Chapter 2: Training Days Episode 3: The Fire Starter

Good teachers are fire starters, I find.  The intellectual firestorm they created in the young mind would spread for me into uncharted territories as fiercely as the Victorian bushfires in the summer.   By the time I got into the third Honours year of the geography programme in 1968, my mind and mental horizon had expanded beyond the bounds of geography, while deepening it.  Like the engulfing fire, they couldn’t be confined by artificial firebreaks.  Like one starving without food from wandering in the desert, I found myself ravishing over a feast of knowledge that still left me unsatiated.  This intellectual hunger led to an explosion of scholarly energy that carried me through those training days and well into the nether worlds of policy in my subsequent career.   Looking back, it was a first class ride!

Geoff Robinson Today

Geoffrey Robinson was my fire starter.  As part of the second year geography requirement, I enrolled in his quantitative methods class.  What started me off on a lifetime fascination with statistical modeling and analysis and their application in policy studies was Geoff’s demonstration of the use of Markov chains in analyzing the geographical spread of conflict between the Hutu and the Yuroba tribes in Nigeria. From that early stage I saw its use later in diffusion studies of crop practices, ecological invasion, and migration studies.  He created in me an unstoppable urge to explore methodology not confined just to geographic applications, but beyond that disciplinary boundary into economics, sociology even political science.  By the time I entered graduate school in Penn, I was already hot-wired to deal with thinking in statistics and pictures, that enabled me to absorb and assimilate vast amounts of information and to synthesize them into manageable bites of intellectual automata.   I remembered Wolfson’s invention of a new science through the application of what he called artificial automata, as in the Game of Life he created which produced complex patterns from simple rules of generation and initial conditions.  It reminded me also of the later development of fractal geometry and Mandelbrot sets, Thun’s catastrophe theory, and the generative grammar of Noam Chomsky’s linguistic revolution.

The truth was that at the time, geography was in the throes of a quantitative revolution which began in the University of Washington led by W. L. Garrison in the early 60s which  spread through America and to the rest of the world via Wisconsin, Ohio, and Penn State, and Cambridge and Bristol in the UK to Australia.  I was caught in the middle of this revolution by the time I entered Geoffrey Robinson’s class.

The road running through the villages in my fieldwork area in
Hulu Langat, Selangor

Geoff was a student of Richard Chorley in Cambridge, and became a senior lecturer in Monash Geography Department by way of South Africa at the time I first met him.  His specialty was in geomorphology, a part of physical geography concerned with the earth’s surface form and function. He was a rugby player and humanist, still is the latter.   He was a superlative teacher; I learnt a lot from him as he later was to say, quite generously, that he learned as much from me.  It was just not so much what he taught me that was wonderful, which of course they were, but his transfer to me of an attitude towards knowledge acquisition.  And application of quantitative methods in social science.  That fascination with the simulation of the Yuroba-Hutu conflagration led me to a desire to acquire the Fortran programming language, starting with the beginner subset in Monash called Minitran developed in the computer science department.  That was in the stone age of computer programming, way before object programming, GUIs and the advent of Apple and Microsoft.

The facility with physical geography that I developed while at Monash was based on a initial diet of Monkhouse, a geography textbook that I got as class prize in sixth form in RMC, and in basic economics browsing through Samuelson’s texbook even as Anwar Fazal brought us up to speed on Bentham’s economics.  But it was in geography that the quantitative mindset was developed in me from which I branched into other fields of application.  My fascination with models and statistical analysis was nurtured through Geoff’s old teacher Chorley’s book co-authored with Peter Hagget on “Models in Geography”.  My fascination with Geoff’s teaching was reinforced on reading his application of trend surface analysis to central places (a central theory in urban geography) in Victoria State jointly undertaken with Ken Fairbairn of Melbourne University. 

