People of VU Transcripts

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People of VU Podcast

Hosted by Vice-Chancellor, Professor Adam Shoemaker
Episode 2: Chancellor Steve Bracks and Gaye Hamilton

Karen Jackson, Executive Director Moondani Balluk

I'm here to provide acknowledgement of country. For those who don't know me, I’m KJ - Karen Jackson, Director of Moondani Balluk.

My Genealogy tracks back to Moira Lakes in Barmah Forest and Mount Hope in Pyramid Hill, giving me my connections to your Yorta Yorta and Burrup Barrup language groups.

There's a couple of things I'd like you to take away from my acknowledgement.

The first is to remember the hidden history of Aboriginal people since the invasion. Our loss of language, removal from country and our new extinction from massacres and pandemics.

The second is our strong and inherent connection to community and country. These connections have given us the resilience and courage to rebuild our languages, gain access to country, regenerate our cultural practises.

In the same way VU has and is creating connections for you as staff to maintain and grow your connection to the VU community. This is an important space from which to survive any difficult days and from which to grow, share and learn from each other and to maintain our genuine and kind actions into the future.

In acknowledging the traditional owners of the country on which you are now on, I'd like to sincerely thank them for their generosity and kindness in welcoming people onto their lands. Lands never ceded and lands that run deep into their being and spirit.

I wish to pay my deep respect to the ancestors, Elders, communities and families of the Woiwurrung Wurundjeri on whose land I stand and who create connection and share knowledge with all of us.

Professor Adam Shoemaker, Vice-Chancellor

Thank you. Well, colleagues, welcome to the People of VU podcast and we want to say thank you so much to KJ for the acknowledgement of country, which is so important to us.

Now in this People of VU podcast, you're going to be introduced to some of the key people shaping Victoria University. Get to know changemakers, leaders, storytellers – sometimes all three – and the people of VU who make the university such a thriving place to work, to study and to be.

Now, in this first launch episode, I have the privilege of speaking with Chancellor Steve Bracks and former and outgoing Deputy-Chancellor and former Chancellor Gaye Hamilton.

It's a timely conversation with many milestones to acknowledge and one where we will reflect on both the challenges and achievements of a very, very big change driven year.

Gaye recently completed over a decade on the University Council, an amazing 10 years. Steve was installed as Chancellor of Victoria University in May, and I was incredibly fortunate enough to become the Vice-Chancellor of this great place exactly one year ago. But most importantly, welcome Gaye and Steve.

Now I'm going to ask some questions of Gaye to get us rolling.

Gaye, you're an expert on this place, but what did you think when you look back on your very first year as a council member and then compare that with your final year? What was then and what was now? Could you just give us an insight?

Gaye Hamilton, Former Deputy-Chancellor

Thanks very much. Well, first of all, I'd say that I was completely overawed in my first year as a council member of VU. In particular because of the great place that VU was and is. But also because of the calibre of people sitting around the Council table.

And we've been very fortunate over the entire time I've been involved to have incredibly talented, committed people on Council who have really worked hard to make the place working with the same team, of course, and everyone else to make it what it is today.

And when I reflect on how it compares with my final year, I must say that I'm still in awe of the people around the table.

We do have an incredibly talented, committed team of people that are a delight to work with, always provide learnings for others who work with them. But most importantly, are really very, very committed to making sure that VU’s the best place it can be.

And while there were significant challenges when I started and there are significant challenges now, they are different and now we're much more in control and able to deal with challenges because of the changes that have been made.

Adam Shoemaker

Well, look, that's so great, and it gives us all heart to think that the talent has always been there. But we had to discover that sense of confidence to deal with the talent as well.

And so, when you when you look at it over your career, which has been amazing, you've been involved in public institutions, for example museums for many years. What do you think drew you to what might be described as genuine public service as opposed to, for example, of working in the private sector?

Gaye Hamilton

I think that stems, Adam, really from my commitment to education. And apart from being able to teach in the secondary school government system in Victoria for, you know, 20 years or so, I was then fortunate enough to work in a couple of the best classrooms going around in zoos and museums. And so able to really look at education from a much more holistic point of view and seeing the power of that and what it can do to individuals and to the community.

And that's really what's driven me throughout that time, and I've been completely blessed by working with some again wonderful people at great organisations where I can indulge that passion for education.

Adam Shoemaker

Well, we're glad you're indulging. I mean, it's a great thing.

And, you know, speaking of passion, that is a word that's often associated with people in sport in Melbourne. And of course, you yourself have expressed a great passion for the Western Bulldogs. What drew you to them in the first place? Like why them?

Gaye Hamilton

Well, I guess that was because I was involved and working in the western region for all of my professional life and saw first-hand how important the Western Bulldogs were and are to the health and well-being of the community.

So economically, socially, psychologically. Literally, the Bulldogs are good for business. When they win, the community uplifts. Everyone feels better like it at best. And the whole economy spikes up and everything is better.

So it seems to me logical that the Bulldogs then should be sort of supported by all the business and industry across the western region. Really, regardless of your personal view of who you barrack for, because the more successful the Bulldogs are, the more successful the region is. It just feeds upon one another sense of well-being. So I became involved when I was working at Werribee Zoo and then on through Scienceworks and beyond to really ensure that we helped embed the Bulldogs in the community.

And now I have the pleasure of chairing the Bulldogs Community Foundation Board, where I can again really take that further and see the positive impact throughout the community.

And of course, I am now a completely, utterly red, white and blue bleeding bulldog.

Adam Shoemaker

Well, nothing else would be appropriate, would it Gaye. So we love that. And of course, at the same time, the university joins you in that.

I mean, we're all festooned during the grand final this year with that kind of support. And we've been on a journey to along with the Bulldogs over the past 10 years, and I think you've seen it all. Now, he Bulldogs have had their grand final twice and of course, they won the championships at least once.

But of course, when you think of us, what do you think you're most proud of for the university over this past decade?

Gaye Hamilton

I think really it's VU’s genuine commitment to equity and respect and the fact that we can again genuinely say that we are there to provide opportunities that will positively transform lives and uplift the community.

And I could not be more proud of the organisation for that commitment.

Adam Shoemaker

Right. Look, we join you in that and that's why we're having this discussion today, because that sense of pride is really palpable.

And I think you actually wanted to exercise your Deputy Chancellor prerogative and pose some questions to Steve as well.

Gaye Hamilton

I certainly did. So Chancellor, you're a recognised Victorian that's devoted much of your life to the state. Why do you think Victoria is such a great place to live and work?

THE HON Steve Bracks AC, CHANCELLOR

Well, thank you, Gaye, and it's great to be a part of this podcast and great to be a part of Victoria University.

And yeah, look, Victoria is a fantastic place. It wasn't those the most liveable city, Melbourne, the best liberal city for no reason. It was because of its excellent education opportunities and institutions, because of a great health system, because of its good liveability in terms of public amenity.

And really, Melbourne and Victoria has got it all and VU sits really at the heart of that, at the heart of really Melbourne's West and serving the people of Melbourne's west and broader community for many, many years and doing a great job.

Gaye Hamilton

And just in terms of Melbourne's West, we know it's been on quite a journey over many decades. And I just wonder. Through your involvement with the university, through WOMEDA and your time in politics – do you think the west of Melbourne's time has come?

Steve Bracks

Well and truly Melbourne's west time is here. And then you look at the one of the fastest growing suburban areas in Australia. That's Melbourne's west. You look at the dynamism really of industry, of the residential communities within it.

It is really one of the most dynamic, most vibrant communities anywhere in Australia. And you can see that now with people flocking into to live into Melbourne's west. And why wouldn't you you know where great facilities, great opportunities and of course, VU at the heart of it, that's the key.

Gaye Hamilton

And so in terms of those opportunities and challenges, what do you think might be the couple that you'd like to see addressed, both in terms of challenges and opportunities in the West in the next couple of years?

Steve Bracks

Yeah, I think managing growth is going to be an important one, really.

We're going to see a significant increase in population over the next 20 to 30 years and making sure that we can deal with that population growth whilst having a high quality of life and a very, very good facilities as part of that. And that's going to be the key issue going forward.

And so good planning, good preparation and good transport systems, good public amenities, making sure that we have regard to open space and the opportunities are there for people having that in their community.

They're going to be some of the key challenges going forward to make sure we manage growth effectively and well.

Gaye Hamilton

And given that VU is right at the heart of all that happens here in the West. In your first year as VU’s Chancellor, what are your observations of the University and its place in the region.

Steve Bracks

Well, these got everything, really, whether it's technical and further education or higher education. It's got a lot and it's really got a great offering.

You know, it's a university that knows where it's going and knows that people are serving and knows the sort of skills that we believe are important for people to gain as part of their university and making sure it's very progressive place, a welcoming place and a place which has a great future as well.

Gaye Hamilton

And since used to have the privilege of being Chancellor of this great place, have you had conceptions that have changed since you've been a little bit more immersed?

Steve Bracks

Well, I think what's changed for me is the reach of Victoria University. Its got a breadth of offering, which is has to be seen to be believed. And that's quite important, I think, in what we have going forward as well.

And also, it knows its place, it knows this community and it knows what is needed to the future. I think they are the sort of things that have struck me as being so important for this university going forward.

Gaye Hamilton

Very exciting times.

Steve Bracks

Indeed.

Gaye Hamilton

And that is an exciting time, of course, is our new Vice-Chancellor.

So Chancellor, I'm going to hand over to you to interrogate Adam a little bit.

Steve Bracks

Yeah. Well, look, we are so fortunate to have Adam Shoemaker as our new Vice-Chancellor. Can't believe it's one year.

The year has gone very quickly, but a dynamic year under very difficult circumstances during significant lockdowns here in Victoria.

But you know, Adam has really been making sure he brings about reform and change and make sure that he has a fit for purpose university here at VU for the future.

So one year on. Adam, what have you learnt this year and how do you see it going to the future?

Adam Shoemaker

Well, learning is what we're about Steve, and as you said, whether it's dual sector learning or PhD learning, you know, it's all here.

I guess there's two or three things which I learnt. One is the power of really listening. And early on, back in January of this year, we were having a gathering of all the Deans and other senior leaders, and I described my discovery because I've been to the VU Whitten Oval for the first time.

Of course, they'd had this welcome Adam Shoemaker sign there because, you know, they were very clever and did all this.

I said, “What's here?” And they said, “everything!” We have the VU Polytechnic students doing remedial massage. We have 12 VU students doing doctorates at VU Whitten Oval, 24 members of the team in the four teams that have the Bulldogs livery studying with VU.

I said, this truly is the industry of sport, but a university campus. So I told this story to all the deans and I said this to me is like a model of literally almost like flipping it so that you have a campus and industry together.

The dean of health, she was very, very closely listening – Karen Dodd - and she said, “Why don't you do that in every campus, Adam?”

I thought for about six seconds, what a wonderful idea that is, because we're really ready-made at a time where never before in human history if we need to symbolise the importance of gainful employment linked to what we do in higher education and vocational training much more. And so having an ethical industry base really makes sense.

So that was one of the things I learnt was listen to great ideas when they come forward and just go for them.

And that was a great idea. Another one is really the case that we had to listen to students. And equally, every time I talked to students, they say this is how you could do such and such better. You know, we could do pop up vaccination clinics said the students. We did them.

You could do more in terms of COVID response by giving scholarships to students. We did them. So I guess what I'm saying Steve is I've learnt to listen to great ideas and there's been a lot of them and I'm so grateful to the people who suggested them. Then, and of course, throughout the strategic plan as well, we had 988 people all putting in great ideas.

Steve Bracks

That's great, and in listening to those ideas, Sam said by staff, students in the broader community have you discovered any surprises about VU that you did not previously.

I know that you're very well prepared and very well researched, but there must be something that was a surprise this year.

Adam Shoemaker

Well, there's always a few.

I had not realised just the breadth of what we did, like you said before and when I went out to Werribee and saw this amazing school, this tech school that we have on the Werribee campus, the Wyndham Tech School, it's just outstandingly good.

So every time we want to bring industry guests or foreign guests from anywhere, we go there and their eyes pop out of their heads and they say, “this is just great.”

And what's excellent about it? It's not just a school for one population, like 600 students, it's all the schools visiting coming in for a few days and going back again. That surprised me in a really great way.

I think the other thing is I was really surprised just recently I rode my bike to work, came along the Maribyrnong River and stopped because you know how you're always in a hurry to get to work because everyone loves getting there. So I sort of look there, and I stopped to look from the river up at the Footscray Park campus just how beautiful it was.

In a way, the front door of the campus faces the Maribyrnong River. The back door faces Ballarat Road, and we often forget this because we come in, you know, through roadways. We have some of the most beautiful campuses around, and not everyone realises – it's like this undiscovered treasure stuff.

So I find that more and more all the time I discover new things.

Steve Bracks

That's excellent. And in discovering new things, of course, you're looking forward and setting priorities for the next year and beyond. You've got new executive team that you've recruited this year, which is which is great.

So what do you think will be the priorities for next year and not just for the new executive, for you individually as well?

Adam Shoemaker

Oh, thanks. Look, there's a lot, but I'll try and just signal a couple of maybe two or three.

One is we really have said we're going to take that theme of protecting country seriously. And I know, and you may know as well, that we have a unique collection of indigenous history. The Aboriginal History Archive here, the Gary Foley collection, which has expanded and grown and has received great philanthropic funding this year from the Paul Ramsay Foundation.

We want to see that recognition of that grow and contributions to it grow next year and become seen as one of the premier sites for history of that sort and politics and change in this nation. If not the world. That's one of our aims.

Another one is really to get digital enablement behind every degree so that no matter what you're studying in the world of technology, everyone is confident and can apply it. If you're in nursing, you know how to use myhealth.gov.au fully.

If you're doing something in engineering, you know exactly what the technology of your work, any degree. And I think that's a challenge which we're going to rise to.

I guess the third one is really seeing us as a place which is so proud of the local, the backyard and the front yard (Victoria), but also being seen more in the world. So as we take the Block model, I can see the potential for that globally as being a kind of method, a kind of way of learning that isn't just powerful, powerful for us, but for many others.

We do believe that could be the course – and great things with partners, rankings comparisons. Those would be the three I nominate. And at the end of the year, we have to talk and see if we've managed it.

Steve Bracks

Well, we’ll check back on that and I'm sure you will. Thank you, Adam.

Adam Shoemaker

Total pleasure. And look, I just want to ask you, both of you are two of the most imbued in VU of anyone in the community. Is there any final message you'd have for all of our thousands of listeners, students, alumni, anyone at all in the community? Any final messages from you first of all Gaye.

Gaye Hamilton

Thank you very much. Well, firstly for me, thank you to everyone who I've had the pleasure to be with involved with over the past decade on Council and prior to that, probably 20 years as well of involvement with a year before that, so 30 altogether.

Thank you to everybody. I would just want everyone to just keep up the good work, keep learning, keep innovating and really make VU top of mind for everyone in the West, in Victoria, in Australia. And let's go for the world.

Adam Shoemaker

I agree with that, too.

And of course, you have a lifetime membership in the VU family, as you know, and you're always welcome here anytime, as you know, too.

Chancellor, over to you for a final message as well.

Steve Bracks

Well, Victoria University is truly the place to be and to be the best you can be. And that's really what we want. We're about and ensuring that you can be the best person you can, taking on courses, a myriad of courses and enabling you to be job ready for the future, and VU’s going to be all about that in the future.

So VU – great future, great prospects. And one of the great universities in Australia.

Adam Shoemaker

There we are. Go, well, everyone, thank you so much.

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People of VU Podcast

Hosted by Vice-Chancellor, Professor Adam Shoemaker
Episode 3: Professor Andy Hill, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research and Impact

Karen Jackson, Executive Director Moondani Balluk

Hello and welcome. I'm here to provide acknowledgement of country. For those who don't know me, I’m KJ - Karen Jackson, Director of Moondani Balluk.

My Genealogy tracks back to Moira Lakes in Barmah Forest and Mount Hope in Pyramid Hill, giving me my connections to your Yorta Yorta and Burrup Barrup language groups.

There's a couple of things I'd like you to take away from my acknowledgement. The first is to remember the hidden history of Aboriginal people since the invasion.

Our loss of language, removal from country, and our near extinction from massacres and pandemics.

The second is our strong and inherent connection to community and country.

These connections have given us the resilience and courage to rebuild our languages, gain access to country, regenerate our cultural practises.

In acknowledging the traditional owners of the country on which you are now on, I'd like to sincerely thank them for their generosity and kindness in welcoming people onto their lands. Lands never ceded and lands that run deep into their being and spirit.

I wish to pay my deep respect to the ancestors, Elders, communities and families of the Woiwurrung Wurundjeri on whose land I stand and who create connection and share knowledge with all of us.

Thank you.

Professor Adam Shoemaker, Vice-Chancellor

Well, hello, colleagues.

It's my absolute pleasure to be able to welcome Professor Andy Hill to another episode of the People of VU podcast. Andy, thanks for joining us.

