Supplementary section

Anne Richards PhD

Dan O’Neill had a mission. At a time when a fiercely conservative government ensured that its police force and especially its Special Branch, policed dissent with a brutal persistency, he inspired and led campaigns for civil rights, social justice, anti-war, anti-conscription and anti-apartheid. He was a powerful orator; his voice was inspiring, resolute and irrepressible. It became imprinted on the consciousness of thousands of University of Queensland students and staff. This had an impact far beyond the UQ campus and the original campaign initiatives.

This social justice and civil rights consciousness spread across groups, each group a cluster of multiplying tangents and talents. Many tangents lead to action plans, the type of action depending on the nature of the group, its personal, intellectual passion and expertise. This expertise, of course, was provided by studies with various faculties of the University of Queensland.

From the late 1960s, gaining momentum through the 1970s, students and some staff of UQ engaged with providing an essential civil rights, social services, educational, environmental infrastructure for Queensland’s future. These included, but were not limited to:

·       Caxton Legal Centre – free advisory service with a few full-time staff, volunteer solicitors and law students which is still operating.

·       Aboriginal Legal Aid Centre initially working from two tiny rooms in Roma Street, first established by Denis Walker and Paul Richards, then Wayne Goss who later became Premier. It provided free legal advice and court representation which is still operating.

·       Aboriginal and TSI issues. Working alongside Indigenous activists, white graduates and students including, developed:

1)    Research on Aboriginal missions taking in social services reports on all settlements and targeted activism to improve living conditions.

2)    Aboriginal health initiatives: children’s health, women’s health, research to address specific issues such as alcoholism and petrol sniffing.

3)    Exposing police prejudice and brutality, sadly still happening.

·       Environmental activism

1)    Save the Reef campaign – PhDs and professionals researching Great Barrier Reef which is ongoing on many fronts.

2)    Alternative energy research and activism.

3)    Research on pollution and dredging of Brisbane River; the role of mudflats in river and ocean ecosystems. There are many projects and strands here.

4)    Numerous and diverse research and action campaigns on endangered animals and plants.

·       Women’s issues:

1)    Women’s health including contraception and abortion activism. Women’s health clinics and ongoing medical research.

2)    Women’s Shelter at Red Hill which provided support for abused women and children, and then set up safe houses.

3)    Rape Crisis Centre in Roma Street.

4)    Childcare centres: firstly an on campus childcare campaign – there was no childcare – and then throughout Queensland.

·       4ZZ (later 4ZZZ) took to the airwaves in December 1975. It was one of the first FM stereo, public, non-commercial radio stations in Australia. It took three years of lobbying government and local community organisations to get this legally established.

·       Alternative education initiatives such as the Brisbane Independent School at Pullenvale which is still operating.

·       A flourishing of the arts across all disciplines. Actors, directors, writers such as Bryan Nason, William (Willie) Yang, Geoffrey Rush, Billie Brown and Errol O’Neill led the way.

·       Research and investigative journalism across every facet of Queensland life.

Every faculty of the University of Queensland produced activists with a different vision for the future, a new awareness of challenges, political knowledge and the courage to push innovation and change. It was, arguably, the first impetus for multi-disciplinary research and activism in Queensland. Certainly, this list illustrates a powerful fulfilment of the University of Queensland mission.

Dan O’Neill was not directly involved in all of this immense mobilisation of expertise across so many diverse sectors of the community, nor was he the only leader throughout the 1960s and 1970s. However, he imbued a vision and, by example, inspired the courage and determination to create a better Queensland for all its citizens.

Les Hooper

Introduction

I am very conscious of Dan O’Neill’s intimate connection with the University of Queensland as long-time teacher, mentor and activist. These roles are continuous with his current leadership of the UQ’s Michie Reading Group and numerous associated groups dedicated to the reading of great texts, literary, philosophical and literary-critical. For me he is emblematic of one of the central roles of the university, the encouragement of open and humane inquiry. Through his many personal qualities of integrity, leadership, passion, courage and intellectual generosity, he embodies the highest possible qualities of teaching. I believe I speak for several generations of UQ alumni, as well as the wider community, in saying that our university experience will have been coloured, enriched and sustained by the example of his lifelong dedication to inquiry, particularly in the cause of social justice. The University of Queensland should be commended for its ongoing support of community learning through Dan’s groups, as generations of Queensland students are indebted to him for the formation of their own character and their pursuit of a better informed, more creative, and just society.

Inside Dan’s Classroom

I was fortunate to attend UQ in the late sixties as a student in the English Language and Literature program. Among several inspiring teachers encountered in that time in the English faculty, Dan impressed myself and my peers as someone upholding a courageous and uncompromising critique of the (for me) untested assumptions of the political and social world from which we were emerging. He impressed as someone of serious stature and searching intellect, willing to live out his convictions at considerable cost to his own security and with some indifference to the norms of academic and professional advancement. Then as now he showed less interest in the academy as an instrument of personal and professional advancement than in its deeper roots in western culture as a place dedicated to the open exchange of ideas and the advancement of human understanding.

