Our Search for Meaning in Changing Times^
An Interview with Bill Ticehurst
The following is an edited transcript of an informal interview that took place between Steven Maras and G.W (Bill) Ticehurst on June 11, 2004. Questions were provided in advance, although the discussion ranged across a number of issues randomly, and not necessarily in the order suggested here. The interview was conducted in the course of researching an article that is published in the Australian Journal of Communication, 'Thinking About the History of ANZCA: An Australian Perspective' (31,2 2004). Ticehurst authored a short paper on the first ten years of the Australian Communication Association (ACA). As a dynamic past president of the ACA, Ticehurst worked to establish the association on a more international rather than local footing. He visited New Zealand--a trip that led to the establishment of the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA). He also went to the International Communication Association (ICA) conference in Miami, Florida in 1992 to make a substantive bid to have the ICA hold its annual conference in Australia, which led to a joint ANZCA-ICA conference in 1994. The interview focuses on Ticehurst's involvement with ANZCA. Bill Ticehurst retired as Associate Dean (Curriculum and Quality Enhancement) of the Faculty of Business Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney in April 2004. [Note 1]
Steven Maras: How did you find yourself in the area of communication studies? What was your slant, or field of expertise?Bill Ticehurst: My location to the field of communication studies was really an evolutionary process rather than deliberative, and largely paralleled the emergence of the field in Australia. After completing a Masters degree in science education at Macquarie University, I became a lecturer at Balmain Teachers College in 1971, at the relatively young age of 27. Prior to this, I had become involved in multi-media methods of teaching Physics and Chemistry, such as time-lapse photography, but had no idea of communication studies and frankly, no exposure to studies in the affective domain, or the humanities. However, I had always been involved in progressive academic movements, especially curriculum movements challenging the established status quo. Then, at the behest of Harry Irwin, who was in the process of developing a communication studies department at Kuring-gai College of Advanced Education (CAE)--which was a struggle for resources against established disciplines--I moved into educational technology and then into communication studies. So I really came into communication studies through educational media.
I think it is worth noting here the contribution of Professor Bill Birkett, who passed away this year. Bill was an accounting Professor who had the responsibility for developing early business degrees at Kuring-gai CAE (c 1975). It was his insights and breadth of disciplinary vision which saw the inclusion of interpersonal and organisational communication skills and competencies, as an essential part of a business education. It was his inspiration which saw the genesis of communication studies at Kuring-gai.
Most of my own work was variable analytic type research, but I eventually wrote my PhD in the Faculty of Education at Macquarie University in the early eighties around the area of the construction of meaning in communication [The Construction of Meaning in Communication, 1987], where I had to look across all fields, including social psychology, phenomenology, linguistics, semiotics and so on. That accounts for why I am so personally focused on meaning as being a central theme of communication studies. There were, of course, not many senior professors available in the field (with the exception perhaps of Henry Mayer, who was a brilliant supporter of the ACA and also provided that linkage between the ACA and mass media studies) to supervise our doctorates. In fact there were really none in Australia at that stage. We knew that we had to do PhDs to further our academic careers and enhance our scholarship, but there were no PhDs to do. So we had to largely carve out the communication field and intellectual territory from existing areas, such as education, psychology, English and sociology.
SM: What was the atmosphere at Kuring-gai like at that time?
BT: I don't know if I can communicate what it was like working at Kuring-gai. It was exciting to get up and go to work every day and to be an academic. But we didn't quite know what we were involved in. It is easy to look back in retrospect as opposed to looking forward in prospect. The Kuring-gai campus was a beautiful place. It just so happened to be an institution on the North Shore of Sydney, in really lovely environment, in a terrific city, where a lot of young scholars in a whole lot of fields arrived, and who eventually went on to achieve in a range of fields, and contribute to other institutions. But it was the site also of a lot of early critical and feminist scholarship, and was a place in healthy intellectual ferment. This environment was a catalyst to the exceptional development of communication studies as a disciplinary field at Kuring-gai. In contrast, I think that the old New South Wales Institute of Technology (NSWIT), prior to its merger with Kuring-gai to form the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) was more characterised by journeyman training of accountants and engineers. Of course, an important exception to this observation was the development of the excellent School of Communication at NSWIT which was paralleling developments in at Kuring-gai, with the emergence of studies in the area of critical, cultural and mass media studies.