In the third year geomorphology course taught by Geoff, which covered topics such as the formation of river systems (analyzed through graph theory), slope dynamics and fluvial geomorphology, I wrote an essay for Geoff on the dynamics of scouring action on the river bed at different stages of the river flow, which caught Geoff’s attention.  It was a similar experience I had when in first year Powell asked me to read my class assignment on Wegener’s theory of continental drift to the whole class as an example of how to write an essay.  Geoff gave me a mark of 21/19 for that geomorphology class assignment.  I was elated; to this day I don’t know whether that was a mark he wrote upside down, or that he had an aversion towards even denominators!  I didn’t ask him for an explanation then to avoid spoiling the magical feeling I had.

It was natural that I developed a strong feel for economic geography, enabling me to combine both human geography and development economics.  I had been inspired in the latter line of enquiry by my encounter with Rostow’s growth theory in sixth form.  I was set on an economic geography course of study in Monash by a series of impressive lectures by a visiting professor to Monash, Jim Lindberg, from the University of Iowa, in my second year economic geography class; he had written a neat little book, An Introduction to Economic Geography, that incorporated many of the extant theories of land use (von Thunen’s), distribution of urban centres (Christahler’s central place theory) and agglomeration economies (growth centre theory).  Lindberg greatly impressed me not just by his mastery of the material, but his masterful delivery of them, without notes!  It was to become my style when taking up my lecturing job later in USM.  Lindberg’s second year course were supplemented in the third year by another visiting professor, Wickramateleke, on the development geography of Sri Lanka, and by David Lea’s studies of the Pacific Islands.  These courses directly connected me with the Chorley-Haggett’s book on models in geography that led towards the end of my third year to my choice of growth poles as my topic for my Honours thesis in the final year at Monash.

The lynchpin of my shift towards theory was David Harvey’s seminal book on Explanation in Geography that documented the different schools of geographic analysis and led to the end of descriptive approaches typified by Hartshorne’s geography as areal differentiation to the search for generalized locational patterns and spatial laws as typified in the quantitative revolution in geography.  My intellectual heroes at that juncture in my geographic education was Berry, Gould, Olson and Tobler on methodology, and on the theory side Hagerstrand (on life-lines), Friedman (core-periphery theory) and the epitome of geographic thought though an incomplete project, William Bunge (on Theoretical Geography).  My intellectual wanderlust broke through geographic boundaries when I ventured into economics and development through Gunnar Myrdal’s Asian Drama (and his law of cumulative causation), Perroux’s Economic Space ( and the theory of growth poles), and Herbert Simon’s Models of Man (the satisficing theory of economic behaviour), which was imported by Wolpert (later to become my teacher at Penn) into his fine study of cropping patterns in southern Sweden and a behavioural theory of migration.

Throughout this first three intellectually exciting years in Monash I, with Daud and Maria, had remained in Farrer Hall, while Fawziah had moved out to Mrs. Ball’s house in Florence Avenue, and Jo joined her friend Jennie in Glenhuntly.  Of the three sisters, Aminah and Rosnah took up residence in Howitt Hall, while Miskiah joined Faezah in Deakin Hall.  While preoccupied with our respective studies, life in the halls of residence and beyond in Melbourne took its natural course amongst the Malaysian students, and I got progressively closer to Rose who was majoring in economic statistics.   Helping her in her studies enabled me also to acquire increased knowledge in economics and statistics.  

View of KL from the Hulu Langat Forest Reserve, with the
illuminated Twin Towers in middle background.

It was sometime in  early winter of 1968 while still in Farrer that I had received a letter from my brother Abdullah informing me that my father had passed away from an affliction with typhoid.  I was devastated; only the previous summer in December that I had been back in Malaysia and spent some time with him in Kg. Bharu.  It was then, one day in the kitchen, while he was sawing some planks for someone’s cabinet, that he opened up to me about how he had a fallout with his siblings over some land inheritance in southern Kedah and as a consequence decided to migrate to Semanggol, and said what turned out to be his last piece of advice to me; that he had no material wealth to hand over to his children but a love for education as the basis of our advancement in life. The night I received the news of his death, Jo asked me to spend time with her and Jennie in their house in Glenhuntly so as not to let me grief alone  in the halls.  When Jo failed to persuade me to dance with her to distract me, they turned to teaching me how to play mahjong for the first time that night.  They were such dears; which is why I was so disappointed when Jo decided not to return to Melbourne to start her diploma in teaching course in that final year 1969; I had met her and her mother in KL during the period of my fieldwork in Ulu Langat in January of that year, after spending some time earlier with Wok and family in Kota Bahru.  I found out about this only on my return to Monash from my fieldwork at the start of the 1969 academic year.  She chose to join her fiance Bertie in London instead, which I completely understood.