Professor Andy Hill, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research And Impact

Thanks very much for inviting me.

Adam Shoemaker

Totally great.

And in fact, as we were privileged to do, I want to acknowledge country before we begin acknowledging wisdom elder ship the value of knowledge for research, but also the value of knowledge for our actions that we take daily and actually to enjoin that as we go forward together.

So Andy, I know you feel particularly strongly about that as someone who grew up in New Zealand and has lived elsewhere, but also back in Australia now.

Can I ask you, let's go back to Maori country first. You know, early on when you were growing up in Wellington, so the capital city of New Zealand. What was it like as an undergraduate and were you a science major? Did you know science was your first love from an early day?

Andy Hill

I did like science when I was at high school, and originally I wanted to do medicine. So my first year at university was trying to get into pre-med.

But I discovered I liked more the science than the medicine, so my first degree was a variety of things. I majored in zoology, biochemistry and also psychology. I was interested in psychology, so I followed all of those through to third year. So I had had quite a broad interest in the biological sciences, mainly.

Adam Shoemaker

Then you must have had a big decision to take at the end of your undergraduate career to stay in New Zealand, to go overseas. What did you do next?

Andy Hill

So in New Zealand at the time, you did a three year bachelor's degree and then you did one year for honours. So it was really my honours project that got me really excited about research.

I was working on sheep, actually, which of course, there is many off in New Zealand. And I was using DNA fingerprinting, which, you know, had just become available at the time, which, you know, had been used to solve crimes. But I was using this to look at the genetics of sheep who were susceptible or resistant to a particular disease.

It just got me really interested in, you know, being the first to discover something. So that's what really got me hooked on research was knowing I was working on something no one else was working on and that whole element of discovery.

It led me to a really cool project I did at the end of that year where I had to go to the zoo and using DNA fingerprinting, figure out the father of one of the spider monkeys at the zoo. So I got locked in the spider cage for a whole afternoon and we caught each one of the monkeys one by one and took a little blood sample and tried to work out who had fathered the new baby spider monkey.

So I guess that's where I learnt a bit about impact, too. And that, you know, the research I could do was actually answering a real world problem. So yeah, and it just inspired me to sort of carry on with my research career, which I decided to do by doing what a lot of Kiwis did at the time, by travelling overseas. And so I looked for a PhD opportunity and went to London, and that's where I started.

Adam Shoemaker

Well, let me just pause for a second now. This zoo connection is very interesting because as you may know, one of the Deputy Chancellors of this University is the CEO of Zoos Victoria so if you want to get in those spider monkey cages again, we can make this happen.

Andy Hill

I'm sure you know, that'd be great, it was a great project

Adam Shoemaker

You can reacquaint yourself with these wonderful creatures.

I think so. But let's get back to your doctorate. So like many wonderful students, you looked, if you like further afield, went to the UK. How did that work like that transition? Did you have any problems getting into the zone or was it something that happened rather quickly?

Andy Hill

So I was actually born in the UK, so I was able to travel there relatively easily. And before I left New Zealand, I was looking at the back pages of Nature and Science and came across a few opportunities. I applied for those and heard back from a couple and had lined up a couple of interviews when I landed in the UK.

One of them was for working on a really weird infectious agent called a Prion, and that's something I learnt about in my undergrad and it sounded very science fiction because no one knew much about them, and I kind of liked working on things that are a bit off the wall. So an opportunity to do a PhD on that arose. I went for an interview, landed the position and started working on these quite novel infectious agents that cause diseases that affect humans and other animals. It's a brain disorder.

Adam Shoemaker

And look, there's quite widespread, as I understand to. Can you name some of the diseases just for those who don't know what kind of diseases would be categorised under that Prion category?

Andy Hill

So it causes diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or CJD. And it was better known in the UK because it caused the epidemic of bovine spongiform encephalopathy or mad cow disease, which, you know, I started my journey there in the early 1990s.

BSE was in the newspapers all the time and we thought and the government was saying there wasn't a risk to humans getting being transmitting this disease through the meat. So that actually played out in quite a different way over several years and I was involved in some of the work that showed the link between a new form of this prion disease in humans and linking that to being exposed to these prions and in bovine materials.

So again, it was another very impactful period of my research. And, you know, I learnt very quickly that the stuff we're doing in the lab can have major public health implications. So it was a really very enlightening time actually about how research can have massive impacts out in the real world.

Adam Shoemaker

Look. I love that because, you know, in a sense, you started early saying these words like originality, discovery and impact, but then you're translating that right from day one and PhD, you know, relatively early. That's a big it's a big achievement.

So, you know, was that something which really led to a form of publication? Did you choose your journals very carefully as a result of wanting to have impact? How did that work?

Andy Hill

Yes. So I mean, some of this is about luck and being in the right place at the right time or the wrong place at the right time. And you know, it did lead us to, you know, work out where we wanted to publish. We did approach, you know, journals such as Nature and we published these first papers in Nature so as a PhD student, that was just an amazing experience seeing my work published in such a prestigious outlet.

But again it's the work that came after that was we just kept going and going because we were unravelling quite a new story about these infectious agents. And, you know, when I discovered that we could detect them in tonsil tissue and that led to us using that as a diagnostic test and living people for the disease. And so I'd have to go to the hospital sometimes and pick up tonsil tissues to take back to the lab and work on. It was a very, very real scenario.

I was a biochemist, but I was able to work at the interface of medical science, which kind of fed my hunger to do medicine, which is what I've wanted to do at the beginning. It sort of came full circle in a way.

Adam Shoemaker

Well, it sounds like you've benefited far more than individual patients, so you're talking about sort of categories of patients as well. So that's really terrific.

So let's think about other aspects. So neurodegenerative disorders, I guess, is the term we're talking about here. And so would that also include, say, Alzheimer's disease and other forms of, you know, age related disorders also, how does that relate?

Andy Hill

So, yeah, the prion diseases, some of them are quite rare, but they belong to this group of diseases called neurodegenerative disorders. And that's basically where three are processes that happen in the brain that break down normally as we age and a common feature of them is that proteins that we have in our bodies start to change their shape and they form these rusty deposits in the brain.

So Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Prion disease, also Motor Neurone Disease are all associated with different proteins that change their shape and deposit in the brain or other parts of the nervous system. So by studying one of these diseases, we can sort of extrapolate to study the others.

That's what happened for me when I came to Australia, I expanded from working just on the Prion diseases into Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and also Motor Neurone Disease and what we found out about one disease we could extrapolate and to the others quite effectively.

Adam Shoemaker

That is fantastic. I mean, really, what a great journey to say that each step of the way you're discovering something new, which is of benefit, you know, and you couldn't ask for anything better. Do you love research?

Andy Hill

I do. I do love research. And, you know, I still have an active research lab.

What I really love is the people I get to work with. So, you know, throughout my journey here in Australia, for instance, I've worked with teams of researchers on large collaborative grants such as programme grants. And you know, I can be the biochemistry guy on that grant and then we've got neurologists, we've got other clinicians, chemists and a wide variety of people. So they get to use my expertise and I get to use their expertise.

What I really love is sort of team science trying to address big problems, and I think that's where you can sort of address these impactful endpoints.

Adam Shoemaker

Well, you certainly were part of Team Uni Melb and Team Latrobe. Now you're part of Team VU or Victoria University, and we're absolutely delighted you're here.

So tell me about what you're wanting to bring here and what you'd like to do. That's different here. Have you got a view around, for example, this impact question that's in your job title after all?

Andy Hill

Yeah. So I think really getting to the crux of what impact means for research at VU, because impact can have quite different meanings. And I think, you know, one way of looking at it is that impact means you've got a real world outcome.

I think it's about bringing VU research along that translational journey to, you know, have impacts, have outcomes in the real world. And I think there's lots of examples of that at VU.

And I think one thing I'd like to do is to try and bring together the research at VU and be able to tell our story a lot more clearly about the research we do and how we think it's going to help people in the real world. And that can cut across several different layers of research from, you know, the policy work that's done here through to that in sports and also biomedicine and with the work that goes on in various different industries, water industry, concrete, you know, the work we do out at Werribee with the fire retardant work and things like that.

Adam Shoemaker

Well, since you mentioned Werribee. I just brought a little sample to our podcast, this is I'm going to hold it up. I have here in my hand a very small cube. It's probably 25 square centimetres, not that big. And it's actually made, it's a new formulation of concrete involving 18 coffee cups microscopically ground in replacing the sand component of the concrete. Now we actually were able to see this as a demonstration, you know, last week. What a wonderful thing to imagine the circular economy leading to advances in building construction.

So what do you think about this kind of thing?

Andy Hill

I mean, I think it's and the fact you can hold it in your hand sort of shows the impact it can have. It becomes real. You can actually see it and feel it.

I think it's these creative solutions to real world problems that I think, you know, we've got a lot of capacity to use here. So, you know, it's just coming up with that way of taking something like a used coffee cup and turning it into something that, you know, reduces the impact on the environment and creates more sustainable product. I think that's really clever, and I think that's the kind of thing we need to be able to tell people that that we're doing here.

Adam Shoemaker

I get the feeling you want to turbocharge clever.

Andy Hill

Clever. Yes.

Adam Shoemaker

Yeah, that's sort of what we're what you're on about. So I mean, I just go in a slightly different section, but related to clever too. In speaking to you, I know you have a very strong commitment to sustainability, both personally and professionally. And you've got an initiative called the Green Lab Initiative.

Can you tell us what does that mean? Why are you so passionate about it?

Andy Hill

Sure. So my lab works with a lot of disposable plastic wear and we started to think about, you know, sustainability, how we could kind of impact on the environment, how our day to day research was having and a postdoc from Europe, joined my lab, and he's very, very passionate about sustainability

We had some long, deep conversations about this and we started to talk about the lab and how we could, you know, change things in the lab to make them more sustainable. And so we started to look around for what's happening in the rest of the world that that's addressing this very, very common problem.

This is a massive problem in the world now because, you know, over the last two years, we started using more masks and things like this so there's a massive sort of environmental impact on a lot of these things we use, you know, day to day. So we found this organisation called My Green Lab, which is based in the US, and they run a programme where you can apply to get certified as a green lab.

As a lab, one of our COVID lockdown sort of activities was to embark on this journey of being the first lab in Australia to be certified. And it involved us doing a survey to see how green we were to start with. And the results came back and we weren't very green at all so this education piece started where we picked off different topics and started to look at ways we could become greener and reduce our waste and look at the energy consumption of our equipment.

It took about a year to get all these processes in place and then we went through the certification process and we're awarded green level certification, which is their highest level. So we're very proud of that achievement and it's something that was starting to get other labs involved in, and it's something I'd love to bring to VU to show how we can sort of work with researchers to make their environments more sustainable and it was it was a bit of fun process, too.

We learnt things that we went home and looked at how we were doing things at home in terms of energy usage and things. So there's been a lot of spin offs and benefits from this kind of approach.

Adam Shoemaker

Well, it kind of goes back to the idea of your research should the application of it and extension and scaling it to so I think it would line up incredibly well with the Protecting Country theme in our strategic plan, but also the whole idea of people place and planet.

So, you know, I can just hear people listening to this saying, you know, cheering this on and wanting to be part of your green lab initiative. I'm sure that will happen. So tell us, when would you like to start that and how can we help?

Andy Hill

I'd like to start it as soon as we can, really, and I think, you know, having a whole of university approach to because while the work we did on this was based on a biology laboratory, the principles can be rolled out in offices.

It's little things like labelling machines, coffee machines, light switches about when they should be turned off, you know, when they can be left on those sort of things and that changed a lot of a lot of behaviour. The way we use water, how we use fridges and freezers. You know, there's a thing called a freezer challenge that migraine lab run every few months and I think that could really kick off our journey here and getting labs and offices around the university to sign up to that freezer challenge I think that could be a great place to start.

Adam Shoemaker

Well, we'll be part of it. I can tell Andy that I think it's going to be leading lots of initiatives. Tell me in addition to that are there any areas of research that you think the VU research, Victoria University research should or could be involved in the future that you really think should be prioritised?

Andy Hill

Look, there's a lot of amazing research that that's happening here, and I think, we're sitting in Footscray Park at the moment, and you can't ignore the fact that across the road here, this is a hospital being built.

That's going to present a lot of opportunities for the researchers to engage in research that involves the hospital, everything from AI and biomedical research through to the expertise that exists in musculoskeletal research as well at the university.

There's a lot of opportunities there, but also on the other campuses, there's a lot of industry engagement that that I can see is producing really strong relationships of industry, particularly around the research base.

I think it's about strengthening those relationships also, you know, the funding environment is very challenging at the moment so I think we have to sort of try and focus our energies on things that we can do and can do well so we can keep our research profiles well-resourced.

Adam Shoemaker

Yeah. And I think we'd all agree to that. Paying attention to the world is really crucial and partnering with the world, you know, in other words, not just seeing the local campus partnering, but as you've done partnering with the best in the world for that world betterment. So you might say something about, you know, partners in other countries as well.

Andy Hill

Definitely. And I think we, you know, we partner very well with our communities that we we're based in but I think that again, that can extrapolate into other similar environments around the world, but also developing international partnerships. I think will be will be great and as we're coming out of this COVID environment, I think that's something that we should be able to do a lot easier than has been done over the last couple of years.

Adam Shoemaker

Oh, I'm sure we can't wait. You know to do that. Andy, I'm going to ask you three personal ones because this is sort of just to get a bit more about your own view of the world. So what is, would you say, is one of the most common myths about researchers that you'd like to debunk?

Andy Hill

Well, I guess, focus on my area of science, I think there's a sort of myth that researchers that just in white lab coats all the time and we're sort of boffiny characters but I think without a lab coat. It's kind of hard to tell who a researcher actually is and so I think it's about not reading... you can't judge a book by its cover so and I think researchers are very passionate about the work they do and the impact that they want to want to provide. Researchers aren't necessarily always extroverts.

You do need to dig out these stories from them. That's something we should work on as well and telling the story of VU research better and being really proud of the things that we're doing here and the contributions we're making.

Adam Shoemaker

That storytelling is woven through everything we've been talking about today, being proud of it, but also explaining it and not just to government, but to the wider public and to our students and graduates as well. The alumni, for example, a 165,000, we met quite a few of them at lunch last week. Some of the alumni award winners and amongst them were some wonderful researchers and applied researchers as well. We have a lot to be proud of.

Andy Hill

Definitely. And learning to tell those stories, you know, clearly and you know, well-articulated I think is that's also a mark of a good, a good researcher as well. So we've got we've all had to learn from, you know, I remember telling people about what I worked on you could see the eyes glazing over and it's like, I've got to do that better next time. So working on that delivery is really important.

Adam Shoemaker

So maybe storytelling workshops for researchers is something we've got in the in the offing, it sounds like we might be doing that as a team based thing. Now I've heard that you're interested in words and very specifically Wordle as well. What are some of your record attempts and what do you have a favourite word?

Andy Hill

Yeah, word. It was my little summer bit of fun and I thought when I come back to work, I'd stop doing it, but I've kind of kept doing it on the sly. My record was getting it in two attempts. And I've been starting with the same word for a while. I used clean as my starting word. Very often it doesn't really do anything, but I'm hoping one day like the Lotto it might be might be the winning word.

I don't have time to do crosswords, but I just love the simplicity of the puzzle and the little challenge it brings every day. So it's been a bit of fun.

Adam Shoemaker

I can tell you do like challenges and of course, clean skills. If you like core skills, clean skills, environmental skills, they do go together, so you come by it honestly, that that word, you know, then relates to laboratories as well let's face it.

And I know that amongst other things that we try to do here, we're always trying to be ever better one of the things I struggle with myself is getting ever better in cycling to work because I seem to have exactly the same time every day just like that.

Is that something you enjoy as well, getting out in nature and doing a two wheeled sort of view of the world?

Andy Hill

Yeah, I love getting out of my mountain bike at the weekends, sometimes after work, you know, during lockdowns, I discovered I live very close to some amazing trails, so that was a really good respite during lockdowns to go out to hop on the bike, not get injured too much.

But you know, and again, yeah, trying to improve times and challenges that biking brings. That's been something I've done, you know, for a number of years now. So it's something I like to get out and do as much as I can.

Adam Shoemaker

Well, you know, we're all going to be there. Can you imagine a new tower? There's going to be so many bicycle parking spots. I think we're all going to use them. You know, wonderful thing indeed.

So everything from the UK to New Zealand to extracellular vesicles, let me, by the way, let me just get you to explain what extracellular vesicles are, because that's one of your research and areas as well just as a final thing.

Andy Hill

Sure. So extracellular vesicles are tiny particles that are released by all of our cells, and they contain proteins and genetic material, and they float around our body, so they found in the blood. We actually use them as a source of, we call them biomarkers of disease. And some of the work we've been doing on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's is pulling out these tiny particles they're about always smaller than that block of cement you've got there, but they're about 100 nanometres in size so they're very tiny.