Kuring-gai was intellectually more like a university than other CAE's, but not confined by the bounds of traditional universities. Around the time of the merger with NSWIT, Harry Irwin, Virginia Nightingale, Glen Lewis and Michael Kaye all went to other institutions. The Kuring-gai culture got submerged in the old School of Communication at NSWIT and disappeared as an independent entity. The remaining Kuring-gai staff were partly dispersed into other faculties. In my view, this unfortunate situation arose from strategic mistakes by the UTS administrators and strategic planners, who failed to distinguish the complementary paradigms that broadly characterised these two leading Australian communication schools.
SM: You have been involved in the internationalisation of ANZCA and Australian Communication Studies, particularly at the ICA and through the Electronic Journal of Communication. Why was that important?
BT: In terms of the ACA, we were all aware that something was happening academically to the old disciplinary fields, and privileged to be involved in these change processes. We were actually aware of that, excited about it, and we thought what we were doing was right and important. Out of this I saw the need that we had to become international and not just local players, and needed to make our scholarship and ideas known to the rest of the world. The International Communication Association only goes overseas once every four years. We began to work on our profile with the ICA by organising panels at their conferences. To get the conference to Australia (and not Israel who were our competition) required a personal link with the ICA, so I had Bob Cox [Administrator] and Mary-Ann Fitzpatrick [then President] of the ICA out to Australia a couple of times. I had a video made about Australia and the development of the ACA. I was also approached by the Electronic Journal of Communication, through the ICA, to do a special issue on Australian communication studies.
In 1994 Warwick Blood, the ACA vice president was the main organiser of the actual joint ACA/ICA conference. It was too big for Bathurst, so it was organised at the University of Technology, Sydney and the Sydney Convention Centre. The time and place for all of this was right, for the ICA also needed to become more international and less North American. Around this time I was also involved in the International Federation of Communication Associations.
In terms of economy of scale it was also important that New Zealand be brought in to the association, acknowledging that people like Frank Sligo and Margaret MacLaren (a quite senior person) were already involved with ACA. I thought it was unreasonable for us to have the ACA, and not have New Zealand scholars recognised for their contribution in our structure and constitution. It could have been called the Australasian Communication Association, but in the ANZAC tradition, ANZCA seemed just right. Opposing the presence of the ACA in New Zealand was a quite strong New Zealand Business Communication association that filtered through from vocational training into the universities. The ACA is an academic association, and is appropriate to universities, and professionals who want to take a wider perspective on what they are doing. The Australian association needed to be larger in size, there was a need to legitimate the role that New Zealand scholars already had in the association, and it filled a need that New Zealand scholars had for a professionally-minded academic association. The relationship involves a balancing act. Given the population differences between Australia and New Zealand the ACA needed to be very considerate of their needs perhaps more than to ourselves--this also applied to institutions in smaller Australian cities (for example Warrnambool). It is perhaps time now that many of the different communication associations in both Australia and New Zealand be pulled back in under the one umbrella.
SM: You were involved with an early project on Australian Communications Resources Project. What were you seeking to achieve there?
BT: That was an attempt to develop a database looking at the resources available in communication studies at the time, for use as a teaching and research resource. It was probably a vision before its time, as database technologies were developing so fast.
SM: How was the field perceived?
BT: As you mention in your paper, Harry Irwin makes the point that as a new field, communication studies did not initially face strong opposition from established interests and disciplines. It is not that it didn't face strong opposition within existing disciplines. What happened was that communication studies largely developed in intellectual spaces where the old disciplinary interests weren't established, and that disciplinary space was in the CAEs, where new disciplines such as Communication, Business, Tourism, Nursing, and Information Studies emerged in the 70s and 80s
In the older Australian universities, the last remnants of the disciplinary challenges posed by the emergence of communication studies were not finally reconciled with the old humanities until well into the 1990s, and the newer communication studies fields now flourish. In 2004 the battle is now well over. Communication studies could never have taken root at Sydney University in the 1970s or 80s because of the very well established School of English, and specialisations such as Linguistics. But this changed with time and the inevitable growth of the restructuring of knowledge, and disciplinary fields.
