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Ian Priestly then and now (photos courtesy Ian)
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Ian Priestly
I have to admit that I never really enjoyed Balwyn High. It seemed to be managed and ‘ruled’ by staff more interested in trouble avoidance than in imparting knowledge. It was many years later, after I had begun building a career that I began to understand that there were things to learn that were relevant to life and work then I began to appreciate academic pursuits with a purpose.
I went straight into the workforce after Balwyn and was fortunate enough to be selected for training as a computer programmer on one of the very few ‘room sized’ main frames in Australia at that time. It was that early involvement with computers that provided the lubricant for my career thereafter as well as providing the stimulus to do my first degree part time. Late night computer test runs left lots of time just waiting around. It was too far to go home and come back, so a tram trip to the University was a way to fill in the time.
I was called up. The murderers of over five hundred young men in an unwinnable war disrupted my life along with thousands of others – all so they could hold on to power. If hatred is a sin – not one of the better ones I may say - then I am a sinner to this day.
I married a Balwyn High girl. We met in my year twelve and her year nine. We remained together for thirty-odd years raising three daughters. One of the girls has given me three grand children.
On discharge from the military, I returned to University and there I met a man who latched on to the computer geek as part of the syndicate study process Melbourne’s Graduate School used in those days and later suggested I might enjoy ‘work’ in Higher Education when we finished our degrees. The next year began a quite rapid rise through the hierarchy of what then was a College of Advanced Education, Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Principal Lecturer to Head of the newly formed School of Hospitality and Tourism Management offering the first degrees in Hotel Management and later Tourism in Australia.
Early on in that job I was lucky enough to travel looking at the Universities of the world offering degrees in Hospitality studies to help me in developing our degree programs. In 1989 I was invited into a visiting Professorship at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. On my return, I was involved in the Dawkins University creations and emerged as Professor Priestly at what became Victoria University.
My life in Higher Education became politics and planning and more politics, all of which meant less and less student contact and more and more meetings. Research was impossible time-wise. Conference attendance as an administrator was regular and in 2001, I was fortunate enough to begin a relationship with a German private university which needed to send its students overseas for a year in order to complete their degrees. Suddenly I was selling Australia to twenty-one year old Germans. At one stage we had eighty German students in our final year, nearly as many as we had local students. I was travelling four times a year to Germany. We even managed to install our degrees into a private institution in Freiburg.
About this time my wife decided that I should leave the matrimonial home.
I took advantage of one of the redundancy packages the Higher Education sector has found itself having to enter into as a result of promoting staff for turning up to work – and not even that much most of the time. I accepted a contract to manage the German connection until I retired in 2010. I have married again and moved to Bendigo and am enjoying a relaxed retirement.
I went straight into the workforce after Balwyn and was fortunate enough to be selected for training as a computer programmer on one of the very few ‘room sized’ main frames in Australia at that time. It was that early involvement with computers that provided the lubricant for my career thereafter as well as providing the stimulus to do my first degree part time. Late night computer test runs left lots of time just waiting around. It was too far to go home and come back, so a tram trip to the University was a way to fill in the time.
I was called up. The murderers of over five hundred young men in an unwinnable war disrupted my life along with thousands of others – all so they could hold on to power. If hatred is a sin – not one of the better ones I may say - then I am a sinner to this day.
I married a Balwyn High girl. We met in my year twelve and her year nine. We remained together for thirty-odd years raising three daughters. One of the girls has given me three grand children.
On discharge from the military, I returned to University and there I met a man who latched on to the computer geek as part of the syndicate study process Melbourne’s Graduate School used in those days and later suggested I might enjoy ‘work’ in Higher Education when we finished our degrees. The next year began a quite rapid rise through the hierarchy of what then was a College of Advanced Education, Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Principal Lecturer to Head of the newly formed School of Hospitality and Tourism Management offering the first degrees in Hotel Management and later Tourism in Australia.
Early on in that job I was lucky enough to travel looking at the Universities of the world offering degrees in Hospitality studies to help me in developing our degree programs. In 1989 I was invited into a visiting Professorship at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. On my return, I was involved in the Dawkins University creations and emerged as Professor Priestly at what became Victoria University.
My life in Higher Education became politics and planning and more politics, all of which meant less and less student contact and more and more meetings. Research was impossible time-wise. Conference attendance as an administrator was regular and in 2001, I was fortunate enough to begin a relationship with a German private university which needed to send its students overseas for a year in order to complete their degrees. Suddenly I was selling Australia to twenty-one year old Germans. At one stage we had eighty German students in our final year, nearly as many as we had local students. I was travelling four times a year to Germany. We even managed to install our degrees into a private institution in Freiburg.
About this time my wife decided that I should leave the matrimonial home.
I took advantage of one of the redundancy packages the Higher Education sector has found itself having to enter into as a result of promoting staff for turning up to work – and not even that much most of the time. I accepted a contract to manage the German connection until I retired in 2010. I have married again and moved to Bendigo and am enjoying a relaxed retirement.
