My Story: Chapter 2: Training Days - The Education of a Policy Wonk: Episode 1: Going Down Under

There was a huge crowd gathered at the departure end of the concourse of the newly opened Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Subang one day in early March 1966.  Friends and relatives sat or stood around, in excited conversation, in clumps surrounding a member of the family leaving for Australia.  There were about twenty of us boys and girls, at that point still mostly strangers to each other, those who won Colombo Plan scholarships that year to study in various universities and colleges Down Under. It was the largest cohort of scholars to date in the wonderful inter-governmental educational scheme for Commonwealth countries initiated by Lester Pearson, then Prime Minister of Canada a few years earlier.

I had my own coterie that day, comprising my sister Rahmah, her husband Bang Yeop and their three young children, also my father and little brother Munar, and a cousin Kak Soyah.  Hadi Ismail a classmate from RMC was also there.  During my RMC years before that, my father and Munar had stayed with my still bachelor brother Abdullah, in a rented house in Jalan Raja Uda in Kampong Baru.  We had moved there from the Jalan Hamzah house after my mother had passed away.  We had as neighbor in the new place a teacher training college lecturer and his wife; they had a niece Fatimah staying with them, who everyone called Wok, with whom I was rather friendly. She was attending Form Four the year I left for Australia.  Both neighbor and brother had most likely but without my knowledge match-made us, and took it almost by default that Wok was to be my betrothed.  They had migrated to Kota Bharu (KB) earlier and were not in Subang that day.  But I had visited them in KB in the month before.  Rahmah and her family were living in Kg. Kerinchi in Petaling Jaya, her husband now working with Rothmans, the tobacco company.  Abdullah was already well ensconced in his job at Istana Negara.  He was at work that day and could not come to see me off.  But he paid for the new suit made by Globe Silk Store tailors I was wearing for the flight to Sydney, the rest of the clothing being financed by our pre-departure allowance.  And by the time I departed for Australia, Munar was starting Std Six.  My sister Rafidah, who was not present at Subang airport that historic (for us) day because of classes, was in her second last year in Kolej Islam, Klang.  I had written her a play she was to produce based on Ingmar Bergman’s film Seventh Seal about an old knight’s (in this case an ustaz, religious teacher) conversation with Death, for her college theatre production the previous year.

I had, as was the case with the others in that departing Colombo Plan group, received notification in early February from the Establishment Office of the federal government that I had been admitted into Monash University in Melbourne to read for a bachelor of arts degree, and earmarked upon my return to join the Malaysian diplomatic service.   I had not really thought about the implication of that for my future career, but it suited my imagination.  The idea had not quite emerged into an ambition, but doubtless some seed of it might have been planted, being impressed as a young kampong boy with the remarkable photograph published on the front page of Utusan Melayu, of the late Tun Dr. Ismail Abdul Rahman, in the full splendor of a Malay suit and tengkolok (traditional headgear), right arm raised in Tunku Abdul Rahman “Merdeka” Declaration of Independence style, representing the new nation and addressing for the first time the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 1957. It was a proud moment for Malaysia, Malaya then.  But how can one foretell the future as it turned out.

For everyone of the group of young scholars at Subang that morning, amidst hugs and tears saying goodbye to kith and kin, it was to be a future full of promise.  It was a historic day for us, not just in starting a new phase in our lives, but for most of us it was our first air-flight experience, and to a strange country at that.  In the BOAC Comet plane, probably among their last flights in operation, for the following year the first of the new Boeing 707 was introduced into service, the excitement amongst us was palpable.  Immediately, a blanket of camaraderie fell over us, the joy of new friendships obvious having left family and old friends behind, as we enter our training days ahead for the next four years.

We arrived in Sydney’s Kingsford Smith airport almost dark on a warm autumn day in the land of Oz. We were driven by waiting taxis hired by the Commonwealth Office of Education (COE) in Sydney, to our transit hotel in the famous Bondi Beach.  There we were to spend a fortnight of orientation to Australian life before being sent on to our respective universities to start the first academic year. Eight of us, Maria, Daud, Fawziah, Josephine Wong (Jo), Mustafa, Zulkifli, Faezah and me were to join Monash University.   The orientation programme itself was standard, but the two weeks we spent in Sydney were a fun time, getting to know one another; knowing that we were going to be in a strange land that will be our home for the next three to four years had encouraged a friendship and accommodation and unity of purpose that stayed with us for a long time after we had returned home. We spent the time with briefings during the day, on Australian history, customs and etiquette etc, bowling at night, or just enjoying seeing people on the beach, especially on the weekends, and visiting Sydney’s city centre for window-shopping and movies.  It was a time on the lark, before we embark on the serious business of study.