Reflecting this, the emergence of the ACA was evolutionary, not revolutionary in the sense that it didn't challenge the traditional English Schools. To go back to the point about opposition, I don't think there was an absence of animosity, just an avoidance.
SM: What was your own view of what Putnis has called the 'cross-currents', the influence of UK and US approaches, or other conflicts between different sub-areas, in the field?
BT: My view of the emergence of communication studies is that ‘communication studies' is an all-encompassing term. When it emerged it encompassed fields such as English, Speech, Public Relations, Technical Writing, Media, Linguistics, to some degree Cultural Studies in its interest in the development of meaning, and aspects of social psychology. In the New Zealand context, it needs to be recognised that New Zealand had a strongly established Business Communication area which developed before the ACA arrived on the scene. As a matter of fact, the New Zealand scholars who were becoming interested in the ACA, mainly from the University of Waikato, at Hamilton, were almost break-aways, and mavericks from the New Zealand main stream at the time. But like the Australian scholars, they saw the disciplinary need for something broader and more encompassing.
My view of the numerous references to European and North American ‘paradigms' that you make in your paper, is that the unique role of Australia in the world, geographically isolated from those two areas, but culturally growing out of them, provided an environment and context that was catalytic, and was the site of confluence between those competing paradigms. And we actually saw more grow from less, a synergy, stimulated by Australian culture, where those previously quite distinct and disparate fields that never crossed, started to meet in Australia.
You mention Peter Putnis's view that Australia is seen as being caught in a cross-current between Anglo and American influences, I disagree that it was caught in a cross-current. There were cross-currents, but surely out of that cross-current emerged a stream, that is still maturing and developing, that I would see as Australian communication studies. I guess it was a synergy that grew out of, and was catalysed by those cross-currents. Of course it was naturally multi-paradigmatic, but it all focused, ultimately, on the struggle to understand the personal and cultural determination of meaning, and the development of meaning. In terms of synergy, each paradigm, methodology, approach or world-view, had within it tools that were actually useful to the other paradigms. And yet in the isolated European and North American contexts, these scholars could never have met, and would never have become aware of the intellectual opportunities within these other competing paradigms. As you say in the paper, there are political overtones to this: If you are in cultural studies you are leftist, if you're in the North American tradition of communication scholarship you must be rightist. Australia as a site provided a scholarly site where those things could meet on non-antagonistic terms, in a way that we could all benefit from the tools that help us look at the same paradox of meaning.
SM: But some people do talk about antagonism, say in terms of cultural studies, for example.
BT: From my personal perspective, which could be seen as coming from a North American perspective--although I wouldn't perceive myself that way--our view was that we'd always welcome Cultural Studies into the field. They were naturally a part of communication studies. However, the Cultural Studies scholars always seemed to be in great flux and ferment: for example, conference organisation just never seemed to progress smoothly. I felt that some individuals were quite antagonised by the other mainstream fields of communication. Despite these minor inconveniences by the 1980s some excellent people like Gunther Kress, and John Fiske, among others were starting to think across the boundaries of cultural studies and communication studies, creating alternative perspectives on old issues.
In human organisational terms, our joint conferences and meetings were always a bit wanting organisationally, but in terms of intellectual and academic outcomes and productivity, were arguably some of the best. That is in very human terms, of course. In none of this is the antagonism deliberate I think; it was an outcome of circumstances.
SM: So you are talking about ACA conferences such as the 1983 conference at NSWIT, and the 1984 conference in Western Australia? I have read that that the 1984 conference was poorly attended ...
BT: One of the reasons it was poorly attended was that it was in Western Australia. In hard practical terms, a failing conference would mean that the organisation would be broke for the next conference. The ACA was a “ college of beggars ” of sorts. Money was always an issue for the journals and conferences. [Note 2] So the conference was also our main fundraising activity. And quite a few of the ACA's activities were characterised by quite domestic and mundane things that don't appear in the literature, such as when association funds tied up with the 1990 Melbourne conference, through no fault of the organisers, were caught up in the Pyramid Building Society bankruptcy. It took us four or five years to get our money back from that. Besides the paradigm issues, we have also been struggling with the practical issues of establishing and keeping an organisation and its executive going.