What became clear over time was that to be inside Dan’s classroom, was to be both in the lecture or tutorial room, where he brought a radical perspective, but also a respectful attention to texts and to the ideas of students and colleagues, and to be in the public space, in forums where he could be the firebrand orator and activist, willing to follow through on what he felt were logical imperatives of political debate, willing to confront authorities who represented a reactionary cultural and political caste in the Queensland of the late sixties.

In retrospect, to be inside his “classroom” was to experience the vital life of the University, something not confined to individual scholarship and credentialling, but to a communal enterprise of free exchange and lived ideals. For many, this remains its greatest legacy.  Whether you agreed or disagreed with his views, Dan’s commitment to open speech and to debate was so much a part of his nature, and so obviously authentic, it couldn’t fail to be deeply impressive and formative for young minds facing personal and political challenges, and fighting to balance idealism with the demands of the cultural milieu they were about to enter. Many like myself, I suspect, took Dan’s classroom with us into our professional and personal lives, as inspiration and as benchmark.

One personal vignette that might illustrate Dan’s public “classroom” is an incident I recall from the Springbok demonstration in 1971 at the Tower Mill Motel on Wickham Terrace. Several of the Springbok players and their entourage had come down to the street from their hotel rooms to confront demonstrators and to defend what to them were the self-evident axioms of apartheid against the mob of (as they no doubt saw it) pathetic, badly informed and naïve leftists. I remember Dan holding his ground in a little knot of vehement figures, arguing his case with passion, but rationally, cogently, with instances and an obvious knowledge of context that obliged his opponents to engage with him, and there ensued, for a couple of minutes at least, quite a serious exchange of ideas between these inimical groups. No-one walked away converted, but perhaps a first small chink appeared in the watertight certainties that were destined to collapse in the next 20 years.

Inside Dan’s Reading Groups

My most recent contacts have come since my retirement in 2016 as a member of several of the UQ sponsored reading groups convened by Dan, on texts including the entirety of Classical Greek Drama, Aristotelean Ethics and Rhetoric, Paradise Lost, Don Quixote, the Poetry of William Blake, and various iconic European and Australian novels. In 2023, as a continuing member of ZOOM groups led by Dan, I am looking forward to exploring new works, including Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

It has been a great opportunity and privilege to participate in these groups, sponsored by the university and led by Dan. It is difficult to calculate their value. I think they must constitute an extraordinary cultural phenomenon: a free, open university level experience comprising close, rigorous encounters with canonical texts, not only for the third age, but for all interested participants of any age.  These groups are a cultural and community achievement of which the University must be enormously proud. They are much more than casual encounters with an arbitrary booklist, they are a deep engagement with the ideas that sustain us as a culture, and with every facet of textuality: history, artistry, aesthetics and philosophy.

A remarkable feature of these readings is the way he is able to synthesise ideas drawn from diverse disciplines, notably literature and philosophy, but also history, linguistics, philology and aesthetics, and that he remains deeply curious and well informed, for example, about the implications of contemporary science and technology on our readings. It is evident as well that his response to texts is not constrained by ideology or literary theory; he remains as open to and deeply curious about the contemporary as he is about the classical canon. He is as fluent in French structural theory and linguistics as he is in classical scholarship, or say, Russian modernism. For Dan, every text is a living text.  There is never any sense that a work as remote in time as, to take one example, the Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle, is merely the artefact of a particular place and time; its ideas must be turned over thoughtfully and considered as though expressed for the first time to a new audience. 

Like all members of these groups, I marvel not only at the sweep and depth of knowledge Dan O’Neill brings to each session, but his capacity to generate enthusiasm and to inspire reflection in a diverse readership and at many levels for such highly diverse texts. His commitment to the text is contagious; in each session there is something challenging, something contested, something to consider more deeply, and it is often his insistence on lingering over a single passage or revisiting some theme that had been passed over too briefly in a previous session, that provides a richer, deeper access to the most challenging ideas. It is remarkable to many of us that in most of these sessions, he seems barely conscious of the passage of time and is often surprised when reminded that our two hours of communal reading and musing has elapsed for another week. For him (and for us) those two hours entail full immersion in the text, and afterwards we continue to be haunted by the ideas, continue to exchange our thoughts and opinions between sessions via email. We need to remind ourselves that these sessions, so important to us as welcome interruptions in the round of daily life and duties, are for him the vital centre of a life lived for the sake of intellectual inquiry. For him, the “examined life” is a lived reality, and while we might participate in one or two weekly sessions, he continues to manage, prepare, inspire and lead multiple sessions weekly, and has done so over many years.

Legacy

Dan O’Neill’s faculty of selfless commitment, while so rare, is no accident. It is something authentic in him, and represents a lifelong devotion to literature and philosophy, not as instruments or objects but as living forces. This is why he continues to be an inspiring teacher and mentor, and why for several generations of students, he represents some of the best ideals of education and one of the many important legacies of the university with which for many of us he is identified.