On that second weekend in Australia, we boarded the Southern Aurora, two to a cabin, bound for the southern city of Melbourne.  The Australian countryside is a sight to behold, the train whisking us through country towns, Golbourn the station town for the Canberra line, bushland and paddocks with sheep and cattle, and eucalyptus trees.   We arrived too soon in the park city, and were met at the Spencer Street station by COE officials and the Malaysian student officer.  Then we were sent again in taxis to our Monash halls of residence in the Greater Melbourne suburb of Clayton; our new home, in a new land, and a new adventure.

Northwest view of the Monash campus from the Menzies
Building and the Student Union toward the Halls
of Residence in the distant background, circa 1966

Monash University was established in 1958 and opened its doors to its first students in 1961, at the start of a period of rapid expansion of Australian tertiary education, and an increasing influx of students from Asia including Malaysia.  By the end of my studies in Australia four years later there were already 16,000 foreign students in total in Australia and 3,000 from Malaysia, many on scholarships but most on private funding.   

Monash University was named after Sir John Monash, a general and national hero in World War I, diplomat and once Vice Chancellor of Melbourne University.  His great quote was later engraved in stone at the entrance to the Great Hall of the university, and in my mind: “Adopt as your fundamental creed that you will equip yourself for life, not solely for your own benefit, but for the benefit of the whole community.”  We are off!

The Forum in 1972, with the Menzies Building on the right,
the Students Union  and the Chancellory on the left, and the
Great Hall (L) and Main Library (R) in middle background.

There were two halls in that student residence complex with a third added a couple of years later, with a common kitchen, but separate dining halls.  I was placed in Farrar Hall, together with Maria, Jo, Daud and Fawziah, with the rest in Deakin Hall.  Later Malaysian students took up residence in the new Howitt Hall.  The residences were co-educational, the mixing of the sexes an experiment in keeping with the times. The halls of residence were located to the northwest of the campus, once a large farm (hence the nickname, the Farm, for Monash), required more than a kilometer of daily walk one way, past the playing fields, to get to and from the education buildings.  The main building, at the centre of campus was the Menzies Building, an imposing high-rise structure overlooking the whole campus and over the flat plain of southeastern Melbourne, which housed the Faculty of Arts and Faculty of Economics and Politics (Ecops) in each wing (till now I still don’t know why the building is called the Ming Wing), set around the Forum with the Main Library to one side and the Student’s Union and the Chancellery on the opposite side, and the yet to be built Great Hall enclosing it on the north side. The Forum was the scene of numerous student demonstrations and sit-ins during the tumultuous free-speech days of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late sixties, which carried into my graduate days at the University of Pennsylvania in the States in the early seventies.  It was a time of student activism, Hare Krishna and intellectual ferment; heady times for a fresh young mind at the start of his journey of discovery.

I had enrolled in four subjects in the first year of the Arts course, geography, politics, psychology and German language.   The first two were a carry-over of my favourite subjects in Sixth Form, psychology a new interest and German I thought might be useful for my later career. Actually, I wanted to enroll in the economics course, but disappointingly for me the quota for Arts students was already full for that year.  But informally I audited the course, attending its lectures as I could.  Joe Powell, a young lecturer in the Geography Department, himself reading for a doctorate in historical geography, was appointed by the COE my advisor.  

Introductory geography was an extension of sixth form geography, and with the extra year we had over Australian matriculation students, Jo, who was expected to join the teaching profession, and I both excelled in this subject.  We both got high distinctions (the top grade) in the subject when the results were published in the newspapers that first summer.  I did less well in politics and psychology , ending only with credits, and a pass in German.  Psychology was a revelation, and I continued in that subject for the second year for my minor offering.  Though I did not like physiological psychology much, except for the animal behavior experiments, it was the theories of childhood learning of Piaget, the cognitive research on early learning by Jerome Bruner, and the psychology of thought of Vygotsky, the psycholinguistic revolution of Chomsky, and the personality theories of Freud and Jung, that kept up my interest in the discipline through to my second year.  In the second year we were to choose our major discipline towards the bachelor’s degree.  Tossing around in my mind the idea of getting into the Ecops Faculty, I tried to sneak in via a politics major, so that I can continue with an economics minor.  Somehow I was talked out of that plan by Joe Powell and took up geography as my major.  As it turned out, I never came to regret that decision.  I still managed to keep up the training in economics, along the way picking up calculus, by continuing to attend its lectures.  And I persisted in second year politics, being introduced to Marx’s Das Capital for the first time.  And Robert Dahl’s A Preface to Democracy for balance.  For German, we got to work through Goethe’s Faust by way of learning the language.