SM: Going back to an earlier point, in your view, was/is there such a thing as a distinctively Australian communication studies?
BT: I think that it is implicit that an Australian communication studies exists. But it is as difficult to define as Australian culture, in the broader sense, as being independent of English culture or American culture. We also need to approach the emergence of an Australian communication studies from the cultural outlook and perspectives of Australian scholars. I think one of the things, as in Australian culture, is an intellectual tolerance of ambiguity, which has enabled this confluence, which Irwin and Putnis have described, to emerge. I think it is more than a confluence, I think that we have got more out of the whole than in the component parts. I believe Australian communication and cultural studies were quite influential in the acceptance and development of cultural studies in the United States. So yes, there is certainly a distinctive Australian communication studies with a unique history, longer than quarter of a century.
It must be said that the development of the field in Australia was quite exciting and satisfying. It was all very friendly, and social, and in an Australian sense we were all good mates going off to conferences and carving out this new frontiers. Of course, there was a lot of earnest debate and conflict too. A characteristic of most of the people in it, like Roslyn Petelin and Bruce Molloy, is that they were all as brave as Ned Kelly, and weren't scared to have a go, to speak their mind, to challenge the establishment. So that is one characteristic of all the people forming the new association. Hardly any of them came from a communication studies background--well, that was almost impossible. At best, they may have come from being high school or TAFE English teachers. The rest, like me, came from all sorts of backgrounds.
Another defining characteristic is that these early scholars were prepared to think about the world, and to think about disciplines in new and refreshing ways. In this regard, I cannot speak too highly of the work of Robyn Penman and David Sless in contributing to the development of the field of Australia. They were active-- provocative in the best sense of the word, of provoking others to think and challenge. Great contributors, both of them.
It is noteworthy how little background in the field, even speech communication, these scholars had. Maybe this is why they could re-think the field: they hadn't been indoctrinated or trained in the traditional disciplines, and yet, there was a disciplinary need for this field to emerge. It is really about the re-structuring and re-organising of traditional disciplines which had become constipated, formalised, ritualised, and were providing no development or insight into this new area concerning the emergence of social, cultural and individual meaning. There were many fields that overlapped with it, but nothing that provided a focus: and that is what communication did. So there was a need there, and these disparate Australians filled that gap.
SM: Was there a nationalistic aspect to these developments?
BT: Yes, most certainly. Just as Australians take on the world in sport, fighting well above their weight, Australian communication scholars would go to the Speech Communication Association, or especially the International Communication Association, and punch above their weight. They were vociferous in debate and argument in plenary sessions, far beyond their numbers. I would argue that such typically Australian characteristics, organisationally, behaviourally, intellectually, and academically, all provide evidence of the emergence of a unique Australian communication studies. I feel that in the 1970s and 1980s we were intellectually leading the world in the emergence of this field.
Quite a few leading scholars came to visit Australia and were a little gob-smacked, like Mary-Ann Fitzpatrick, Jesse Delia, Lee Thayer, Denis McQuail and Cal Downes, and many others. Australia was an exciting place to visit for international communication studies scholars. What they found was refreshment from a stagnating American North American communication studies--which in perhaps the late 1960s and 1970s when these scholars were at university, was still feeling the effects of the Macarthyist era and the Vietnam war--and a willingness to challenge the status quo.
SM: So there was something about the interdisciplinarity of Australian scholarship that was attractive?
BT: Yes, but we were forced to do it. We were relatively small and couldn't block ourselves in disciplinary areas. So you almost had to meet scholars from other fields. If you were in speech communication like Bill Crocker was, he had to meet media studies. I had to meet cultural studies. You'd sit down and have beers with them, carouse with them, and argue with them. If we were going to get a critical mass we had to become an Australian Communication Association. Either that, or we had to be part of the international scene and for our scholarship to go to the United States or go to Europe. If we were going to have a uniquely Australian communication studies we had to share: and that very sharing, being forced together as a small group, caused us to meet people who in other intellectual cultures would be an anathema. So in the United States, Speech Communication scholars wouldn't mix with Cultural Studies scholars. Here we had to, and so you get that fertilisation and synergy.