But we can tell so much information about what's happening in the body by looking at their contents so that's been a big part of our research for about the last 15 years on looking at these and how they move around the brain and spread some of these horrible diseases.

Adam Shoemaker

Thank you so much. Look, I've learnt so much myself. I'm sure all of the listeners have to, but even more it's whetted our appetite to have you part of every possible meeting we have about the strategic future of this institution.

Andy, welcome to VU. We could not be more fortunate to have you with us and the team based approach you have to science is absolutely inspiring, so thank you so much.

Andy Hill

Thank you very much, Adam. That's great. Thank you.

Text on screen

People of VU Podcast

Hosted by Vice-Chancellor, Professor Adam Shoemaker
Episode 5: Nyadol Nyuon, Director Sir Zelman Cowen Centre

Karen Jackson, Executive Director Moondani Balluk

Hello and welcome. I'm here to provide acknowledgement of country. For those who don't know me, I’m KJ - Karen Jackson, Director of Moondani Balluk.

My Genealogy tracks back to Moira Lakes in Barmah Forest and Mount Hope in Pyramid Hill, giving me my connections to your Yorta Yorta and Burrup Barrup language groups.

There's a couple of things I'd like you to take away from my acknowledgement. The first is to remember the hidden history of Aboriginal people since the invasion. Our loss of language, removal from country, and our near extinction from massacres and pandemics.

The second is our strong and inherent connection to community and country. These connections have given us the resilience and courage to rebuild our languages, gain access to country, regenerate our cultural practises.

In acknowledging the traditional owners of the country on which you are now on, I'd like to sincerely thank them for their generosity and kindness in welcoming people onto their lands. Lands never ceded and lands that run deep into their being and spirit.

I wish to pay my deep respect to the ancestors, Elders, communities and families of the Woiwurrung Wurundjeri on whose land I stand and who create connection and share knowledge with all of us.

Thank you.

Professor Adam Shoemaker, Vice-Chancellor

Colleagues. Hello, first of all, and to acknowledge country and to recall the fact that we're here on First Nations land, no matter where we work, where we live and where we profess what we're doing at Victoria University. And it's something which we take incredibly seriously each day of the week and all the time.

We're here for another episode of the People of VU podcast, and I've been introducing you to the incredible people at Victoria University, and there are many of them.

Today, I'm joined by Nyadol Nyuon, who is Director of the Sir Zelman Cowen Centre.

That's a wonderful place, and we're going to hear more about it.

She's an esteemed lawyer, a community advocate and actually a graduate of this University too. Welcome Nyadol.

Nyadol Nyuon

Thank you for having me. It's good to be back. It's good to be back at this campus. I don't remember the last time I was here. Oh, I think it was in early March (last year) when I came back to give a speech on International Women's Day. But it's good to be back in so many ways because this is where I did my undergraduate studies.

Adam Shoemaker

Well, as they say at VU, you come, and some people will never leave in spirit, and we feel like in a sense, that's a belonging for us and we're so delighted that you're back as a staff member now.

When you were a student, could you ever have imagined that?

Nyadol Nyuon

No, not at all.

I mean, I don't even think I could have imagined that three months ago or four months ago when we started having the conversation. It's definitely a step up in terms of taking on what might be a very public leadership role.

I think a lot of my leadership roles in the past have been within voluntary context and community context and hasn't been necessarily one that is backed by an institution. So this is going to be interesting and in many ways.

Adam Shoemaker

Well, you certainly have our backing and that's what this is about.

I want to tell you that I have not met a single person at the University who wasn't really excited to hear the news of you taking on this role. So congratulations again, because it is quite a thrill for us as well.

Nyadol Nyuon

Oh, thank you. I'm glad. I'm glad that's the feedback. Maybe you have not asked enough people.

Adam Shoemaker

Well, we'll keep on asking. But that's where we're going so far.

And so let's just go back in time a little bit because it is the case that the West of Melbourne has been very significant in your life as well.

But just tell me a little bit, you know, when you first sort of laid eyes on this continent kind of flying in, what did you think?

What was going through your head when you first visualise and saw the airport and saw Australia… what was going through your head?

Nyadol Nyuon

I have written about this before. I came from Kakuma two weeks before my flight to Melbourne. I think we were in Kakuma for even about a week. And so Kakuma has no electricity. So at night it's very dark. And I used to steal my mother's torch to read, to continue reading at night after the sun has gone down. And so I think the first striking thing was just how much light was spread across Melbourne as you look down from the plane. And it felt as if the world had been flipped upside down because it did look like a carpet of stars as you stared down from it. So I think that was quite striking.

Since returning to this role, I've been driving more and more back to the office and I go through the Melbourne tunnel and I just remember that was one of my first vivid memories of Melbourne. I'm going through those tunnels and the light flipping as you go along, and every time they do that, I go back to that kid on there and on the back of the car as we got picked up from the airport. Just imagining what this country and what the opportunities could be now that I'm out of the refugee camp. So very I was very, very excited.

Adam Shoemaker

Wow. And light is such a powerful image.

I mean, when you think of it, I don't know how much time you spent in the so-called outback of Australia or beyond the city lights, but those stars are even brighter there. But of course, the city lights dim, but there's no less light. In fact, on a clear night, it's incredible. It's as if the whole carpet, as you put it of stars is closer and the sounds are sounds of animals and creatures, not the sounds of the city. It's all part of Australia, but it's marvellous to imagine that moment.

Nyadol Nyuon

Wow.

Adam Shoemaker

So sounds mattered. Vision mattered. Lights matter. And also, what about the sense of people? Who did you meet first when you came?

Nyadol Nyuon

The first people I met were the family that sponsored us and picked us up from the airport.

The second people I met, I think, would have been whoever was the KFC owner around that place because I remember having my first KFC and I don't think I've ever eaten as much chicken ever since. It just this is so differently from anything I had eaten before.

So I think so. Those were the first group of people I've met.

And then I decided to enrol at high school I saw a school on a bus driving and walked in the next day and said can I enrol at 11 and they told me to go back and bring my mother but yeah, so it was sort of finding my own way and there was not a lot of guidance for my family when we arrived here because we were sponsored by a family member there was an expectation that they would sort of take us through the ropes. And when you're when you're brought in through government sponsorship, they provide you with a social worker and much more support.

So we were in our own rental property within two weeks. We had to figure out where the shopping centres where, we had to figure out what buses to get to where we wanted to go.

You know, I remember the shopping centre. It's about if you're walking about 12 minute walk or more and we didn't have a car then So we would put all our stuff in there and cart and push it all the way back home because that's the only options we had at the time.

Adam Shoemaker

It’s the only way you could do it. Yeah, I mean, look, migration is an incredible thing. I've done it myself. I was an accidental migrant. I mean, I came to this country by air as a student and I had one duffel bag over my back and I never thought I would stay.

And I remember one of the images I had. Of course, I came in the early morning and as you came into Sydney, not Melbourne, you saw the coast and this this incredible idea of blue meeting land it was is always stuck in my mind.

And when we arrived in Canberra, because I was in Canberra, I couldn't believe it. It seemed like going back in time at that point because the airport was pretty basic and it was 40 degrees. It was actually Valentine's Day, really hot. And immediately all these flies were around, you know, kind of all over your body.

It wasn't a common thing in Canada. We've gone from minus 27 degrees to plus 40, so there always is a bit of a shock to your body as well.

Nyadol Nyuon

I had an opposite reaction. I come from Kakuma, which was, I think, about 40 degrees or more every day because it's a semi-desert area of Kenya. And so I think we arrived, we came here in March, and for a long time I still had the heater on when it was 27 degrees outside or sometimes when 30 degrees outside because it wasn't as warm enough inside still. So I had the opposite reaction.

I'm still getting used to the weather. I think that's the bit I find really hard, especially the winters when there's not enough sunlight. I love Melbourne Summers, you know, and I have to almost contain my delight when it's when it's about 30 degrees because I, I can see everyone else seems to be suffocating in the heat and I want to skip around.

Adam Shoemaker

You're just suddenly your energy levels go up when others are going down. Yeah, it's a weird thing. But two things in life thermostat internally of a body and accents. They both seem to be formed at about the age of 11 or 12 or something like that.

And you don't lose it, you know what I mean?

Nyadol Nyuon

I didn't know that.

Adam Shoemaker

Well I made that up. But I mean, but in reality, when you meet most people, their accents are pretty formed. Someone who's, let's say, a small child, sometimes their accent changes.

Yeah, but you know, but when you come as a teenager, very often you have those remnants. I was like that. I was just 20, you know, when I came. So my accent, like the edges, have gone off it. But people can still tell I'm kind of wasn't born here, you know? And that seems to be, you know, they're always curious, you know, they say, where were you from originally? Is the word I get asked a lot. I don't know if that's happened to you as well?

Nyadol Nyuon

Yeah, I think it does. But sometimes they don't often wait for my accent. I think I have a visible passport in terms of my skin colour, so people tend to ask, so where are you from?

And you say, well, Melbourne or whatever you mention and they ask again, No, where are you really from? Where are your parents from? And to me, what I think those questions, I mean, besides the curiosity which is in itself, not a bad thing it's also, I don't think that question's ever really answer gives you a clear answer in a way you know, because for me, you asked me, Where are you from? I would say I was born in a refugee camp in Ethiopia, and I grew up in Kenya, and I came to Australia when I was 17.

So where are you from is quite different to asking me, what is your ethnicity? Because the two are not linked, and if you're really asking for my ethnicity, then I would say I am of South Sudanese heritage, which in a sense is actually meaningless because South Sudan, you drive your ethnicity from the tribe, not the nation, because that's not, you know, just because of the history of Africa and colonialism, the way nations have formed more than a group of people that came together collectively and have a political identity. You know, they were sort of forced to a geographical location based on how the colonial powers decided to carve up Africa.

So you do end up, you know, I consider my language come from being an Angakuei woman.

My traditions come from being a Angakuei woman, the sort of the political concept of South Sudan is very new in a way, so it's an interesting way if you want to answer it in a more complex way, it's not a question that get to the answer that the person is actually seeking. But I sort of also get what they mean when they say where you from, they are not asking about the different places of travel. They're asking about a specific identity that they think correspond with what they see visibly outside.

Adam Shoemaker

I absolutely understand what you mean and sometimes there's surprises, too. It's a bit like how people are saying they're surprised when they see someone on Zoom and then meet them and so called face to face this kind of thing. There’s a bit of dislocation there, too. But you're absolutely right to point out that his assumptions made about lots of things and a lot of the time, they're very wrong.

You know, assumptions can be very wrong. What about when you studied like you were studying in school and then as that went through, you know, we love to think of ourselves as a University of the West of Melbourne, where we visible to you as a student in high school?

Nyadol Nyuon

No, but I think partly because I was in the southeast, I was in, so I heard more about Monash because it was in that location but I moved towards this side when I started my degree and live with a family that was in the western suburb I think it was in Taylors Lake at the time. But no, I wouldn't say that the university was visible to me.

Adam Shoemaker

How did you choose Victoria University?

Nyadol Nyuon

I don't really recall. I think I made a number of applications to study an arts degree, and I actually wanted to major in Philosophy. But I'd gone back to Kenya for a visit and a friend was enrolling me on my behalf and instead of Philosophy he picked Psychology, I don't know how you make that mistake but by the time I had come back, it was late to do to change without incurring a fee so I just stuck with Psychology.

Adam Shoemaker

Amazing story. So it has a p, it has a y, whatever is in the middle, it doesn't matter too much.

Nyadol Nyuon

So that's how I ended up majoring in Psychology instead of Philosophy.

Adam Shoemaker

Well, happily, there's a bit of overlap with some very good psychologists who have very strong philosophical ties and vice versa.

But did you enjoy that course after all?

Nyadol Nyuon

I did, and I think that's why I stuck through it because I was quite a much broader course than just a focus on psychology, and I could measure it. But I could also take all this other interesting courses in, you know, in social sciences. So I still got to explore that and that was good. That's why I stayed in it.

Adam Shoemaker

Fantastic. Well, that's a great story in its own right, too, that you don't really know. Everybody starts degrees anticipating what they think. They don't always have that same experience when they finish. So we have this little slogan of wanting to start, well, a degree and finished brilliantly. Do you feel you finished brilliantly or was it a struggle? How hard was it?

Nyadol Nyuon

It was hard and on a number of fronts. I think it was hard because I was also relatively new to the country. I think by the time I started at VU it had only been two years since I'd come to Australia because I enrolled in year 11 in 2005 and then in 2006 I finished year 12. I think I started 2007. So I, yeah, about two years.

And so I remember my first assessment. Actually, I didn't even have a computer. I didn't own a computer, so I wrote it. I wrote, I hadn't written the assessment, and I think the lecturer was kind enough to tell me that I was not going to be adequate but he did it a very gentle way. So I thought, you know, so I had to again learn basic computer skills, just typing and getting fast at it and doing research online and all these things that I suppose you either take in because you grow up here within the systems that I was learning for the first time at you know at a university level and that was that was hard.

Adam Shoemaker

Yeah, that was hard and everybody goes through it. But people assume that others know and it. And sometimes that happens at a much earlier age, too so if you don't have access or openness to it, well it just shows us we can never assume with our students you have to always ask and be supportive in different ways. I'm glad that the lecturer was supportive. That's a good sign.

Nyadol Nyuon

I met some really good people here, you know, Dr Anne Harris at the time, and I think I might have forgot to his name, the last name Wallace and he was just really generous with his time. And also, Helen Hill, you know, she teaches international development I think I took one of her courses. So, you know, really people that were dedicated to just not just being good teachers, but good people. And I think that makes a difference.

Adam Shoemaker

Well, and you know, Helen Hill is still doing great work a lot of it in Dili. She's still doing a lot of work in Timor Leste. And when I before I started, I asked the Australian Embassy in Dili about sort of key people from Australia, and her name came right up right there in the beginning. So we've got some marvellous people here and it's a great amount of pride to think you have more knowledge of VU than I do, which is why I was speaking. But also having been out and then coming back in is incredibly interesting.

So when you finished this degree, then you, you worked and then you decided to do Law. So how did that sort of sequence happen? How did how did you how did those next phases occur?

Nyadol Nyuon

I always wanted to do law, but I had not scored high enough marks to get into law at a first go. So I, you know, I undertook Arts nonetheless. And I think it was the best decision in hindsight, because had I had the same struggles that I had in doing an art degree with a law degree I would have been a much more different struggle, you know, trying to write 4000 words, essay law essays when you kind of don’t type properly would be full on. So I think that the undergraduate degree prepared me for the law degree.

It prepared me to do research. It sharpened my analytical skills. It introduced me to academic writing. And through that, I was able to see some of my weaknesses and strengths, you know, introduced me to universities structures, you know, getting used to things like deadlines and so I think I'm so glad I did that.

And I've always said that I'm so glad I also started at the VU because I think one of the challenge I didn't have to feel being here was being different, you know, because it's so diverse, and I think that really made university feel as if it's somewhere you belong because I think had I gone somewhere else, I'm not sure I would stayed through a university course, I'm not sure I would have I think it would have been tremendously hard to deal both with trying to figure out and feeling out of place in a university and being one of the few people from your background or whatever in a class or so I think that made it easy and I made friend here and things like that.

So I'm really glad I did. And then after the degree I took about, I'm not sure whether it was two years off. I worked a little bit. I helped a little bit with raising my siblings and then I thought I will apply again for to law. And I did and I got it in, which was really surprising. I mean, in some ways, maybe not. By the time I'd finish my studies, I think I graduated with a distinction average.

So it wasn't like my marks were terribly bad, you know? So I suppose that and just maybe my application and background history made it made it possible to get in and study.

Adam Shoemaker

And so this was this hope, this dream came to pass. And was it a two year intensive programme? How long did it take you to do the postgraduate law?

Nyadol Nyuon

So it was three years full, was it called, full time? But it took me, I think, three years and a half or maybe four years in total because it became quite apparent to me that I just couldn't assume that I had the same situation as everybody else.

You know, I was working three part time jobs while trying to study a degree because having come here, we didn't have anything. You know, when we landed in Melbourne, we didn't even have a dollar to our name. So it meant that I had no support because there was no support that my mom could provide to the single mom financially so I had to work. It also, you know, I didn't have a place to stay for a number of times because at the time my mother moved to Ballarat to try and get some government housing because it was really hard to get housing here. So I was staying at relatives homes and when they moved back to Melbourne to try and get a place, we all stay at my sister's house, which is a two bedroom house, nearly the ten of us for a while. And that's when I just started the law degree. So there was no space to even be able to sit in and read and study. So I was lucky enough to meet Pip Nicholson, and she then made some arrangement with Alman College, where I could go in on a part scholarship.

So that was one of the jobs I was working to earn a room. And then I worked two other jobs, so it was really, really intense. There were times when that when that process felt almost impossible.

Adam Shoemaker

Yeah, almost, but happily not. Not impossible because you persevered. But look, it's an incredible story. And did you like the studying of law as much as the anticipation of the studying of law?