I am one of the thousands who would have experienced this personal impact on our growth both as students of literature and future citizens, many fortunate as I have been to renew our contact through the Michie reading groups. Many more thousands would have been influenced indirectly by the work of those he inspired as a lifelong activist and teacher.

I am sure that the University of Queensland recognises Dan’s stature of one of the greatest of many great alumni. Any honour conveyed on him by the university would be richly deserved and would certainly be welcomed by the alumni and the wider community he continues to serve.

Biographical notes on contributors

Dr Lee Richard Duffield was for over 20 years a journalist with Australian ABC, in several roles including as first news editor on the Triple-Jay youth network and as European Correspondent at the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was later Deputy Director of Ministerial Media with the Goss Government, and a Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Queensland University of Technology, where he served for four years as a staff member on the governing QUT Council. He is Media Editor of the online publication Independent Australia and is a member of the University of Queensland Senate, elected by graduates of the university. He studied politics, journalism and education at UQ during the years of conflict, 1965-68; obtained an MA with Merit from Sydney University (1983), and Doctor of Philosophy degree from James Cook University (2003). He has published widely on internationalisation of the curriculum in higher education, European affairs, new media, and development journalism in the Asia – Pacific.

Les Hooper was a student in the English Honours program at University of Queensland from 1967 until 1970, and briefly after that in the postgraduate program – encountering Dan O’Neill both as teacher and civil rights activist. He is a former Head of Visual Arts at Kelvin Grove State College and was President of the Queensland Art Teachers’ Association during the early 2000s. He began a teaching career in 1975, teaching English and Visual Art in several state high schools. In 1999 he became the project officer for the InSEA (International Society for Education through Art) Congress in Brisbane, then obtained the appointment as Head of Visual Arts at KGSC. He presented at numerous national and international conferences on art education initiatives, including an award-winning Urban Design program for senior students (“Living City”), and a design excellence program for primary students (“2 Day City”), subsequently featured in QPAC’s “Out of the Box” festival. In 2008 Les Hooper was awarded the inaugural Smithsonian Fellowship in Design Education by the Queensland Government, working on design education initiatives with the team at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York during 2009. Since retirement in 2016, he has been involved in several of Dan O’Neill’s UQ based reading groups.

Margaret (Marg) O’Donnell AO served as Director General of three Queensland Government Departments: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Policy and Development (1998-2001), Equity and Fair Trading (1998-2001), Arts Queensland (2001-2004). She was Senior Conciliator and acting Director of the Human rights Commission in Brisbane; Director of the Womens’ Information Service - Queensland, attached to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet; and inaugural Legal Ombudsman of Victoria, among other positions. A qualified mediator and mentor, she has chaired Not for Profit, University and Government Boards, including Breast Cancer Network Australia, Legal Aid Queensland and Griffith Law School Visiting Committee. She is a Mentor with McCarthy Mentoring, and has also provided consultancy services on conflict resolution, Aboriginal Affairs, Women’s Policy, the Arts and Local Government, to local state and federal governments. Marg O’Donnell’s original degree is in Social Work. She is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and received the Order of Australia in 2013.

Terry O’Gorman AO describes himself entering university in 1970 as a “highly conservative law student, one of 15 children from a very Catholic and very conservative family”. The following year he acted as a legal observer during the demonstrations against the Springboks Rugby Union tour. As a practitioner in the field of criminal law, he spent his early years as a lawyer with Aboriginal Legal Aid. He was for several years President of the Queensland Council for Civil Liberties (1979-85, 1990-94), becoming engaged in several issues of freedom and authority, for example connected with Aboriginal deaths in custody, the treatment of asylum seekers, introduction of the Smart Card and Go card. During the Fitzgerald inquiry into official corruption he cross examined the former Premier, Sir Joh Bjelke Petersen, about abuse of authority by police. He encountered Dan O’Neill through his position with the QCCL particularly as a legal observer during the street march bans of 1977 – 1980. In 2023 he continues as Vice President of the QCCL.

Dr Anne Richards teaches at Griffith University. She received a Griffith Review Fellowship, with her novella Demonstrating Defiance being published in 2018. She was awarded an ARC Post-Doctoral Fellowship for her work on the co-edited Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing (2007). In 2020 Anne Richards published A Book of Doors, a memoire on her time as a student commencing in 1969. She would write that confused by the conflicts in society, she looked forward to university, where Brian Laver and Dan O’Neill were already speaking at the forum: “Two of my favourite books were Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. Tolstoy’s complex characters provided critiques of love and war, sorrow and forgiveness. I yearned for conversations such as these … My first week on campus I knew I was in the right place. As I walked towards the refectory the cryptic tag, ‘Yossarian Lives’ from Catch 22 was stencilled in black at intervals along the concrete pathway. Large-lettered flyers denounced war on every post. The forum near the refectory acted like a magnet. This was where I would join the conversation.” Anne Richards’s awareness of the seriousness of the social divisions then occurring, as one of the “radical” generation, would be deeply engraved by the experience of homelessness, ejected from the family home for taking part in the Brisbane Moratorium march in 1970.