Working as a research engineer at the Sugar Research Institute for ten years and then as a consultant to the sugar industry with the Brisbane – based Batstone Hendry and Associates, I travelled extensively in North Queensland, looking at transport systems and installing computer systems in sugar mills. In 1972 I won an industry prize for my work on the scheduling of sugar cane railways which saved mills hundreds of thousands of dollars when first introduced.
Fortunately I had otherwise unavailable skills and knowledge badly needed which gave me entry to areas barred to women under normal circumstances. At times the reactions were hostile from professional engineers, but more usually people were simply mystified and worried about how to deal with me. Many is the cup of tea or meal I have had with mill workers’ families to allay the unfounded fears of their wives.
Things have changed over the years. I can now chit-chat happily about my work with strangers without feeling like an alien being. I can now be outwardly proud of being an engineer. For the odd fleeting moment I occasionally fell marginally put out that I’m no longer special. But don’t worry, the moment passes very quickly and I’m thankful that it’s easier for new graduates today.
I can honestly claim to have done my bit for change in the Institution of Engineers. Can you imagine it? The Mackay branch used to have men-only Christmas parties and the annual dinner was held at the men’s club. The first year they sneaked me like a thief into the function room by the kitchen door so the club patrons wouldn’t be scandalised by the presence of a woman on the premises. The next year sanity prevailed and the dinner was held in a hotel with husbands and wives invited. In International Women’s Year, 1975, they voted me in as President of the Mackay Branch.
The format for branch meetings had always been a lecture by a local engineer or guest on a learned topic, followed by supper. I managed to introduce some variations, in particular a series of forums where the group debated topical issues. This seemed to be extremely important to me because very often engineers plan in isolation, as a result inflicting unnecessary stupidities on the general public. As a result of these forums the city council provided smaller trees for the footpath and consulted with the electricity board on where to position the trees, rather than plant forest giants directly under the overhead lines.
When Queensland Rail built a new railway line through an outlying suburb, so many children could no long walk to their old school that virtually overnight the population of one school dropped by some hundreds, while at another tiny school with no facilities the population exploded. It wasn’t until the railway, main roads and consulting civil engineers were jointly made to realise what was happening than a footbridge over the railway was built.
As I mentioned earlier, I love teaching and have always looked for part-time opportunities. One of my most pleasant assignments was to be invited by the Mackay High School to give a series of lessons to some problem Grade 8 children who were very intelligent buy failing. As an experiment, the group of boys and girls was taken out of normal classes for some weeks and three or four outsiders like myself, were invited to spend time with the kids in any way we pleased. I chose to introduce them to formal logic and some of the classic problems which have puzzled philosophers and engineers for thousands of years. They responded incredibly to the challenge and for a short time stopped being problems exhibiting instead their natural intelligence and superior abilities.
For many years I taught part-time at the Mackay College of TAFE, in particular at the Sugar School where shift engineers and shift chemists are trained for the sugar industry. Although girls were accepted for the shift chemist’s course, the school’s prospectus stated that they would find employment only as laboratory assistants, not as shift chemists. To my surprise, the battle I fought to change the prospectus was long and bitter, even though the wording in it was illegal. Eventually the discriminatory language was removed, but to my knowledge the industry still shies away from female chemists and engineers in positions of authority.
Again it was quite acceptable for me to be in the team setting up the engineers’ course for the Sugar School and for me to teach the future male shift engineers, but girls were not permitted to enter the engineering course.
I rarely become involved in women’s issues and I am wary of some of the excesses of the feminist movement. For myself, I have managed to do anything I pleased simply by going ahead and doing it and take no notice of anyone who said I couldn’t. If I have any influence, it will be from example, not from oratory or from joining movements.
However I will fight tooth and nail to keep all doors open for both men and women, especially educational door. Once there is no bar on women entering a course or profession, I feel no further need for artificial encouragement, for affirmative action or for redressing the balance. From personal experience I know that thumbing your nose at the prevailing attitudes of the society in which you live is very likely to lead to loneliness and unhappiness. How silly and potentially dangerous to push young girls into engineering courses as many universities do, simply because the government wants to improve the statistics (and provides funds to do so), without some accompanying discussion on the realities of engineering working environments.
Simply open the doors. If girls want to walk in, they will. If they don’t want to walk in, they must not be pushed.
In early 1985 I sought an appointment with the Dean of Engineering at the Queensland Institute of Technology because I wanted to tackle him about his newspaper advertisements trying to attract women into engineering courses. Advertisements for male students always show male engineers in white shirts and ties in clean offices, but the new advertisements showed a girl in a hard hat. Why? We argued for some time and then I ended up with a job as tutor which later extended to lecturing in electrical engineering. Towards the end of the following years left to found Mosaic Electronics. Since then I’ve lectured part-time at QUT in 1990 and at Griffith University in 1991.
Now I have an appointment as fractional senior lecturer in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Queensland and expect to stay with this department for some time.
Although small towns are wonderful for bringing up young children, the lack of facilities can be very frustrating. No public library, no book shops, very little music or theatre. But there were many like us not prepared to sit and wait for the town to grow before the good things happen. If you wait until they or the Government do something about it, you miss out. Our family became very involved with the local branch of the Arts Council and I took my turn as Treasurer, Secretary, and President as necessary. I could never describe adequately the amount of pleasure my family derived over the years from the concerts, school performances, opera, ballet, and art shows brought to town by the Arts Council. The number of shows we could pack into a year was limited solely by the energy of our local branch committee.
More than anything else I love music and have played the piano and sung in choirs all my life. It worried me that our children had no music at school and no opportunities to enjoy the pleasures of singing in a choir. The battle was already on to get instrumental teaching in schools, and to stimulate the growth of music in the town, our Arts Council branch was putting pressure on the councils to employ a music coordinator. Eventually Mary Lyons, now Manager of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, was appointed and slowly exciting things started to happen.
In the meanwhile, I started a choir at my children’s school so that they could sing, but as so often happens in these cases, my daughter wasn’t interested and my son marginally so. But I struggled on with the North Mackay High School choir at the same time forming a second choir for primary school children, both of which are still going. Mary Lyons started a youth orchestra and together we worked on establishing a music school. My husband bought the old butter factory and partially did it up so that we could let most of it, keeping separate areas for a drama school and music school. We begged for Australia Council funds, imported teachers and with a shoestring budget and much community good will and assistance, tarted the Mackay Community Music