SM: Was a uniquely Australian communication studies an explicit objective or goal, or is that something that is constructed retrospectively?
BT: No, it wasn't deliberate. It was not so much a vision as a knowing, a feeling, perhaps an intuition. It was just where we were in terms of disciplines, of thinking about the world, and progressing. We set out to form an Australian Communication Association to pull together these emerging strands, or emergences, popping up here and there in the intellectual ferment--I'm thinking of bubbles popping up in the mud pools of Rotorua here. The ACA could almost be seen as an outcome of the reshaping of knowledge happening at the time, and a watershed development of that time. And these developments occurred in a context, with the emergence of the CAE system, and all sorts of other things like the Public Relations Association wanting to become more professional. The Public Relations Institute of Australia has never merged with the ACA but there has been an overlap of thinkers, and many of them would have done one of the early graduate diplomas in Communication Management at Kuring-gai, or at places such as the Queensland Institute of Technology [now QUT]. You keep seeing references at that time to the idea of ferment in the field, which I see as an intellectual restlessness in people's thinking that was shared by different scholars, who didn't know what the answer was, and they didn't even know what the questions were. The ferment has to do with these emergences I am speaking of. The notion of the ferment in the field was a North American construct where they had recognised that things had become stultified. They didn't know the answers. Some of the answers were emerging in Australia. Maybe I am being a bit extreme here, but I think not.
At the time, Australians were all concerned with media and effects research, attitude and behaviour research, credibility studies, Cultural Studies was concerned with issues of control and hegemony. Concurrently with all this was a key realisation or recognition, and this seems very simplistic now, that we share and construct, both at an individual and social level, meanings in our society. Through understanding how we construct these meanings you can then understand persuasion, interpersonal understanding, media control, political communication, and so on. This provided a unifying theme for us. This is the awareness that came bubbling up. A few maverick scholars like Berlo had started to write about this in the US, but it started to become firmly established in the ACA.
SM: Are notions such as discipline helpful in this context? There has been a long struggle with that term.
BT: I recall an excellent unpublished paper by Bill Birkett called 'Disciplines and Disciplinarity'! In my own view, a discipline is an artefact in time which reflects the structuring and organisation of particular knowledges, and sets of knowledges, that are useful in thinking about and understanding the world. So disciplines are temporal. They tend to take on an identity and an undeserved respect after a time, and scholars see themselves as lodged within those disciplines, and fight for their retention, long after their need has passed. Disciplines are organic, and are constantly being reshaped, restructured and reorganised. The emergence of communication studies is an example of the restructuring and reorganising of knowledges, to help us in understanding the world. And of course, going along with this was the development of satellite communication, the development of new media, and information technologies and so on. So that is my view of disciplines. Is communication studies one? In these terms, yes. It may well disappear in time, and be subsumed in other ways. The important goal is that it helps the human struggle for understanding. A discipline of communication studies is only useful insofar as it is productive in progressing along that pathway.
SM: By seeing communication studies unreservedly and unashamedly as a discipline you are going against the trend here. What do you make of practical problems with this idea such that the area of communication is so diverse that it is difficult to lock into a single discipline, especially since it is shared with other disciplines.
BT: Those people are confusing the methods and approaches with the central focus of the field. The central focus on the field is, as I've elaborated, is meaning, whether socially or personally constructed or determined. They are seeing it as diverse because they are looking at the tools: whether semiotic tools, or variable analytic tools, or critical tools. I see these as ranges of tools and philosophies, even world-views, but the central focus is still on meaning. All this is symptomatic of the tendency for people to get locked into their methodologies and approaches, rather than keep their eye on the central goal and central focus.
SM: What then should we make of say early statements by Bill Crocker that the ACA should primarily be about interpersonal communication?
BT: That was Bill speaking out of his world at the time. He was a thoughtful man who had been trained and brought up in the discipline of Speech Communication. And I suspect, knowing Bill, that there was a restlessness in him that knew more. But in the mid-1970s when he was prepared to take leadership and responsibility he couldn't know where we'd be today.