Nyadol Nyuon

Yeah, I think I did. I think I've said, I think I love the practise of it more. It was a really good time for me to grow intellectually. I hope I did because I felt really challenged by that course and the content. And then I went on to Arnold Bloch Leibler and did commercial litigation, but I sort of wanted to point out the struggles with a law degree because I think I think that there is a perception we talk a lot more about our successes than we talk about failures and the hardships and all that and so, you know, it's just more if there's anybody listening to this podcast and they have goals and dreams that they are scared of achieving I say give it a shot, doesn't mean it will be easy, but it's doable and I do truly believe I can do it. Anybody can, because I don't think there's anything that's anything really that exceptional.

Adam Shoemaker

But let's not compare but let's say congratulations, because absolutely, unless you recognise, unless one recognises it is not easy there are always setbacks and you know, I remember, you know, at various times, you know, receiving terribly harsh feedback for some of my recent work you know, this kind of thing and if you take it to heart, you probably would give up, but you have to learn from those kind of experiences and we all do. So I guess the same thing happens when you're practising law too.

There will be times where there's setbacks, where they're both setbacks and successes at Arnold Bloch Leibler as well.

Nyadol Nyuon

Yeah I was completely unprepared to be a commercial lawyer and I knew that going in. I think I and one of the reasons why I even took it up was because I just wanted to see whether I would sink or swim. I wanted to challenge myself and sort of face a fear. And six years later they have not discovered that I was a fraud. So I think I know and I was still there for six years and eventually left to go and look after my kids.

But Law is a really hard discipline. The hours are long. It's really complex matters. You have to get used to sitting and trying to figure out really complex issues for a long period of time. And you're always tasked not only with understanding what your position is, but what the other person position is and having a really good understanding of both.

It requires really good communication skills, both written and spoken. I wasn't very good at the written part and I and I'm still working on it. But I think one of that thing about feedback is that I have got harsh feedback before, but I always look at the feedback and think, what can I work on? Because honest feedback, it's valuable. It's tremendously valuable. It allows you to sharpen your skills. It points you to where the problems are and if you know where the problems are, you might begin to start working on them. For me, was taking English language skills to learn the basics of English language, and I want to go back and do that because. Part of it, it’s fun, the other that it makes me better at writing and other stuff that I want to do. So there is no shame in learning and wanting to learn and continue to learn. If you can just swallow that moment of pain of it being pointed out.

Adam Shoemaker

But one of the great things about being an academic, we love being in the profession. We feel really privileged to be in the profession because we always help each other. I mean, I just recently wrote a chapter for a journal. And of course, peer review is a bit like what you just said constructive, but sometimes harsh, really, to the point criticism. But you take it on board and make the outcome better. And it's the same writing a book or anything else. So we're sort of in a profession that is built upon collegial approaches, but they're very honest. And I think that that's a great way to be when you're coming into this Sir Zelman Cowan Centre because there will be collegial approaches and very honest. Have you met some collegial and honest people already?

Nyadol Nyuon

Yeah, I would like to think you are one of them. Yes. I think I'm loving, it's only three weeks in, but I'm really loving the team at the Sir Zelman Cowen Centre, and just the amount of work that everybody else everybody has put in over the last two years in a pandemic when they couldn’t run some of the other courses, you know, it's really it's inspiring to see people committed to doing good work and believing that the centre can really deliver programmes that are impactful and have the ability to change people's life in the community which is a good thing for the law because the law can be seen as a very distant thing. It's something that is practised for the rich by the rich in a way.

And I think places like Sir Zelman Cowen forces us to contend with the question of what is the utility of the law and how does it impact people in who are at either the merging of society or minorities, minority groups.

Adam Shoemaker

Yeah, there's no question in my mind that there's still much more of a road to run in that direction. You know, we believe it. And whether you call it intercultural law or different forms of movement of people, you know, you yourself were one of those, I myself in a different way. You know, just imagining the rights of people who move across borders huge in the world. I mean, we just, you know, as we speak, we're talking about the potential of the verge of war in Ukraine, people moving across borders again in different ways.

Nyadol Nyuon

Yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot recently the Ukraine, the Ukraine situation and the conduct of Russia and what it means and not necessarily just for Europe and the Ukrainian people who are at the very front of it but what is just for world order, the ability that someone can sort of almost impose their will on a whole group of people based on an assumption and maybe I'm simplifying within the assumption of some past empirical entitlement, you know, and I thought it was really strange how he described Ukraine as part of their spiritual territory, which to me, just sounds like it's my feelings, you know, this is nothing. But I mean, it's been on my mind too, because I think in some ways there's a level of I think may be triggered to some degree or well, I remember reading a tweet about parents putting the blood type of their children on their uniform so that if something happens to them, they can get help and that feels really close to home.

Adam Shoemaker

That's awful, isn't it?

Nyadol Nyuon

And I think you can. I think the sad part is you know, I remember when I was a kid and hearing the [unknown] comes to drop bombs on our heads and we would and we would run to, you know, this foxholes that has been dug on the ground to hide, you know? And my mother tells the story where she said she got to a point where she didn't worry because she knew we knew what to do. We had become so used to monitoring and recognising the sound of the [unknown] approaching that we will leave everything we are doing, what they were drinking tea or playing games and just run into this foxhole to hide.

And I think that that tweet was just not a tweet it was just it just evokes so much more and in terms of how terrifying it must be for parents to get to that level of despair in a way.

Adam Shoemaker

Yeah, and also the children to not think of it as other than sort of normal business. I mean, that's also in a sense, quite terrifying because it's almost like normalising that kind of fear.

Yeah. You know, which is, I guess, what we're talking about at a time you'd think there's enough going on in the world with the pandemic not to add war on top of it. You know, that's kind of what I'm getting at. But it's very relevant, I think, to this whole question of whether it's rights or human rights or movement of people and the law.

We're going to be talking more than once, I'm sure. And this is our first sort of conversation with our colleagues in this way but the most important thing I was going to say is that we will always be open to these conversations.

And that's I think the role that is the role of a place like Sir Zelman Cowen is to open conversations not to close and to make these issues visible, not invisible and to actually achieve different areas of the law that no one else has done.

Nyadol Nyuon

Yeah. I think so. I definitely agree with. I agree. I sort of have to bring seriousness of the conversations that are happening of the margin that people don't think we should be necessarily having a conversation about.

Because if you think about law or when I think about law and the way the law is structured, it's a very conservative discipline, you know, and for some reason, they have very good reasons why we need that. You know, we cannot sustain the chaos of the political process in the league. You know, in legal administration, we know we need to have systems in place, people need to be able to rely on precedent and the idea that the law would be apply a certain way. We need that predictability. But it doesn't mean that you know that the law being a social construct doesn't lack insight into how it impacts other people and so I'm hoping that the Sir Zelman Cowen Centre can be a place where we begin to have those conversations, you know, before people think about I propose actually, this space is a place to have discussions about law and legal application in a multicultural society.

I think it's fascinating intellectually to me, you know with the race discrimination, with the religious discrimination bill, you know, those intersection between law, the protection of civil liberties, the protection of religious rights, you know, the interplay of multiculturalism in it, which was used as a justification as well by the Prime Minister. Whether you agree with him or not, I think that that shows kind of an interesting intersection between law and culture and society with a society defined by multiculturalism or societies that are, you know, defined by their sexual orientation. You know, it's kind of those conversations, too.

Adam Shoemaker

And what's common there is other people are defining someone's identity, which goes back to the very beginning of the questions we asked about where are you from originally? You know, kind of all is of a piece. Isn't it sort of judgements made externally about the internal?

So look, I can't wait to attend some of these seminars at Sir Zelman Cowan and learn more.

We are going to talk some more. But most importantly, now, on behalf of the board, the staff, all colleagues, we could not be more thrilled to have you as a day to day colleague at this university.

Thank you for joining us.

Nyadol Nyuon

Thank you so much. Thank you.

TEXT ON SCREEN

People of VU Podcast

Hosted by Vice-Chancellor, Professor Adam Shoemaker
Episode 7: Professor Richard Constantine, Chief Infrastructure Officer

KAREN JACKSON, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR MOONDANI BALLUK

Hello and welcome. I'm here to provide acknowledgement of country. For those who don't know me, I’m KJ - Karen Jackson, Director of Moondani Balluk.

My Genealogy tracks back to Moira Lakes in Barmah Forest and Mount Hope in Pyramid Hill, giving me my connections to your Yorta Yorta and Burrup Barrup language groups.

There's a couple of things I'd like you to take away from my acknowledgement. The first is to remember the hidden history of Aboriginal people since the invasion. Our loss of language, removal from country, and our near extinction from massacres and pandemics.

The second is our strong and inherent connection to community and country. These connections have given us the resilience and courage to rebuild our languages, gain access to country, regenerate our cultural practises.

In acknowledging the traditional owners of the country on which you are now on, I'd like to sincerely thank them for their generosity and kindness in welcoming people onto their lands. Lands never ceded and lands that run deep into their being and spirit.

I wish to pay my deep respect to the ancestors, Elders, communities and families of the Woiwurrung Wurundjeri on whose land I stand and who create connection and share knowledge with all of us.

Thank you.

PROFESSOR ADAM SHOEMAKER, VICE-CHANCELLOR

Thank you. Hello, colleagues. It's fantastic to be with you again for another episode of the People of VU podcast, and I've been absolutely fascinated to meet our colleagues and get to know them better. The people shaping this wonderful place we call Victoria University.

Now we met some pretty special people so far, and today I'm joined by Professor Richard Constantine, who is our Chief Infrastructure Officer. Now, Richard, welcome.

PROFESSOR RICHARD CONSTANTINE, CHIEF INFRASTRUCTURE OFFICER

Thank you very much, Adam. Great to be here.

PROFESSOR ADAM SHOEMAKER, VICE-CHANCELLOR

It is great to be here and let's just together join in KJ’s acknowledgement of country, too, because we really believe this place is special.

The land, the waters, you know, as we approach this place for the Maribyrnong River, you can just see why all those elements are so important for First Nations culture. And we honour them, and we honour indigenous knowledge daily as well.

Now, Richard, you're a Melbournian. OK, so I want to just ask you if you sort of cast your mind back. Did you always think this was the best place in the world to live?

RICHARD CONSTANTINE

Look, I think, you know, it's always home. And as you travel around the world and you see other countries and I've been to some that, you know, perhaps seem a little bit better on the initial visit.

But then when you think about, you know, could you actually live there? I think everyone is drawn to their home and home Melbourne. So, you know, I don't think there is anywhere better in the world to live. I think Melbourne is the place to be.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Well, it's certainly attracting a lot of a lot of people and a lot of attention.

You went through school here as well, and this kind of thing again. Where did you study post-school?

RICHARD CONSTANTINE

So look, I did a diploma in IT and was mainly in the maintenance engineering side. And then my first job was actually at the University of Melbourne as a technician. And I saw it was like a bit of an ad in the paper to do a post-grad diploma in management at the Melbourne Business School. And so I applied for that and back in those days, the business school wondered why a technical person like a technician would want to do a management sort of degree.

So I got questioned by about 20 professors around a table to get into that programme. And ultimately, I was successful, so I was one of 35 people chosen for that course, and it was a great growth opportunity for me.

I'm studying things like economics, accounting, all the business disciplines, and it really gave me a great view of the world and how everything worked. So it was terrific. It was a great opportunity. And then I went on to Monash University from there.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Mm-Hmm. Well, let's just hold on for a second.

That first one is so interesting because you were a technician and in fact, you've got very deep technical skills and knowledge. But you've always been very curious to, I can tell. So it seems like that was a great base, but there was always a thirst for more.

RICHARD CONSTANTINE

Yeah, that's correct. So like I said, like I remember when I studied, you know, micro and macro economics and understanding, you know, how markets work, even doing statistics, you understand how you know, organisations that manufacture, if they've got a whole lot of defects, how they can prove that it exceeds expectations by doing various calculations to demonstrate that look, you know, basically we expected three out of a thousand. That's normal, but we've got 10 out of a thousand that are defective. And so that's not acceptable.

And so it just gives you a different lens to view things. And it really did expand my horizon. And yeah, I was very curious. And dawned on me throughout that experience that, you know, it really is the classic… and I people say this, you know, are you interested in the piece of paper or are you interested in learning?

And I think for me at Melbourne Business School was really about the learning. And I felt that I grew a lot and I did change as a person.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Well, you know what? It seems like you are ideally suited for university work, because just think about it, you know, imagine here at Victoria University with the dual sector nature and you come at that from both sides of it and also from a third side, which is this service provision side.

So I mean, the role that you've got now, let's just unpick that for a minute. Chief Infrastructure Officer. Well, just think of that in this day and age.

We've got digital infrastructure, which is worth as much, if not more than physical. You know, if you think about, for example, the value of Qantas and its rewards programme is probably as much as the physical airline. Right. So you're responsible for that and for the infrastructure, the actual buildings, the maintenance, the new growth.

Gosh, there's a lot to how do you fit all that in?

RICHARD CONSTANTINE

Probably to answer that question. I mean, I'm pretty lucky that I've got a great team.

And I think that's what's critical. It's not in traditional sense, you know, a boss over the individuals, but we work as a team.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Oh, that's good. That's really good.

I know that people use that word boss advisedly, but one of the things we actually agree in here is that in a sense, we're all you know in academia.

There's no greater example of self-managing professionals, both in the polytechnic, in higher ed. So if you really want to get a group of people who know their stuff and know it intimately, it's academics and it's universities.

So that's what's so great about. It's a very inherently democratic tradition and a democratic place.

RICHARD CONSTANTINE

Yeah, that's true. And I think the other thing too is that Adam, you know, we spoke about the transition from being a technician to moving into management through my education.

One thing that dawned on me was all those case studies where, you know, back in the days when people did an MBA, they were usually technical or engineering type people that wanted to move into management.

And a lot of the case studies you read is how they shift back into what they know. And then they make a disaster out of management because they go back to being the hands-on engineer.

So I've always tried to give my staff autonomy because they're the subject matter experts.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Mm-Hmm.

RICHARD CONSTANTINE

And so I keep watching that. I make sure that they feel like they're directing their areas. They're in charge of a lot of the operations in their area, and I intervene when I need to.

But most time it is working as a team and I do that, and I think that it's a great privilege to lead people and to be, you know, in charge of a group. And I take it quite seriously. But I see it as a privilege.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

I agree with you. Totally is. And let's just contrast a bit. You've talked about Melbourne and you've talked about, you know, going to Monash and how about working in South Australia because you actually at one stage in your career before coming here were at Flinders University in South Australia.

So was the culture quite different?

RICHARD CONSTANTINE

So I was at Swinburne University for 12 years before I went to South Australia and, you know, when I got there, I realised that the pace was a lot slower than what I was used to.

I came from a dual sector institution, so there was TAFE and higher ed. So you had two different levels of reporting, into government, and there was just one campus and I'd come from a multi campus environment.

So a lot of travel between campuses. You know, it was it was a very busy type position that I had there in Melbourne before I went to South Australia. But there's no doubt operating on one campus in South Australia. They had various agreements. There's only three universities, so it's not as competitive.

So there was a lot of factors that made it a very different experience.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

It is fascinating that one of the best integrations of medicine in Higher Ed is at Flinders University with the medical centre there. You know, it's integrated. So I think we're really lucky to see that happening almost on our doorstep now with the new Footscray Hospital.

Now that's in your bailiwick that you know the rollout. Tell us about that. How important do you think that new hospital is going to be for our future?

RICHARD CONSTANTINE

I think it's critical, like we're going to have a bridge linking our campus to the hospital.

And you're right, like Flinders did gain a lot from having a lot of those health professionals teaching and do research with the university. And I think at one point they mentioned that without the people in the hospital actually participating and providing services to the university and to its students, they wouldn't be able to operate.

And so I think we're just at the start, but it's I think we've got a tremendous opportunity ahead of us and I think it'll be terrific for VU. It will be like something that we haven't seen before. I think it's really a great opportunity.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Well, we don't take it for granted. I want to thank you. Because I've seen it too in the year and a bit that I've been here.

How much goes into just not only planning but executing these things that we take for granted? So take the new building, you know, in the city, eight years in the making and the new tower is now on.

Are we ever lucky that it was finished off just when it was? I mean, we just, you know, as it were, our hearts go out to all those in ProBuild. But gosh, you know, it's amazing that we are able to finish off, have this have it signed over to us just two weeks before the builders actually went into liquidation? So you must have had a bit of a heart stopping moment when you saw that.

RICHARD CONSTANTINE

Yeah, look, we were very lucky.

I mean, there's these projects that are still underway where they are still dependant on Probuild. And so we're not in that situation. So we are lucky.

And once again, I think once people have an opportunity to go to the City Campus and see the building that we've built, I think it's, you know, we took a group through at the end of last week and that was they couldn't believe what they saw like the finishes, the fit out.

It's like nothing that they've seen at VU before. And you know, and we do tell people it's the biggest vertical campus in Australia. It's got a hole, it meets a whole lot of different needs, like for research, teaching and learning in our polytechnic, as well as higher education all under the one roof, so to speak.