Student demonstration in the Forum in 1971

Those early student days in Monash were not just exciting in the classroom, but were enlivened by the goings-on in the Student Union and the Forum.  Lunchtime anti-war speeches were interspersed by rock concerts. Albert Langer, a first class mathematics major, who later was to play a bit role in my continuing studies, was the student leader. Tousle-haired and over the BMI norm for him, he gave fiery speeches and whipped up considerable student support.  There were sit-ins and much rowdiness.  This was to continue for the better part of my first two years in university, and in 1967, as happened in US campuses and predating by  a year the 1968 Chicago student demonstrations at Johnson’s Democratic Party Convention that summer, a group of Monash student activists occupied the Chancellory offices.   It was traumatic for the administration, but fun and somehow educationally liberating for the student masses.   Later in 1974 I was to experience a similar situation in USM, then a lecturer, as the staff union president during the Baling demonstrations in Malaysian campuses led by Anwar Ibrahim, then a student leader in University of Malaya.

Monash group reunion January 2015
Standing from left: me, Munirah, Daud, Faezah;
sitting from left: Fawziah, Maria and Rose

Life in the halls of residence were supportive of our studies, and extra-curricular activities.  We struck close friendships with the more senior Malaysian students. Ramli Ismail, the most senior, was in his final year in science, slated to become a teacher, and stayed on after the first degree for another year with us to complete his diploma in teaching, later on returning home to rise to the director of training post in MARA.  He was like our elder brother among the group.  Khor Kok Kheam and Lee Beck Sim were already into their postgraduate studies in theoretical physics, both later to take up lectureships in University of Malaya and USM respectively.  There was Munira, a year ahead of us, also taking up science, and eventually to become like my sister on campus; and her charming close friend Phaik Sim from Singapore.  Our circle of other Asian friends include Thun, a Thai economics major who later married the Australian scholar John Funstan who studied the formation of PAS for his Ph.D.; Eddie Chuah, though not a resident, who then was President of the Malaysia-Singapore Student Association, later to return to work for Tourism Development Malaysia.  Another Malaysian in Farrar Hall, Micheal Lim, who was active in the university’s Clubs and Societies Committee of the Student Union, persuaded me to stand for election as second year rep to the Farrar Hall student representative council, but fortunately lost.  That enabled me to concentrate more on my soccer, representing  the university team from the very first year together with Zulkifli, a Stanley Mathews-style winger, and SP Tan, who kept goal and later to become a New Straits Times journalist.

Jo was a special friend; from the first orientation day in Bondi Beach she and Fawziah adopted me as their brother and protector, and I took that seriously.  She was also committed to a teaching career as part of the Colombo Plan scholarship, but chose along with me to take up geography as her major. So we got to spend a lot of time together going to lectures, tutorials, and to study together in the library, have teas in the student union cafes, and to prepare for exams.  We also later in the second year, when she thought that she was too “montel” (fat), played lot of squash in the evenings at the university gym some distance from the halls.   We also partnered in the compulsory geography field trip to Gippsland in the second summer of our stay in Australia.  Jo had a fiance studying chartered accountancy in the UK, and I had Wok in Kota Bharu, so our relationship though close was quite platonic.  We had a friendly rivalry in class, earnest in our studies to the extent of being called “overachieving” twins by David Lea, one of our senior lecturers; we often swap positions at the top of our classes at the year end exams.  

It was a time without care or worry, except study, the Colombo Plan scholarship being quite generous; some of the Malaysian students would even earn extra income taking on summer jobs usually from the second year.   It was a wonderful period of “responsible irresponsibility” (a phrase I used in my acceptance speech for the Distinguished Alumni Award from Monash in 1994) in our journey in search of knowledge and truth.