SM: And is it an issue that we now speak of Cultural Studies or Media Studies or New Media as separate disciplines?
BT: Not really. Within Business Studies we speak of Accounting, Marketing and Management. What it represents is the collective endeavours of individuals towards understanding, and the sharing of those activities as part of the journey.
SM: How does politics fit in here? Looking back, I can't but help and see, say around the 1983-1984 period an element of politics. Bruce Molloy has commented that in the post-1984 period the Cultural Studies people drifted away.
BT: Yes they did. It was political in the sense that the people who established the ACA had a very genuine willingness, not to overtake, but to encompass and share, Cultural Studies. Right from the start of the ACA the Cultural Studies tension was there. But Cultural Studies people (and here I am including people such as John Fiske, John Hartley, Gunther Kress, Helen Wilson, and of course the critical contribution of Bill Bonney [Note 3]) are not logical positivists, they don't organise and structure things (it is a way of thinking about the world), and it just so happened that the conferences they organised were well-intentioned and well-meaning, and good conferences intellectually, but not well-structured and formalised. They would also run hot and cold with the association. Their field was very exciting. They were flirting with the ACA but at the same time flirting internationally. And I don't want to see them as an isolated group, but that group is characterised by people who think outside the traditional establishment square. We can't separate intellectual interests and developments from social outcomes associated with the players. It's that simple.
SM: So, given your view, has the field lived up to its promise? And what about ANZCA's place in the field?
BT: Yes. Today the field is energetic, and relevant, and providing understanding, keeping in mind that a thirty-year time-span is very short in comparison with other areas. The amazing thing to me is how the study of communication, which is so fundamental to the human condition, has been overlooked for so long. Perhaps it is in the nature of things for the obvious to be so overlooked. The field is emerging now in traditional universities, and is being taught in schools. It is a relevant and sought after area for bright young scholars to enter.
We have had a difficulty of public perception, and the federal Department of Education, not differentiating between communication studies and communications. Communications is about messaging and messages, and is associated with information technology. While communication is a processual thing. It is like a health commission seeing doctors and all their work in hospitals being about medicines rather than about Medicine and the whole process of wellness and sickness and so on. So we had this problem of getting us defined as a unique area for DETYA funding. The bureaucrats had difficulty seeing a field of communication as separate from communications. But that issue has largely been addressed now.
Of course I associate the field with my own interest in meaning, and when I talk about meaning, it is almost like the association is concerned something like 'the meaning of life'. Maybe that is a weakness and that people are more committed to individual specialialites. But specialties are rarely viable in themselves. In the ideal situation ANZCA would be an umbrella organisation for a range of centres. But in terms of ANZCA's place in the field, it is diffcult for ANZCA to work as a hub because it is never the focus. The size of the organisation represents constraints, and there are many international organisations now. At the same time, ANZCA is today mainstream and well-known. The association has had a whole series of heroes and champions, like Harry Irwin, Robyn Penman, David Sless, Grant Noble, Ros Petelin, Bruce Molloy, Peter Putnis, and Warwick Blood, Henry Mayer--and they were all ready to step forward into the breach and take the Presidency in a non-assuming, non-power grabbing way. There was a great collegiality about it. The ACA has been a cradle, and if I go around the people I knew at Kuring-gai more than 60% of them would have reached associate professorial level or above, and 60% doctorates in the field. I don't know if the people are there today, I suspect there are.
Notes
1. The title of this piece comes from both the theme of the ACA conference organised by Bill, but also seemed to suit the fact that his own PhD was had to do with the study of meaning.
2. BT: Thus, when the Communication Research Institute of Australia gave the ACA a home it was incredibly welcome.
3. BT: The NSWIT School of Communication Studies was world-class for critical and communication studies. And of course in 1990 there was the amalgamation of the very successful Kuring-gai program with the UTS program, and the administrators unfortunately didn't understand the different approaches being taken here. I was the person that oversaw the demise of the Kuring-gai program.
First Upload 6th June, 2005. © Steven Maras 2005
Referencing information. 'Our Search for Meaning in Changing Times: An Interview with Bill Ticehurst'. An ANZCA Dossier. Date of access <http://www.anzca.net/dossier.htm>.
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