But it is something that we should all be proud of. And once again, I've had a great team, you know, work with me on that. But I think, you know, people will be quite impressed when they get over there and actually walk through it and have a look at the building. Because the feedback to date, it's been excellent and quite, you know, quite exciting. People have found it very exciting.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

And I think it absolutely is.

Remember, we had this group of students there, oh, about a week ago and I met a number of them. Some had, you know, many children at home studying full time.

They all said, we cannot believe the opportunities that this is going to present, you know?

And the first eight floors effectively, you know, all students space. And is it floor 10 that has the lounge as well that actually overlooks the city outdoors?

RICHARD CONSTANTINE

Yes, it does. And it's also got a couple of barbecues there that I hope students will make use of.

And yes, it is a student lounge area where they can bring their lunch catch up with other fellow students. Staff can use that as well. There's a whole lot of microwaves that they can heat up their food if they want, and we'll have a little coffee shop there as well where they can, where people can buy coffee.

And like I said, there is the balcony, which they can get some fresh air as a bit of a break during the day. You know, staff and students and like I said, also barbecues, which will be terrific. So very different.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

I’m told they’re the highest barbecues in Melbourne. Is that true?

RICHARD CONSTANTINE

Yeah, it is.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

It's well, there you go. Well, there's another thing so that you add that to the mix.

So now listen, let's be honest, when you first heard about clearing the top four floors of that building to have industry partners, were you a fan?

RICHARD CONSTANTINE

So, you know, I thought to myself, I think the Vice-Chancellor probably has gone crazy.

[laughter]

Look no, so to be honest with you, I wasn't a fan because, you know, I had a lot of ownership over the tower in the fit out. Everything was going to plan until I heard that announcement. And then as I got more and more involved and I do tell people this, that's why it is funny because it really is a case of one of the lessons I've learnt is that, you know, we've got to share our ideas and respect other people's views, even though we think that we've got the best ideas.

And I've got to admit that I'm probably a bit guilty of that in the past. Like, always think our idea is the best one. But at times it's not. And there's been a couple of examples, Adam, where you know, you've demonstrated that you've had some good ideas and one of them is the tower where, you know, there was a lot of people that opposed it that thought, that's great.

So you can fill out the top four floors, you want to bring industry in. That's terrific, but it's during the time when there's never been more vacant space in the city of Melbourne. And you know, are you guys all crazy? You know, like so they actually brought me in the mix as well.

And then I got to see our strategy and the new strategy and that partnering with principle is probably the one like, look, they're all excellent strategic drivers. We've got five strategic drivers, but that partnering with principle really hit home.

And so when we start getting industry bodies into or an industry partner into those top four floors of the tower and the students are the winners, not us, that we finished the programme on time. We tick the box, you know, but the students that get placements with that industry partner that get course development, you know, new up to date course information or, you know, the stuff that they learn about is up to date because we've got an industry partner there telling us what the latest is.

You know, so the students the winner. So the students must come first. Otherwise, what are we doing here? And just answer that question about, you know, a lot of free space in the city. So I've taken quite a few groups through the towers, you know, and tried to get them to move into those floors.

And the first thing I say to them is that if you're after free space in Melbourne, there's plenty. If you want to co-locate with us and be co-located on a university campus, then this is the place to be.

And we're quite fortunate that the organisations that have already shown interest and we’re probably going to have less than a floor left very soon. So three floors, I'm pretty confident that maybe at the next podcast whenever that would be, but pretty soon. You know, by the middle of the year, we would have definitely leased out three floors of the tower.

You know, under the odds where people thought that you wouldn't get anyone, they'll be paying market rent for those three floors. And it's because they want to be part of VU. They want to be, you know, associated with VU. They want to be on a campus. They want to make use of shared infrastructure, not just the floors.

And they want to have a partnership with the VU. And so that's something very special. And probably, you know, it's true. It's quite there's a lot of incentives. You know, a lot of buildings are empty in the city, so it hasn't been easy.

But we've got something that's quite unique and it is precious. And so people have to pay the market rent for that opportunity. But I don't think we can have a shortage of people that do want to co-locate with us.

So. Yep. Initially, I thought, what's going on here this is it sounds a bit crazy to me, but you know, then the way to look at it is I've seen it as a challenge and I love challenges. And you know, I want to make sure that our students are the ultimate winners.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Now there's one other thing I forgot to mention, too, because we talk about, in a sense, the physical infrastructure. But implicitly, throughout your career, you've been a digital learning expert as well.

In fact, you've overseen the whole system that brought us into the middle of the 21st century in terms of everything, cyber security, everything to do with digital uplift. Now also not just looking at the tower, but everywhere.

That's a big, big job. I mean, as we said at the outset, what gives you the greatest excitement looking forward to that side of what you're doing?

RICHARD CONSTANTINE

Yeah, look, you know, I have been in IT for a number of years. And you know, I remember the first time I went out for lunch when I was working at one, you know, another education provider and I heard someone talk about windows.

And it was the first time I heard someone else talk my language like IT. And now everyone's an IT expert. You know, everyone knows about IT. Everyone uses IT.

But remember, there was a time that I think for half of my career, my supervisor had no clue what I did and just left me alone. So it was great, like as long as systems ran and as long as, you know, they didn't have any issues, they left me alone because they didn't know what I was doing.

But what excites me is what's coming. And, you know, COVID has accelerated the use of things like, you know, now, I mean, if we look back three years ago, not many people would have known about how to use Zoom or how to use WebEx, Teams. All this technology that we've become dependent on during COVID.

So I just think that there's great years ahead of us as far as digital goes and also the reporting, the analytics. I think that that's quite exciting. I think also to be able to customise and generate a better service offering is what excites me like, so, you know, I am very service orientated and I hope that people that know me know that that's the case.

I believe in service excellence. I believe in getting things done. And I think that technology, if you use technology wisely, you can actually deliver a better outcome for the individual. And that's what I keep striving for, and I think that technology allows us to do that.

So things like now monitoring, you know, if we do have another pandemic monitoring through our access points, how many people are in the room - like this room here. We can get reports. And so we know that the room, let's say, we had a during a particular stage in a pandemic, five people only we could be notified when it detects six people so we can be proactive and we can manage things like that.

So, you know, technology is fascinating. It does go through like in patents like, you know, a lot of things around. I remember when Cloud first started eventuating and I was excited and wrote an article about that when I was working another university, you know, in their magazine because I thought, we've now got fast bandwidth through Arnet. We've got cloud.

We can have storage now as if it's in the next building, but it's somewhere else, you know, miles away, you know, many thousands of kilometres away. And that was quite exciting. So I think the greatest things are probably still coming.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Oh yeah, I agree with that, too. And you know, we're so lucky. When you think about the dual sector nature and it's actually the triple sector nature, we have one of the best tech schools in the whole state of Victoria and everything you could possibly imagine - A.I., robotics in, you know, using sensors in all sorts of different ways, industry led learning.

And it's all happening at the Werribee campus. It's happening at the Sunshine Campus, it's happening in a lot of sites. So is there is there anything that we can't do? I mean, it's really interesting to see where that's going.

RICHARD CONSTANTINE

Yeah. So look. What will excite me is things like the use of voice. And it's for a number of reasons, like you said, like even pandemic like, so who wants to walk into a room and start touching things? You'd rather avoid it.

We've also used input devices and the same input devices for many years now, like a mouse, like a keyboard, even, you know, touch screens. We've used that for a while.

But the next input device will be voice. So it's like, you know, to be able to say almost like Siri, and we've seen that improve over the years or Google, you know, or Alexa.

But you know, imagine being at your desk and you call up a data warehouse and you ask for the latest financial information and then you hear it, or it prints out a report for you or brings it up on the screen for you. And so being able to transact with voice instead of actually touching things. I think that's the next thing that that I'm really excited about, and I saw some demonstrations of that.

I was lucky to go to Arizona State University a couple of years ago, and they are doing some very early works in that area. And I thought, that's going to be that's the ultimate. The ultimate is voice. So that's going to be quite exciting in years to come.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Definitely coming. I mean, you know, there's many, many people as whether you're on what kind of vehicle you're on. And I know that you, you like vehicles, but you like vehicles that are technologically enabled to do you talk to your car as well?

RICHARD CONSTANTINE

Yeah, I do. And, you know, even like that CarPlay now, you know where it incorporates with Siri. And so I've seen that improvement over the years where, you know, it used to, you know, tell it a straight name and you'd be there and you'd be driving to somewhere in the USA or something because it’s got the street wrong.

And now it's actually spot on. And you can even say a place you could say Victoria University Footscray and will come up and give you directions. And it's pretty accurate the first time around, you don’t have to keep saying it. So that's been great. Change technology's also now.

And I do. I do love vehicles and you know, I'm into all sorts of cars and things, but I was lucky enough to drive a Tesla a few weeks ago.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Now do you think that just as a final thing as we're wrapping up, should we maybe be encouraging people with electronic scooters and so forth to come here more?

I mean, is that something we could accommodate and do safely?

RICHARD CONSTANTINE

Yeah. So look, I'm happy to say that I've actually got an electric scooter, so I bought a Segway quite a while ago, probably about nearly a year ago, and I use it quite a bit.

I think that I think there's a place for it. However, the law is still unclear on the use of the scooter, and that's what probably stops me making my way to the VU with the scooter because you're not going to be using bike paths. You’re meant to be on the footpath. And in Victoria, there's certain regulations around the speed.

So the scooter might be able to go 25 kilometres an hour, but you’re not allowed to exceed something like 12 or 13 kilometres an hour on the footpath. So it would be quite a slow commute to work.

And so I think the law, this is where the law has to catch up with the technology. But once we get that all right, I think we would be there. The other thing, too, is that, you know, we probably can do more around the council around linking our campuses and especially around Footscray and to Sunshine inter-campus sort of commutes.

You know, you can see that you use scooters down Nicholson Street and get to, you know, our campus at, you know, VU Nicholson.

You know, that could be that could be quite viable. But like I said, I think the laws have to catch up with the technology.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Well that’s often the case. And look, we teach law. We teach technology. You bring them all together. We've got to win. And it sounds like that's the way forward.

So Richard, it's great to talk with you because I can tell that not only the passion and enthusiasm you've got, but also the problem solving. You know, you've solved about five problems just while we've been talking.

RICHARD CONSTANTINE

Oh, thanks, Adam. And there'll be no doubt that there'll be no shortage of future problems to solve as well. And like I said, I think, you know, we've got some great people here at VU and it's a privilege to work for VU and I look forward to serving everyone at VU.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Oh, that's great. Thanks again for the time today.

RICHARD CONSTANTINE

Thank you.

TEXT ON SCREEN

People of VU Podcast

Hosted by Vice-Chancellor, Professor Adam Shoemaker
Episode 9: Professor Peter Radoll, Deputy Vice-Chancellor People & Organisation

KAREN JACKSON, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR MOONDANI BALLUK

Hello and welcome. I'm here to provide acknowledgement of country. For those who don't know me, I’m KJ - Karen Jackson, Director of Moondani Balluk.

My Genealogy tracks back to Moira Lakes in Barmah Forest and Mount Hope in Pyramid Hill, giving me my connections to your Yorta Yorta and Burrup Barrup language groups.

There's a couple of things I'd like you to take away from my acknowledgement. The first is to remember the hidden history of Aboriginal people since the invasion. Our loss of language, removal from country, and our near extinction from massacres and pandemics.

The second is our strong and inherent connection to community and country. These connections have given us the resilience and courage to rebuild our languages, gain access to country, regenerate our cultural practises.

In acknowledging the traditional owners of the country on which you are now on, I'd like to sincerely thank them for their generosity and kindness in welcoming people onto their lands. Lands never ceded and lands that run deep into their being and spirit.

I wish to pay my deep respect to the ancestors, Elders, communities and families of the Woiwurrung Wurundjeri on whose land I stand and who create connection and share knowledge with all of us.

Thank you.

PROFESSOR ADAM SHOEMAKER, VICE-CHANCELLOR

Hello, colleagues. It's wonderful to be here, present again with another really, really important episode in the People of VU podcast.

And before we do another thing, I want to jointly and on behalf of all of us, acknowledge country, protecting country, ancestors past, present, emerging and the roles that we all play in honouring, listening to and learning from indigenous eldership.

And of course, there could be no more appropriate way than to welcome you as an Anaiwan man, Peter, to this table into this discussion. Welcome.

PROFESSOR PETER RADOLL, DEPUTY VICE-CHANCELLOR PEOPLE & ORGANISATION

Thank you very much, Adam. Thank you. And what a great way to start acknowledgement of country.  

ADAM SHOEMAKER

It really is something that we take to heart, but daily. And in fact, every time we have a chance to, you know, recognise, I think it's very important to do. And it's just a matter of respect. But also it's part of our actual being at VU as well. So that's very strong.

And today, well, you're a new colleague, relatively new colleague. I've been talking with leaders and changemakers at VU, that's the whole idea of this series.

And here we are. You're the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, People and Organisation. What a fantastic role that is.

PETER RADOLL

It's fantastic. I get to work with all the people, staff and students, and make a difference to people's lives. Now, no one. No one has a better job than I do.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Yeah, that's right. Well, I'm going to just argue the toss with you because I like mine as well. But I think together we have two of the best jobs in the higher education sector in the whole country.

PETER RADOLL

For sure. It's a rather unique. Yes. And look, I think we actually have an opportunity to actually do something quite unique with both staff and students.

And we've tried. I think a lot of universities have tried very, very hard to try and bring people together. But  bringing all people into one portfolio is definitely unique approach and the VU way.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

It is very much that One VU approach, isn't it saying if we really believe in parity and respect and egalitarianism, why would we do it any other way than, you know, bringing professional staff, academic staff, students, shall we say, human beings on campus under one roof and that roof happens to be the house that you're leading!

PETER RADOLL

That’s fantastic, a great opportunity.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Really good thing. So, Peter, I fully declare that I've known you for some years and I've enjoyed it so much. We used to be colleagues in Canberra at ANU, and I followed your career.

Tell us a little bit, though, just going back in time, because one of the things people may not know about you is that you've had a storeyed but very varied career, which you might say relates both to the polytechnic side and the higher education side of this university.

You want to just tell us a bit about it?

PETER RADOLL

Yeah, well, it's definitely been a journey, Adam. I've started off my career very young. I finished school year 10. Off to become a tradesperson, if you like.

I was a motor mechanic for the best part of 12 years and Tamworth and Taree and then in Taree had the greatest opportunity of my life two really wonderful Aboriginal elders –

Aunty Pat Davis, who's since passed, and Uncle Ray, who’s still flying the Aboriginal flag every day in Taree – you know, gave me the greatest opportunity and wrote to the federal government for an opportunity to do an Aboriginal cadetship, which is where I landed in Canberra.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Wow. So this it's amazing how many people come to Canberra from somewhere else. I mean, there are people who are born there, but at that time, largely people came from somewhere to Canberra.

PETER RADOLL

And that's exactly right. Canberra's really the... there are people who are born and bred in Canberra, by the way. Not very many, but there are a few people there, but it is very transient, that's for sure, because there's opportunities there, of course, education, employment and it's a fairly small community. Only a few hundred thousand people so, yes.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

That’s really great and look as far as the place goes institutionally a place like ANU, there was really nowhere better in lots of ways.

Did you thrive there?

PETER RADOLL

Yeah, I definitely did. I think it was. It was, you know, I was up and down, really, because it was a very prestigious institution, different to what I thought it was, but don’t forget I had no preconceptions about what an institution was, so I didn't really know the gift that I had, if I put it that way.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Yeah, yeah. Well, we all kind of appreciate it in different ways. I like you came from overseas pretty much straight to ANU, and I remember the first time I arrived there it was literally February, you know, 40 degrees. And there was actually a conference of the Australian Democrats on at the residence where I was staying.

And I said to people, Is this typical Australian politics? And they kind of laughed and said, No. You know, but everybody came to Canberra for a reason, right?

PETER RADOLL

Exactly right.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

So then fast forward that. Uou ended up staying, doing a higher degree.

PETER RADOLL

Yup.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

So actually tell us a bit about the area that you did your studies in.

PETER RADOLL

Yeah. Yeah. So I did a Bachelor of Information Technology at the University of Canberra.

Then I did a Master's degree in Technology at the University of Canberra. Spent a little bit of time in the public service, seven years doing stuff, if you like, it was, you know, desktop support and system administration.

Then I joined Department of Immigration and Multicultural Indigenous Affairs in the Business Solutions Group. So we're rolling out the architectural, the enterprise architecture associated with the visa system internationally. So that was really exciting. If anyone knows mainframe programming, will know how difficult that is – it's very slow and laborious. But doing something international like that was absolutely incredible.

And then, you know, then I took a great turn. I had this great opportunity to be the director of… applied for another job and different department… to be the director of Indigenous Telecommunications in Department of Communications, I has also applied to go to ANU to do a Ph.D.