In my final honours year in 1969, I moved to Mrs. Ball’s and took up residence in Linga Longga, along with Rose, Aminah and Miskiah, joining Wan Zawawi, Abdullah and Wan Halim who were already there.  The easy access to the campus was very convenient when in the final year I had to work very late at night at the computer centre, just a stone’s throw away among the engineering faculty buildings, keying in the data cards on the punchcard machines, debugging the computer program and iterating through my data analysis.  

Aerial map of the location of my fieldwork in Ulu Langat,
Selangor.  KL is located to the west of the Hulu
Langat Forest Reserve

By the summer of 1968 after third year finals, I had returned to Malaysia to undertake the fieldwork for my bachelor’s thesis as fullfilment of my Honours degree requirements. I had chosen to study the spread of development around Kuala Lumpur as my topic, testing the growth centre theory of backwash and spread effects of development in a spatial context.  This involved a field survey of some 19 villages in the Ulu Langat area extending some twenty kilometers to the east of the capital city, which I had scouted out during the late 1967 visit home. Following Geoff and Fairbairn’s study of central places in Victoria, I decided to adopt the technique of trend surface analysis to discover the pattern of spatial development at an increasing distance from KL using a battery of development indicators extracted from household socioeconomic data among the selected villages.  Using principal components analysis to reduce the battery of indicators to their basic factors underlying development, and deriving factor scores for the villages involved,  I was able to discern gradients of development falling away with increasing distance from Kuala Lumpur.  Using this finding enabled me to assign factor scores to the entire wedge of districts in the south-eastern sector of Kuala Lumpur, and to apply the technique of trend surface analysis.  To do this I had to use a Fortran program developed by Albert Langer, of the anti-Vietnam War student movement fame, which I later modified to add a fourth dimension and dubbed it hypersurface trend analysis which would enable one to study the time dimension of the spatial spread of development.   The output of such analysis would be to produce trend surfaces as time slices of the growth centre effects of development in a region.

Geoff was my supervisor for the Honours thesis.  He hardly needed to engage with me for the analysis of my data and the writing of the thesis.  The literature review was quite straightforward as I had been building this up towards the end of my third year as per the writings of my intellectual sources mentioned above.  I spent a lot of time to draw the diagrams and do the cartography with the help of the technical staff in the department.   I submitted my Honours thesis just in time before the fourth year final exams.

Sometime after almost everybody had left for the long summer vacation, when only the lecturers were busy marking exam papers and finalizing the results, I was called to Geoff’s room on the ninth floor of the Ming Wing.  Soon as I entered he asked me whether I was a chess player and good at it. Later I did take it up, but at that moment I demurred and said no, I was not a chess player.  Why he asked that question I didn’t know until he suggested I should take up the game as he said I was good at strategy.  Still not sure to what place he was taking me with this line of inquiry, at last he asked me how important was it to me to get a good degree for my future.  Only then did it dawn on me what he was leading to.  He said that the department had received the external examiner’s report, from a certain professor in University of Tasmania, for my honours thesis.  Geoff gave the broadest of smiles trying to hide what he already knew, and congratulated me on getting a first class honours degree in geography from Monash.   It was a first first class Honours for the department.  I could hardly hug my fire starter, because I myself was on fire.

Walking on air to Linga Longga after a cup of coffee in the Student’s Union, I arrived home to my friends to break the news, but somehow they already knew the result.  Even without the internet then, news certainly travelled fast.