Health Department
from 1965 to 1970.
He published many
papers on psychiatric treatment (which are now held in the Mitchell Library in
Sydney) and with a colleague, wrote a book "Fraser House: Theory Practice
and Evaluation of a Therapeutic Community" published by Springer, New York
(Clark and Yeomans 1969).
As his interest in community
work developed, he completed a Diploma in Sociology at the University of New
South Wales in 1963, to better understand the social aspects of human
responses. He also broadened his interests to studying other cultures and their
values and, among other things, joined the Australia Eurasian Association in
the late 1960's, and followed his passion for multiculturalism. He regarded
Australia as a "cooking pot" rather than a "melting pot" of
cultures, cooking up a new and better culture for the future! It was on a
platform of multiculturalism that he stood for the seat of Philip (Liberal,
Sydney) in the 1972 elections and gained sufficient votes not to lose his
deposit, but failed to gain the seat.
Not content with his
already numerous qualifications he went on to complete a Bachelor of Law degree
from the University of New South Wales in 1975 and was admitted to the Bar. In
spite of this, he was more interested in mediation than litigation and closely
studied the mediation systems used in China. He studied Japanese and Chinese
languages and travelled overseas to Asia, Europe and the Americas on several
occasions over the years. He was an avid supporter of Blissymbolics, an
international sign language based on symbols.
Neville Yeomans was
drawn more and more to the area he grew up in and in 1975 he moved back to
north Queensland where he became engrossed in working with Aboriginal people.
He conducted a private psychiatric counselling and family therapy practice,
facilitated community support for Aboriginal and Ethnic groups, established
"Healing Haven" houses in North Queensland and assisted in the
creation of a black women's shelter in Cairns.
In the early 1980's
he became interested in and a keen qualified practitioner of Neuro Linguistic
Programming (NLP) which was a revolutionary way of treating emotional states
and of helping people overcome psychiatric illness and addictions. He and a
friend, Terry Widders, set up NLP Centres in Cairns, Townsville in Queensland
and Bondi Junction in Sydney. Neville Yeomans continued to pay the price of
being a pioneer of new ideas and was regarded as a pariah by many of his
professional colleagues in the establishment, with many refusing to refer
patients to him.
In 1987 he was a
consultant to Petford Aboriginal Training Farm in far North Queensland and from
1989 to 1994 he facilitated camp-outs/Intercultural Healing Training festivals
in the Atherton Tablelands and at the Petford Aboriginal Training Farm. In 1990
he was an Adviser to the Australian South Sea Islander United Council. He was
on the Steering Committee for Training on Torture and Trauma in 1994 and
conducted a three-day training course in Darwin. His working career came to an
end in 1997 in Darwin where he was discovered sick with bladder cancer by his
youngest son, and brought back to Sydney for treatment.
Neville Yeomans was a
very intelligent, passionate and insightful person with a deep sense of purpose
and an ability to focus absolutely on the job in hand, a characteristic that
often made it difficult for those closest to him. He was also an introspective,
artistic and aesthetic person who loved music (he played the clarinet) and art
and he wrote poetry on a regular basis from the mid 1960's. Many of the poems
demonstrate his sharp wit and sense of fun. The hundreds of poems he wrote,
which give glimpses of the man within, will be published shortly. His passion
was to treat people in need, his skill was his ability to engage with people
and to make suggestions for change. His dying wish was to leave
a legacy of clinics for Aboriginal people to enable them to help themselves.
Neville Yeomans died
in Brisbane on 30 May 2000 following a painful struggle with cancer. He spent
his final days at home, surrounded by members of his family and friends.
He is survived by his two brothers, two half-sisters, five
children from two dissolved marriages, and eight grandchildren.
Peter N. Carroll
Leura, N.S.W.
Peter Carroll first met Neville through Peter
being married to one of Lien’s best friends. The wives had been friends since
been in Kindergarten together in Vietnam. They had both won scholarships to
study in Australia. Peter has worked for the Asian Development bank in
supporting cattle growing and was for many years based University of
Philippines in Quezon City, Manila.