And they both came probably the offers came a week later, roughly from each other, and I decided to take the ANU offer and go do a PhD rather than go off and work. So I did this part time.

So, you know, all my mentors said to me, Look, you know, you never get this opportunity again. You'll go off and get a job and get all the collect all this debt. Why don't you go off and do this?

And I listened to my mentors and the rest has really been history.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Sure, that's so great that it's wonderful that a) you had such superb mentors and b) that you listen. But it just shows that in life, key decisions and points are so important and that really determined the course of very much what would follow.

I mean, you really became an academic.

PETER RADOLL

That's true.

Very much so. Became an academic across ANU University, Canberra, University Newcastle, published ARC grants, did everything that academics do, had a great time teaching as well.

And then, you know, all the external opportunities and leadership roles. Look, and that just led me down a path that I would never have thought that would ever happen, to be quite honest and love it.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

It isn't it? I mean, aren't we privileged?

PETER RADOLL

We are very lucky.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

I have to say that I do say that every day when I think about it, because it's so true.

And when you think about all those past rules – and there's been lots of them – is there a kind of a colleague who inspired you the most on your path? Somebody who really stands out?

PETER RADOLL

Yeah, there's a couple of people actually that stand out.

I think one of the beautiful things I love about universities, other people, I mean, the people are really it and you don't really comprehend that until you work inside an institution.

And I think there's probably not one person that has inspired me over time as many people and in different institutions and for different reasons. So, you know, really there was there was a colleague… when I was doing my PhD at ANU the faculty Dean, Keith Houghton, and I used to walk once a week – every Thursday afternoon for a week and have a conversation.

He would teach me about leadership and I would teach him about the Aboriginal community. We did this for the best part of 18 months. It was a great relationship. He and I had a fantastic sort of working relationship and we still do today. When he came to Canberra, he would call then. I mean, we just had a coffee down there, just down the road here and at Surry Hills couple of weeks ago. So like, still made that connection still very influential.

And it's just really set me up in a different way, understanding what leadership was and, you know, I asked him, “How come people get these roles, these senior roles?”, and he said, “Well they apply!”. And I thought, well that makes sense!

[Laughter]

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Not just bestowed on them!

[Laughter]

PETER RADOLL

And I know that sounds silly, but thought that how do they that? Oh yeah they apply!

ADAM SHOEMAKER

These are very important questions. Well, interestingly, how things work in circles because Keith Houghton now runs, is one of the co-owners, if you like, of Research Coaching Australia, along with Mark Clisby and others who used to also work at ANU.

And they did a really interesting study of the effectiveness of the Victoria University block model, and it's been published and showing that not only in terms of impact, but also you might describe it as reach and efficiency. It's one of the most out there models in the world that they could see. You know, it's kind of interesting.

So the very person who was one of your mentors has also been an assessor of what we do here.

PETER RADOLL

That’s fantastic, and the Block Model is actually so unique. And I think when I when I looked at the Block Model, I thought, is that block release that seems like fairly normal, like other universities?

And then I delve deep into the Block. I thought, Wow, this is really unique. This is a great experience for students. I mean, everybody wins by this Block Model.

I remember I was sitting with my physiotherapist recently and she was saying, “Gee, I wish I had the Block Model when I when I went to university” and she went to a different university, not here, “because my brother's here and he's killing it.”

And I think the subtext is that she thought she was brighter than him. And he's been getting better grades than what she did.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Probably more satisfaction too, which is what seems to be the case.

Well, you know that people feel like they're really treated, as we said at the outset, with respect as equals. And we like to say, you know, from day one, people are colleagues, not just pupils or students or some other word, you know, it really matters.

PETER RADOLL

The VU First Year College® makes a big difference with the VU Block Model®. There's no doubt about that.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Yeah. No, I think it's great, too. Well, look imagining you. It's a bit like a student in a way.

Like when you commence, you commenced here as a colleague and as a very senior and respected colleague about a month ago. So what's struck you? So what are the characteristics that you've noticed so far of this university because you've seen a few others? What stands out?

PETER RADOLL

Well, I have to say the passion of the staff stand out. There's absolutely no doubt about that.

Everybody that I've come in contact with and met have all talked so highly and passionately about what we do. We're building the west with supporting the western suburbs of Melbourne. We're actually making a difference, we're actually building our capability and then actually the taking the time to sit down and talk to students and taking the time to actually, you know, reach out to students.

Because I'm lucky I get to sit and I have the human resources portfolio in my side. I’ve got the inclusion and engagement portfolio as well as the VU sports, which is the gyms and the and the swimming pools, but also the student facing piece, as well as some the student services, the passion that they all bring to the table.

And Adam, if I tell you, as an Anaiwan man, I sat in the committee meeting the other day thinking this is only a few of us having a chat. So it probably didn't need to do with an acknowledgement. But one of my team members said, “Actually, Peter, we do acknowledgement no matter how many people we are in the room.”

And I thought, Oh, oops, that's my first faux pas.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

No, it's not sort of a minimum, you know, quantity. It's more to do with, you know, people's, as I say, respect quotient, if you like.

PETER RADOLL

It's a passion. It's a passion these passion staff have associated with the work that they do in the roles they do here, that is something quite unique.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

I think you're right, you know, and when I look back to…  I've only been here just over a year myself. But when we talked about this question, how best to recognise Indigenous knowledge, First Nations knowledge and aspirations in our strategy, and it was actually Indigenous members of staff, First Nations members of staff, who suggested the term protecting country.

It came from them and it came from Elders all over in the region. So we were proud to be as it were gifted that concept and then people grabbed it with both hands, you know, and I don't know of any other university that's done that actually at this stage, but we hope they'll be many more who might emulate it, you know, in the future.

Yeah, in the future, you know. And so how do you see that sort of that concept protecting country in terms of your role because it's a very people focussed thing?

PETER RADOLL

Look for sure.

I mean, I've a couple of aspirations around protecting country, and there's something that I spoke to K.J, the head of Moondani Balluk Centre, and I said, KJ this idea of protecting country, what does it really mean to the local community?

And she said, Well, it can mean whatever you like Peter, as long as it fits with inside the ethos or the philosophy of Aboriginal or Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing.

I thought, Well, that's fantastic, and that's what I think that we’ll bring. We’ll bring a more connected, particularly through what we do as people, a more connected community between us and the Aboriginal community. When I say us, VU.

You know, trying to bring those together, but also the elements of, you know, the very simple things like recycling our products, making the place a better world, having opportunities, you know, I'm not the best person to talk about this because I drive to work still… I will get there on a pushbike because I know you do Adam! Ride push bike to work and I know lots of other people do as well.

But you know, protecting the country is not just about the recycling, it's about making sure that we actually are connected to the people we talk to and actually bringing those learning circles, bring in those yarning circles, into our staff meetings and bringing those Indigenous or Aboriginal philosophies into everything we do now.

That's what I'd love to do, and I will get there over time. It's just a matter of sowing that seed and bringing those, yeah, elements or philosophy, of indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing into the concept of protecting country then into where we are.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

I think that's fabulous. And you know, as we both know, it's listening as much as speaking.

PETER RADOLL

And that's that is very true because this thing and I've seen this work very, very well where, you know, the yarning circle is so important because you get the opportunity to speak, but also you get the opportunity to listen.

And like you say, that is so much more important than speaking.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Yeah. And you know, that's maybe a characteristic that we need to shall we say educate ourselves more and because we're taught very much to be as academics, you know, public speakers and influencers and all that kind of thing, but actually, it's in those silences that you can actually achieve just as much.

PETER RADOLL

That is so true. And as we know from the Aboriginal community, a moment of silence is not an invitation to make a word. It's an invitation to actually listen to what's been said.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Just pause there for a minute. You know what I mean, like that's it's really powerful. No, I absolutely agree with you.

And so in a way, we're talking about the changing agenda, not just for the VU, but for universities as well. I mean, the state of Victoria is leading in a lot of these areas, too.

But federally speaking, gosh, it's been such a riven time. And yet there's so much more we can do to bring people together.

PETER RADOLL

Yeah, that is true.

Yeah, I think the higher education landscape has faced unprecedented challenges, not just from the pandemic, but also from federal government policy.

And thank goodness that the states are helping out as much as they can. I think that, you know, there's been a philosophical change. You know, we had the year back in 2007, we all wanted everybody who should be able to have a degree, should have the opportunity to go.

I still feel very strongly that that's the case, and I think that ethos actually fits VU very nicely, particularly when we're building up the West.

We know and there's a quote from one of my mentors, Professor Tom Calma. He says, you know, an education is an inoculation against poverty, and that is so very true. I mean, you can see in our community, in where we sit here in Footscray, but also further west, you can see that the more opportunities you give people, the better life they have.

And it's not just about education, because with education comes a better income, with a better income comes better health care and so on and so forth. So you have this incredibly, you know, once you break that poverty cycle…and I like to think of once you break the poverty cycle, it's a bit like dropping a rock into a pond.

You have these beautiful ripples that go out and then that protects everybody else, right? So it's not just you that actually it has an impact on everybody, around you has that impact and that flow as a serious flow on effect.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Well, I'm pleased that you mentioned water and I'm going to talk about the Maribyrnong River for a minute. And what we used to do a lot as kids grow up in Canada is skip rocks on flat water, because that to me is another image of kind of what education can do that kind of accelerates your progress across the top of things to the other side, you know?

And unless people have a chance to throw in the first place, they're not going to get there.

PETER RADOLL

That is so very true. And I've seen that so many times I've seen and I've been really, really privileged. And this is one of the things I love about universities because you get to go to graduations, right?

And then some of the students stay connected to you. They’re a bit sticky if you like the word sticky, but they're also mentees, right?

So then you actually have the opportunity to actually see and I've had the greatest privilege to watch two wonderful people. I've seen many, actually, by the way, to go through, but two people I'm very, very connected to, have gone to Oxford and done have completed PhDs and came back to Australia, and now are working [at a university].

Not our university, but you never know they might come and visit us at some point. But you know, just to see that see them grow over time is absolutely incredible into academics.

And then then they start realising, you know, the opportunities that they can make for other people as well. So that flow on effect is like they've been able to mentor students and not just Indigenous students, by the way.

But then you got, then you got other students who you know, and I've got this message of the day from a student in Canberra. Now she's taken about 12 years to finish her undergraduate degree. I've helped her for a bit, and she messaged me and said, I've finished. I finally finished. Can you please come to my graduation?

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Oh, yeah, yeah.

PETER RADOLL

And I thought, Oh goodness, I can't miss that one.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Well, in fact, and you know, later in March of 2022, you were having the first graduations we've had in pretty much full a full year, and it's just going to be an incredible experience to get it back.

You know, people really do key on that event. And it's not just the individuals, it's the families.

PETER RADOLL

And that's exactly right because the families deserve this as well, right?

Oh, you got the mums and dads and the families and everyone together and those graduations. I'm looking I'm really looking forward to those 13 of those graduations this year.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Yes, we thought we would go for a large number.

PETER RADOLL

It is a big number! And of course, because they're going to be a little bit smaller for COVID safe. But this is a great time to celebrate and this is what universities are all about I think. You know, we talk about partnerships, we talk about research and teaching and education, but really the best thing and I don't know about you, but I sit there in my gown, in the hat, and I actually have tears as I'm watching the families hugging.

They're all cheering and carrying on, like really celebrating. And it's the kids. You see the little kids in the front, and mom and dad, you know, graduate across… and there's nothing better than that.

Yeah, the whole family.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

And you know, I can't remember exactly how many ceremonies I've attended…. scores of them, but I have to confess, I've always been thrilled the moment I walk into whatever auditorium or space it is, it's just a natural feeling of elation. And I'm not even the one graduating, you know, it's like, it's very weird!

Maybe it's just a transference of excitement that, you know, but you can just see it on people's faces and literally everyone looks up and lights up.

PETER RADOLL

So true, that is so very true. They all get so excited and I get that feeling as well. I feel like I'm graduating again. If not, I'm walking in and walking out and congratulating.

It feels just the energy and the vibe at a graduation, there's nothing quite like it.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Yeah, it's one of the great, great privileges. And so here we are at a time in world history when so much is uncertain. But one thing is certain is that does work for people.

And it is, you know, like, as you said before, there is nothing more powerful. So climate change, you know, war, whatever it might be, there is something which is going to be able to attack both and that is betterment of education for people.

PETER RADOLL

It's true. It's one of the things I've learnt over time is that they can, you know, people can take a lot of things from you and the world can, but they can't take your education away.

You know, that's with you forever. Once you've done that, that's yours.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Yeah. In fact, even jobs, you can change, but that base is still there.

Now, go back a bit because you talk to me about just briefly about I.T. and you know how it attracted… something grabbed you in that area, something about information technology or computing.

So it seems a theme throughout your career that it's woven throughout this kind of the digital thing. So why the digital thing and how would you want to embed the digital thing here?

PETER RADOLL

Oh, that's a really good question. I suspect that probably, you know, things have moved on a little bit since I did my Ph.D. a little while ago now.

Well, yeah, one of the things I suppose when I get this innate sort of passion about I.T from. I blame my father. I mean, he's tinkered. He tinkered with electronics and we had a computer when we were quite young and we were poor.

Dad used to make iron tanks. I mean, that was his job. But he would spend every single spare cent on electronics. And mum, you know at the time, used to stand at the end of a sticky tape factory production line, take the little rolls of sticky tape off and pack them into boxes.

And that was her job for eight or nine hours a night. So that we grow up fairly poor. So we really struggled to understand how, particularly now in today's context. How did we afford to do that?

But dad made that a priority over everything else so that was a natural sort of lead way after being a mechanic and into this sort of process. And then, of course, I.T and then a Ph.D. in information technology looking at adoption of technology.

So I’m really keen and passionate about why do people use information technology and what are the barriers? Why don't we use it? And I think that's a really critical thing. I looked at the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community is my subject, but you know, for non-Indigenous communities and those with low socioeconomic status are very similar challenges.

I think what we do know is that anyone who has decent access to information technology at home has better job, better career aspirations and better career prospects. We know now that I don't think there's any job now uou can apply for now without actually doing something digital or electronic, and I think that's that still is a barrier. That only about 70 percent of the indigenous community still get access to a home device. And you know, you can't upload everything on a mobile phone still today, which is unfortunate. If you try and do a job application on a mobile phone it’s near impossible.

But what do we want? We really do need a digitally connected, but I think it's got to be a compromise, Adam. I don't think, you know, something that I've had an aspiration for pre-COVID was everyone to be connected and we can do whatever we like, wherever we want to be.

But I come to realise, I mean, that's a real technical sort of techno social sort of aspect, the social thing that we really do need.

So my feeling and thoughts have changed a little bit that we do need people around us. We can't do it with just a piece of technology that we do need people as well. So I think, you know, and I'm hearing from students as well, even the orientations that we've had over the last few weeks is that students need the technology to be successful at university.

But what they want to do is to be here on campus and have that opportunity to engage in their own way, but they need people around. And I think that's something that, you know, something that I need to think about as well. I mean, that's really changed my view on the aspect of using information technology.

We still need that, but we'd need that human touch and that human contact as well. Because when you don't have it, you know, you miss it and you lose something.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Well, look by force of circumstance, we've been all called to be isolated in the last two years, and many, many people have suffered from isolation and the effects of it.

And I think perhaps that's one of the reactions we’re commenting on here, but also when you just look at the trends.  Maybe we don't need lecture theatres, but we do need spaces like libraries where people meet.

And I've never seen more attendance at university libraries than in the past decade, in other words, and people aren't necessarily borrowing books, but they're there for other reasons. And happily, some of them are technological reasons, too. Interesting, isn't it?

PETER RADOLL

That is very true. Yeah, we go into any university in the last couple of years and you'll see the libraries are full. But they're not… people are not borrowing books, they're not borrowing books.

They're sitting there with a technology, but they're there because other humans are there. And the technologies available, and the wireless access.

And you know, so there is there is a there is a yeah, there's a balance really between taking the technology and the human aspect.

And like you say, you can see that in libraries. Libraries are getting rid of shelves of books, putting in desks and hot desks and opportunities for people to come together. And this is what they want.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Some of the furniture in libraries is just amazing. It's just like some of the best design you can see.

So that's actually what you're describing is a kind of human centric or person centric view of the world. And I guess that's what we're trying to say we're about with this One VU model to like, always come back to what's it all about for people, not just what's it all about for an organisation?

PETER RADOLL

It's exactly right. Yeah, now that's right.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

And so that is, I guess, where it comes back to your role too, because of be times when not everyone agrees. So how do you how do you work it through when there's disagreement about what that human centric thing is?

PETER RADOLL

Oh, that's a really good question, Adam, because we're all we're never going to we never all going to agree, by the way.

Look, I think from my perspective, I think more diversity that we have on campus, the better it is, the more diversity we have with our staff and our students, the better it is.

I think communities need that diversity, and it's one thing I really appreciated. I would often spend time I would get invited to, you know, a variety of different sort of cultural, you know, events back in my previous university - I hope I get that opportunity here as well - with the Muslim community and, you know, to go and have a look at the mosques and look at the Greek Orthodox churches and mean that diversity is so important to us as a community.

Look at the Aboriginal community, go and visit aunty’s and uncles at the road, and it's going to be amazing, right. This is this is who we are and that all that richness and diversity of culture is really important.

Capturing that and actually making good use of that in a sensible way is a little tricky from a student perspective. It's a little bit easier from a staff perspective because we can invite people along to events.

But why can't we have different cultural days throughout the year around particular events when we need to bring that richness and actually bring that diversity to the table.

In terms of being people centric, that's all we can really do. Everyone is going to have a different view and we can everyone's going to have a different view. Everyone's going to have a different perspective. But bringing that together, it's not going to be necessarily harmonious, by the way. Because it's because people are not going to agree on everything,

But we can actually bring that diversity to the table and make the best use of what we have at hand in terms of our staff and students.

And I hope it's one of the aspirations. I do hope not many people get the opportunity to do staff and student stuff together. I'm hoping that we can actually bring those staff and students together in a really sensible way around our people and making it a bit more people centric, but also bringing the different diversity and cultural backgrounds together to enhance what we do, not only through not only through our, you know, business processes and our policies, but also our teaching and our pedagogy, the courses that we teach and the degrees that we actually teach and provide that opportunity then for staff to actually understand the cultural backgrounds of our students.

And, you know, in some of our students to understand the cultural backgrounds of our staff. I mean, this is a great opportunity to bring these together all the time.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

And I was blown away, too. When you think about the VU Polytechnic, for example, and we go to many different campuses, like Sunshine and Werribee and see it in action.

I have never seen any campus before where there is a school on campus, which is a technologically focussed one, so that picks up that theme. We talked about that. And there are all sorts of educational opportunities at the polytechnic level, and literally a hundred metres away are PhD students working in some of our most advanced laboratories.

PETER RADOLL

It's incredible.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

That's really, really interesting.

PETER RADOLL

And that is incredible. Yeah. And I saw a little bit of that at St Albans, at the orientation with the cybersecurity, in the nursing and the Polytechnic aspects of what we do.

That's incredible. I mean, I've never had the opportunity or worked in a dual sector institution. I've worked in both the TAFE in the university and the higher ed in the vocational education, and I've worked in the governance side of those as well.

But to bring them all together is absolutely fantastic. Now I'm really hanging out to go visit the STEM education space that our wonderful Deputy Vice-Chancellor for the Vocational Education and Training, Di. I'm really hanging out for that opportunity to go and have a look at that STEM education centre.

I'm also excited that we're actually doing so many, so many things in the student space because not only do we have higher ed and vocational ed, but we've also got a high school and this is amazing.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

It's really triple sector.

PETER RADOLL

It really is.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

You know, I mean, these terms need to all be looked at and, you know, throw them up in the air a bit in a different way.

But I'd like to throw them up in the air together with you. And I think that's what we'll be doing, which is good.  

PETER RADOLL

Fantastic.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

And we will just get, you know, government to catch the ideas and then we'll really be on fire.

PETER RADOLL

That would be great!

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Now some colleagues have been asking me, I've been having lots of people ask. That you're a hard worker, you're a wonderfully focussed person, student and person focussed.

What do you do in all that fast-paced environment just to relax or unwind?

[Laughter]

PETER RADOLL

That’s a really good question. Well, there are two things I really love. Really love just sitting at home and reading. I mean, that's one thing I do love. I don't get much time to do that these days.

But Adam, if I tell you that I of a weekend, I strap on a helmet and put on a leather jacket and I go… I won't say go fast because I never break the law… but I enjoy, you know, two wheels and four cylinders under me, you know, on the highway.

Absolutely. I love the motorcycle. It is the only thing that gives me joy beyond what I do in terms of work and family. It brings me great freedom and it's and I read a piece.

Charlie Teo, wrote a piece once in a magazine and he said he rides a motorcycle as well. And he said, it's really exhilarating. You know, trying to stay alive at 300 kilometres an hour on two wheels. Also on my bike I would never get to 300 kms an hour. But I do understand what he's saying. It's just a freedom. Yeah, and it's also you're a little bit vulnerable.

And then there's something really... I'm not going to say edgy, but there's something really nice being vulnerable at 100 kilometres an hour on a highway, you know, it's just you and the two wheels. And you know, that's it.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

And the wind, of course.

PETER RADOLL

Yes, there's a lot of wind! There's a lot of wind, there's a lot of birds and kangaroos and all these wonderful things that you have to avoid.

And I have to say that I've been incredibly lucky. I've ridden motorcycles since I was young enough to… 17 I think I had my licence for the motorcycle might be a bit younger than that, but I've ridden motorcycles all my life.

It is the one joy that stayed with me since I was a motor mechanic till today.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Well, you could actually service them and you still do.

PETER RADOLL

And I still do. I still do all my own servicing. That's exactly right. Spark plugs, oil, whatever you want. Change sprockets. Everything's the same. Yeah, because you never lose that.

And I still service my beautiful partner's car too, by the way. But maybe that will change one day. I don't know. I hope it doesn't to be honestly.

ADAM SHOEMAKER

But we're certainly not going to make you do the university, you know, cars or buses. Don't worry, that's not going to happen. That's beyond that's beyond the day job, shall we say!

But one of the things I wanted to say in just finishing is that this morning on the way in, I actually came along the Maribrynong River.

And as you said before, there's a wonderful Buddhist temple just about next door, just down the road. And you know, all these incredible cultural representations of progressive inclusivity in the west of Melbourne, and they're all on the doorstep.

So imagine if we can be the magnet for them as well as for us.

PETER RADOLL

That would be brilliant. I mean, that would be a dream. And that's what I would say to everyone listening is what will you bring to VU?

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Mm hmm.

And the challenge is there, but the door is open and it's welcome and it's a welcome from all of us. And it's especially a thank you and a welcome to you, Peter Radoll.

It's wonderful to have you as a colleague, and I'm sure we'll be saying that to many other people because of you as well.

PETER RADOLL

Thank you, Adam. And can I just say thank you so much for the opportunity. And as I said before, all those wonderful people in our region and in Melbourne, what are you going to bring to VU?

Because we know what we're bringing, we'd love to have you join us and look forward to actually seeing and meeting you. Please reach out!

ADAM SHOEMAKER

Any time. And if you see a fast-moving motorcycle, wait till he’s stopped. Don't flag him down.

[Laughter]

Thanks a lot, Peter, it's been great to talk.

PETER RADOLL

Thank you very much.

Text on screen

People of VU Podcast

Hosted by Vice-Chancellor, Professor Adam Shoemaker
Episode 6: The Hon. Wade Noonan, DVC External Relations & Partnerships

Karen Jackson, Executive Director Moondani Balluk

Hello and welcome. I'm here to provide acknowledgement of country. For those who don't know me, I’m KJ - Karen Jackson, Director of Moondani Balluk.

My Genealogy tracks back to Moira Lakes in Barmah Forest and Mount Hope in Pyramid Hill, giving me my connections to your Yorta Yorta and Burrup Barrup language groups.

There's a couple of things I'd like you to take away from my acknowledgement. The first is to remember the hidden history of Aboriginal people since the invasion. Our loss of language, removal from country, and our near extinction from massacres and pandemics.

The second is our strong and inherent connection to community and country. These connections have given us the resilience and courage to rebuild our languages, gain access to country, regenerate our cultural practises.

In acknowledging the traditional owners of the country on which you are now on, I'd like to sincerely thank them for their generosity and kindness in welcoming people onto their lands. Lands never ceded and lands that run deep into their being and spirit.

I wish to pay my deep respect to the ancestors, Elders, communities and families of the Woiwurrung Wurundjeri on whose land I stand and who create connection and share knowledge with all of us.

Thank you.

Professor Adam Shoemaker, Vice-Chancellor

Hello, colleagues. It's fantastic to be back with you.

And this is The People of VU podcast. And I know that we had a bit of a mid-year break when so much was happening, but we're back with a vengeance with some fantastic episodes and people to meet.

So as a reminder to we've been introducing you in this series to change-makers, leaders, influencers, researchers at Victoria University.

And today I'm really delighted to be joined by Dr. Mary Wisner, who is a researcher not only with the Institute for Health and Sport, but also a lecturer in clinical exercise and a very busy person.

Mary, it's great to have you with us.

Dr Mary Woessner

Thank you so much. Really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you.

Adam Shoemaker

Yeah, it's going to be good. And so in our beginning, we always want to acknowledge country, we want to acknowledge place, and we want to thank K.J. for the acknowledgement that we've heard.

But we also want to add to that with our own acknowledgement of the daily responsibility, the responsibility that we have in every campus and every nation in the West of Melbourne and also the Eora people in Sydney where we have a campus too.

So it's just goes without saying. Every time we have something public like this and I know, Mary, you and I are and join with that very much too.

So can I just ask you, because we're talking today about history, present, future. That's what podcasts are about. I'd love to know where you were born and where you grew up.

Could you just share that with the listeners, if you wouldn't mind?

Mary Woessner

Yeah, absolutely.

So I was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, but I grew up in a small town, Hillsboro, North Carolina.

It's about 30 minutes from every town that anyone might know, but it was a lovely place to grow up ten-acre farm, lots of animals.

And I was home schooled from fourth grade all the way into university, which is another fact many don't know.

Adam Shoemaker

No. And that's probably your parents would have had a big job to do. That was … was it something that they enjoyed as well? Absolutely.

Mary Woessner

It was a decision they made very strategically. They both were quite successful in their careers, but realised they weren't spending enough time with the kids and they decided in fourth grade to bring us back home and homeschool us.

And I made the decision to keep doing that through high school until university.

Adam Shoemaker

Fantastic. Well, look, I have met many home schooled people and they are fantastic. The outcomes have been really tremendous very often and sometimes people have gone on to do elements of Montessori method or international baccalaureate, sometimes matched with that.

Did you do any of those things as well or was it fully done and designed by the family, as it were, with guidance from the state? How did that work?

Mary Woessner

Yeah, there's guidance from the state for sure and benchmarks you need to achieve.

But it really was kind of at our own pace, which worked quite well for me. So in essence I would do all the subjects that we would normally do, but sometimes I would progress much more quickly through some and maybe take a little bit longer on others, which I think is really reflective of how broadly I'd like to see education kind of go being that adaptable as much as possible to individual circumstances.

So I was able to excel more quickly at the things that I was good at and also get the help and support I needed for the things that I struggled with.

Adam Shoemaker

You know, you sound like an ideal poster person for the view block model, you know, like that's the you know what I mean?

Sort of like if you sort of said you can slow down if you want, you can accelerate if you'd like to, but the choice is yours. Well, we would say that, too.

Yeah. And then, you know, with ten starts with blocks a year. So it's kind of you found the right place in another country.

Mary Woessner

Absolutely.

Adam Shoemaker

You know, that's really amazing. How did you find the right place in another country?

I mean, you know, it's a bit of a distance. I've been to North Carolina and, you know, took a while to get there from here.

So how did you make the journey the other way?

Mary Woessner

Absolutely. Well, I always wanted to visit Australia.

My great grandmother was actually born here and left the country for love and ended up living in California, which is how my whole family happened.

So I still have cousins, aunts, uncles, distant relations that live here. So I always knew I wanted to visit here, but I didn't have the opportunity to do that until I was ready to take on my Ph.D.

And it just so happened that the person I was working with at Duke University got a job offer at Victoria University.

I applied to come along and do some research with them and that's how I landed here. And I have not left.

Adam Shoemaker

Oh, look, it's so wonderful that it happened that way.

I mean, migration attached to universities, the two go together everywhere in the world. But of course Australia's a wonderful recipient of much talent from other nations.

So it's a very good example right there. And how did you do you think your upbringing influenced your research in what you thought about that? How did it work?

Mary Woessner

Yeah, I think it influenced it a lot.

So I am actually the let me count here the fourth doctor Westerner, though my aunt would argue that she's the only one because she has an M.D.

And all the rest of us are PhDs. But it was always in my mind to do postgraduate work.

But I actually always wanted to teach, and I always had a curiosity and passion for education. And that was definitely from my parents. And I did everything I did to get to be a lecturer at a university.

And after every single step, I kept saying, Is this enough? Do I have enough at my bachelor's now? Okay, Master's, do I have enough? No. You need a Ph.D. And I like to say along the way I fell in love with research.

So I had a passion for teaching and for that mentoring aspect. But I really fell in love with research as I was going through it.

Adam Shoemaker

It sounds like it almost accelerated as you went, you know, like that kind of sense of impetus towards the end and then just tell because people don't know necessarily the topic. What was your Ph.D. topic?

Mary Woessner

Yes. So my Ph.D. was really focussed and a lot of my work actually before where I'm at now was really focused on nutritional supplementation for clinical populations to kind of improve their exercise capacity and their like activities of daily living.

So my research was specifically on nitrate supplementation, which is beetroot juice with people that had heart failure.

To see if that would help improve their function.

Adam Shoemaker

And did it?

Mary Woessner

No.

[Laughter]

Oh, the short story is - No. So I'm one of those success stories, but not because of the research.

I guess it didn't. There are a lot of reasons as to why I won't bore you with them. But yeah, it didn't. It has a lot of benefits for overall health, but it doesn't solve all the problems for people with heart failure.

Adam Shoemaker

Well, look. And not naturopathic medicine and other approaches. I mean, it's a huge field and lots of things are kind of coefficient as well, not just in their own right.

And they can be incredibly good, as you say, systemically, but when you're talking about specific organs, maybe not so much.

Mary Woessner

Exactly. Yeah.

Adam Shoemaker

Okay. Got it. No, well. Very interesting topic that a lot of us are fascinated by.

And. Well, let me just ask you then, cardiovascular health. Were you an athlete? Like where did you get involved in cardiovascular health? What led to that?

Mary Woessner

Yeah, I have loved sports since I ever since I can remember I played all the sports you can imagine. I was a horseback rider. Volleyball, soccer.

Eventually, my parents decided that you need to pick one if you're going to play in college. So I picked basketball and that's where my love of sport has just emanated from.

And I like to play a large range, but basketball will always have my heart and that's where my passion for health and fitness really came.

Adam Shoemaker

Wonderful thing about basketball and I say this as a Canadian growing up is that you could play it year-round, but indoors.

Mary Woessner

Yes. Absolutely.

Adam Shoemaker

Well, you know, so it wasn't affected so much.

But we used to, as we say, "rat around” a lot outdoors, you know, just with, you know, anyone, you know, anyone's driveway with a hoop on it.

But what position did you play?

Mary Woessner

I was a small forward, so I was a shooting guard, three-point specialist. That's where I that's where I stayed.

Adam Shoemaker

You're in demand now. I'd say that's a really ..

Mary Woessner

Maybe not as I am now!

Adam Shoemaker

Yes, you know what I mean? It's a great position then. And so being a lecturer here at the U, as well as doing all the other things you do, what do you feel and how much do you infuse your classes with the research?

Is that a lot?

Mary Woessner

Yeah, absolutely. So I teach into the Master of Clinical Exercise Rehabilitation and I teach a couple of different units across that and my research directly goes back into that.

So a lot of my research is working with clinical populations or working with people that were trying to become more active.

So really looking at the benefits holistically of exercise and how to keep people safe and enjoying that exercise. And I absolutely feel that back.

But likewise, the students influence my research, their questions influence the questions that I want to keep asking or how I perform my research.

And a lot of them come in to work with me on minor thesis projects on the research itself. So I think it's really both ways actually.

Adam Shoemaker

That's fantastic.

Have you had any then go on to do PhDs in a topic relevant to what you study at the master's level yet, or is that happening?

Mary Woessner

Yeah, absolutely. So none that I'm personally primary supervisor on - that's to come.

But yeah, we've definitely had students that I've worked with as an associate supervisor on their minor thesis during their master's programme that have then gone on to do PhDs, which is so important.

Adam Shoemaker

Right.

It's a bit like you talked about before of the journey towards the end result and you're helping people now do the same thing.

Mary Woessner

Absolutely. A lot of people just don't know that that's an option and they ask the right questions and you ask the right questions. And all of a sudden you can peak their interest and have them thinking about doing something that they never thought that they could do or would want to do.

Adam Shoemaker

Okay. I'm getting a big theme here about potentiality. You know, that seems like a major theme for today's discussion.

And another example is, of course, talking about your work, you know, in actually explaining it to the public, explaining it to the world. Sometimes academics have been criticised for saying, well, we're too much within our own globe.

But one of the things where we really go outside into the globe is something which was invented at the University of Queensland called the three minute thesis (3MT) competition.

Now back here I think was around 2016 from memory you won the Victoria University 3MT. What did you talk about and why did you win?

Mary Woessner

You'd have to ask the judges for that. [Laughter] No, I presented my PhD and it was one of those rare moments where I just wanted to throw myself into something.

I wasn't confident as a public speaker, and I wanted to try something. I hadn't done any of my research at that point. It was all a proposal.

And I actually, in the first round of the Victoria University heats, did not even make it into the top few people. But I learnt from what I was doing, I got the feedback and I presented much better the second time and that's how I got that.

But yeah.

Adam Shoemaker

Quick study, in flight, you know.

And then when you did the Asia-Pacific level because I mean after having gone from the university, you did that. How is that different? Did you meet others involved in that and what was the experience like?

Mary Woessner

Yeah, so I had a great experience at that actually, and it was in person then too, which was such an important part of that, being able to meet everyone, be on campus.

But it was also really intense how they how they actually drive it forward. I mean, you literally have your 3 minutes and then you're off the stage and next one's up within 30 seconds.

Adam Shoemaker

Right.

Mary Woessner

So it was really intense and much more nerve wracking I think, than what the previous ones had been. Yeah.

Adam Shoemaker

It sort of reminds me like Mastermind, but not sitting down, you know, like it's, you know, kind of like boom.

Mary Woessner

Yeah, no very much standing up on the mic, go forward. If you missed something, keep going because you've only got your 3 minutes.

Adam Shoemaker

Wow, wow. Well, well done.

I mean, I think it's a fantastic initiative, but also one to look back on as a kind of formative stage in your in your life as well.

And now you're doing a fair bit of media work now. And I mean, I know that's because the sensitive and important nature of your research, maybe we'll go to that next, because I think it's not just the coverage of it, but the nature of the research, meaning the experiences of violence against children in community sport.

Which is, gosh, it's important to every state and territory of this nation. Could you explain what led you to focus on that topic and what have you found?

Mary Woessner

Yeah. So the reason for focus on that is really one of my dear friends, colleagues and my colleague, Dr. Aurelie Pankowiak.

She's actually a very out and open survivor of childhood abuse in sport and French basketball. And a few years ago we were PhD students, you know, exploring the world and looking up everything. And we realised there really wasn't a lot of research on that.

And we decided four years ago that we wanted to do that and some how we would make it happen. And I'm very proud to say that, you know, four years later, here we are.

She's a research fellow and I've obviously I'm a lecturer and research fellow and we've just released that national study looking at those experiences of violence during childhood sport participation.

Adam Shoemaker

And it cuts across all sports.

Mary Woessner

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think that was that was a really important part of this. There's a lot in the media about, you know, specific sports and what we found in our data.

We didn't name out any specific sports, but we had 68 sports represented and violence was across all of them. And that just it speaks to the systemic nature of violence, but also the normalisation we have.

Adam Shoemaker

Wow.

Mary Woessner

Things that we accept in sport, we don't necessarily accept elsewhere. Things that a teacher would do in a classroom that we would absolutely abhor. Coaches can do on in the locker rooms or on the field, and we've normalised that a little bit.

Adam Shoemaker

Yeah, there wasn't any exception to that rule. That's the scary part of this in a way, you know, to think it's all across the board. Wow.

Mary Woessner

Yeah. And I think, you know, the numbers are confronting when you say 82% of the respondents that can be quite confronting.

But I think what we've heard as well from the community is it actually just resonates. And we've had a lot of people reach out and say, I thought I was the only one. I thought my kid was the only one that left sport because he was being, you know, harassed.

So really, it's spoken to the community a bit in a way, and I think it's kind of pulled together a collective on this issue, which is important.

Adam Shoemaker

Only way forward.

You know, I mean, if you look at probably anyone who's been involved in sports, there's an element of this.

But to know exactly what it is, if I may ask, a lot of it revolved around the coaching or the coach athlete relationship. How much was peer to peer?

Mary Woessner

A lot, actually, the highest rates for amongst peer to peer. And that bullying and that psychological level of belittling and humiliating.

I think the coach is often talked about because we see them as a protector of the sport, but also they kind of set the culture of that team.

Adam Shoemaker

Yeah.

Mary Woessner

So I think the coach is often spoken about because that's an adult that has some ownership over this, whereas the children are often taking cues from other areas, but the peer to peer as well as parent to child was impactful too.

Adam Shoemaker

Oh parent to child too. And sometimes the coach's response or non-response to the peer to peer is the key factor too.

Mary Woessner

Yeah, it could absolutely play a massive role in how that can kind of continues to go.

And I think that's an important point, too, is that, again, it wasn't a specific sport, it wasn't a specific type of violence or specific perpetrator. And we see in the news the all the stories about umpires and the abuse of referees.

And so it's a whole of sport issue and it's going to take a collective action. And we're just really happy to be a part of that collective action.

Adam Shoemaker

We're very proud of it, too, I got to say, like not in any sense of accomplishment, in the sense that the job is done, but opening the door to the job being done is really crucial. And, you know, that's what we're talking about today.

So was it a difficult topic to discuss or navigate in the media?

Mary Woessner

Yeah. I think I was honestly really impressed with the media.

I think they were very respectful to the issue. And I was I was preparing myself for the worst, but I was very happy to see the best. A lot of people just really wanting to know what was behind these numbers and what we thought about them.

From my standpoint, the hardest part about media was just doing that first interview and realising that as you call in, you're live on the radio and there's no mistakes and if you make a mistake.

So that was the hard part and sticking to a message that you wanted to be told. But that's where all my experience before it, and especially the three minute theses, really helped me with that.

Adam Shoemaker

I know what you mean and depending on the venue, something like The Project, you know that which is sort of 13 seconds of discussion, not even 3 minutes is a very different venue from, say, radio.

So, you know, each one has its own, you know, rail guards and so forth. And you've just done them all.

Mary Woessner

Yeah. And they were they were each different and challenging. But like I said, I think that's made me a little less nervous to sit across from you today, so there's one good thing.

Adam Shoemaker

Well, let's hope it's not nervous at all.

Mary Woessner

No, it's great.

Adam Shoemaker

Now, we're going to go into research funding because, you know, as you know and many listeners would know, it's the lifeblood of our research is grant-getting the quality and peer review and what we do that's got impact in the world and for, if you like, the society that we serve.

So you've had something like as part of the Waitlist Project, which we'll explain in a second.

It's around.. and you yourself gained around you $2 million Australian research funding, which includes your involvement as a chief investigator in the Waitlist Project.

Do you want to say a little bit more? I know a bit more now that I've had the pleasure of hearing you discuss it at our Council Forum recently. But for those who may not know, it's a wait list. For what? Because I had to learn this myself. So just explain this a bit to everyone who's listening in.

Mary Woessner

Yeah. So I think in the media we hear a lot about waitlists and waiting for surgery and how those can be several months long or sometimes even a little bit longer.

But our project was really looking at a waiting list for the waiting list. So we were looking at people that had been referred by their specialist, by their doctors, their GP's, their local community, GP to Western health for orthopaedic care.

And we're awaiting a specialist appointment, so not a surgical outcome, just a diagnosis in some instances. And so when we hear about the waitlist in the media, they're often talking about the waitlist for surgery, but we're talking about the people waiting to find out if they need to be on that waitlist for surgery.

And that waitlist was extensive. We have over 5000 people on that waitlist, some of them waiting in excess of three or four years.

Adam Shoemaker

Wow.

So if you think about the problem... west of Melbourne, you know, we're talking sort of hip knee joint replacements, you know, orthopaedic surgery.

These are very painful conditions. They affect mobility sometimes. Would they also affect people's mental health I would think?

Mary Woessner

Absolutely, yes.

So the project that we did really first sought to answer that question, who are these 5000 people awaiting care?

Because we really didn't know a lot about them. We wanted to understand their physical and their mental wellbeing.

And that first part of the project really highlighted how diverse their needs are. They're on the wait list for orthopaedic care, but they're coming with high rates of mental ill health.

So depression that are four times higher than the general population. They're either coming with diabetes and other cardiovascular risk factors that are 2 to 3 fold higher than what you would see in the general community.

So you're dealing with people that might be coming for one problem, but if you can start to work with them to fix their holistic health, you might be able to help improve some of their long-term outcomes beyond that, orthopaedic care.

Adam Shoemaker

And tell us what were some of the interventions that you were suggesting? Because that's I think what we're really interested to know is what can we do to help?

Mary Woessner

Yeah. So, so we did a lot of work, a co-designing, an online self-directed intervention for this waitlisted population.

So working with clinicians from Western health, academics from view across ten different disciplines. So really a huge effort. And then also working with the patients from the community and we created this holistic health platform.

So it covers a wide range of challenges that people might be facing. So in terms of dietary advice, advice for osteoarthritis, which was the condition we were targeting as the most prevalent condition on that waitlist, but also pain management and coping skills and really looking at the health in a holistic way.

And that's what our team really developed over this last year or so.

Adam Shoemaker

What would be the greatest success of it, do you think? I mean, so far.

Mary Woessner

So far, I think that co-design was a massive success.

As with all co-design, you go in with a plan and you come out with something that looks hopefully somewhat like you intended, but maybe not in the same way you thought. It ended up being a dual language programme, so we created it not only in English but also in Vietnamese.

And that was never part of the plan, but it was part of the needs from the community.

And right now we've tested it in terms of feasibility and gotten some initial feedback from new participants on the waitlist to say, you know, it works, we like it. Here are some things that could make it better.

And where we're looking next is to get that next set of funding to make sure that it's efficacious. So to really test it with a broader population of that community and see how effective it is at improving mental and physical wellbeing and ideally reducing pain.

Adam Shoemaker

Would you be considering any other language groups besides those two?

Mary Woessner

So I think to start off with, we need to prove efficacy of the content and then really focus on expanding it out.

So with the co-design, we wanted to prove that we could do it in a second language and do that to a high standard. But now we really need to get that efficacy down and then absolutely expand it out.

Adam Shoemaker

I think it's like one of the most interesting and important projects I've come across in my years in education and research, and it's so needed to be done. We can't wait to see what comes next with it.

You're also working in other areas of research and we just heard the previous one. What are some of the challenges? I mean, it's not as if we have a hit rate of 100% in research grants.

So when you're thinking at a certain time of day, I want to really go for a grant and I don't know what time of day that is. We will ask. How do you choose? I mean, because it you can choose any number of targets, but how do you select them?

Mary Woessner

Yeah. So I think at my stage I'm really guided a lot by my mentors.

So I'm mentored extensively by Professor Itamar Levinger and Professor Alex Parker as well as others external to the University.

But they really help guide me as to where I should be applying my energy. Because you're right, there are ten, 12, 20 grants that could absolutely be relevant, but you're not going to do a really good job on every single one if you spread yourself so thin.

So part of it is thinking about which grants I can go for and lead. And the other is really thinking which ones that I can add value and support other more senior investigators in their work as well.

Adam Shoemaker

Do you think it's the kind of thing that could attract philanthropic support as well, this particular project?

Mary Woessner

Yeah, absolutely. I've been in touch with the philanthropic office for the last couple of years on this topic.

And now that we've got data on the Violence and Sport Project, we're definitely leveraging that philanthropic angle. But I think the waitlist project as well has a lot of potential.

I've realised throughout my career that though I started in a very narrow focus of, you know, pharmaceutical interventions for health and disease, I really value that translational work.

I want to solve the big community problems. And if you look at my mission in research, it's really about getting as many people as possible to exercise and enjoy it and do it and be safe doing it.

Adam Shoemaker

And do you like the way that some of the health insurance companies are getting that, you know, the apps going? And is that sort of the same approach that you see with, you know, Medibank and others and, you know, BUPA is doing similar things?

Is that all to be applauded or do you have any criticisms of any of those approaches?

Mary Woessner

I think anything that can get someone moving is a positive.

And I think, you know, one of the challenges that I saw throughout all my research is we're often trying, oftentimes still trying to show how good exercise is. And the challenge, I think, is not convincing exercise is good, like not convincing people that it's good and it's valuable.

It's actually getting them moving.

Adam Shoemaker

Yes.

Mary Woessner

And that's what that's what I really want to focus on.

How do we make it something that people enjoy and find pleasant and how do we help them find that enjoyment in it so that they'll stay lifelong?

Because I don't want to help them for 12 weeks.

Adam Shoemaker

And exercise can be any time of day, too.

I mean, you know, is there a time when you do your own sport, like, do you have a sort of routine where you do it the same time of day?

Mary Woessner

I find that if I do not do it first thing in the morning, everything else piles in. So it's really hard.

So I'll usually try and do my run or my workout first thing because you get to the end of the day and you just think, Oh, I'll do it tomorrow.

So for me, it's first thing.

Adam Shoemaker

And I think I've met probably half the staff who say to me that's what they love. The other half say, I need to do something to unwind from the day. Like I go for a swim for a kilometre at 7:00 at night and then I sleep better.

So is there any, you know, efficacious advantage? They're both good.

Mary Woessner

Look, I think, you know, if you're trying to look at an elite athletes performance, you know, there could be minuscule differences in their metabolism at certain times of day and with timing.

But for the general population, just doing anything is better than nothing.

And I think that's the message that I'm trying to impart to the students that I'm teaching and that I know my research group is trying to focus on.

Just move.

Adam Shoemaker

Yeah, just. That's a that's a great one.

And we have also the element where people think a lot in nature, you know, and one of the things we talk about is where you exercise.

And, you know, in Japan, there's the whole idea of the onsen approach, you know, sort of tree bathing and things like this being in forests.

Have you do you subscribe to any of that stuff where you know the environment in which you do the exercises determinant of its success as well?

Mary Woessner

Absolutely. I hear that all the time from my research participants as well. We're talking about that, interviewing them about their experience of exercise and what parts they enjoy and how he can make exercise prescription better.

And almost every single one of them has mentioned outdoors. And yet here we are as practitioners, training people in a gym on a machine, but they love the outdoors and most of them will opt outside when they have that opportunity for those reasons.

Adam Shoemaker

Yeah. And so important we do have this very important theme in our University is called Protecting Country. I think these come together in an interesting way.

But tell me, if you were imagining this is something we're asking all our podcast guests, what does protecting country mean to you?

Mary Woessner

Yeah, I think that's been an evolving term in my mind for seven years, and I think it means something very different to me now than if you had said that term ten, 20 years ago.

The respect that's coming forward for Indigenous populations here in Australia is incredible to me and humbling to me and the voice that we are giving them and that so many are trying to give back to them I think is so critical.

Speaking as a North American, where we have our own indigenous communities and I absolutely applaud the movements that are being made to that.

But for me, protecting country means that every day in my life I'm doing what I can to protect the climate, the environment, but also the people, every single one of them that's on this land and all those people that came before me.

I recognise that though I have ancestors that lived here, they were not the first ancestors that lived here. And I think that's a really important part of the acknowledgement of country that happens.

And it's part of the importance to me and protecting country in that term.

Yeah.

Adam Shoemaker

Oh, thank you. That's really meaningful and not just personal, but broad scale.

And personally, I've said this to a couple of people. I find this campus outside, especially between the river and the sports centre. That Vista is one of the most beautiful that I've seen in higher education in this country.

And you a lot of people don't actually just stop and breathe in the river and have a look, you know.

And then of course, walking through Footscray Park is a fantastic way and so we're very, very lucky at Footscray Park and then other campuses to have their own vistas and their own approaches.

It's not just this one, but we happen to be here today, so it's almost like we got to take not for granted the things which are there and then protect them.

But recently we were planting five and a half thousand trees out in Werribee. That was another example, you know, very profound. And, you know, everyone said, oh, do you all want to get, you know, wear gloves?

And a lot of you said, no, it's good to get your hands dirty. You know, going back to the farm.

Mary Woessner

Yeah, going back to the farm all the way back to it. Yeah. No issues getting my hands dirty. I think, you know, the country is so beautiful.

And one of the reasons I can't ever imagine leaving here is just how beautiful nature is.

And every chance I get, I go out into it. And I'm very thankful for the beautiful campus that we're on and overlooking that river is just incredible and learning more and more,

Almost every acknowledgement of country. I learn a little bit more about this country, and I think that's incredible.

Adam Shoemaker

Yeah, me too. It's always it's always listening.

Finally, then thinking about the future, because you've been a great planner, sometimes accidental, sometimes purposeful.

But if you brought those together and said, I want to think back to this date, you know, back in the month that we spoke and it's five years hence, let's say, do you dream about what the five years hence moment will be?

Do you have a sort of goal in that five-year window?

Mary Woessner

I'd like to say I've never really had like a very clear picture of where I'll be or who I'll be.

I think I really ascribe to the idea that when I look back, I want to be remembered for the researcher that I am rather than the research that I do.

So I hope that at that time, when I've got my own PhD students and I'm still teaching and I'm I'm hopefully still doing the research that I love, that people are remembering me, not just for the research that I'm doing, but for the broader impact and seeing people as humans first.

Yeah, that's what I'd like to be.

Adam Shoemaker

I think it's fair to say, pretty much from the very first question, that's been the theme, you know, potentiality, humans first, and nature above all and health underpinning them. It's a fantastic way to think of the world.

And thank you so much for the discussion. We could go on, but maybe the next time we will.

But it's been wonderful to get to know you better. Thanks, Mary.

Mary Woessner

Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.