Читать книгу The Net Result - Book 2 - Lucille Jr. Orr - Страница 10

A pioneering electrical engineer; a founding director of a data communication firm, an educator and a mother, Else Shepherd combines the pragmatism of engineering with the aesthetics of music, holding formal qualifications in both disciplines.

She was the 1992 Queensland Executive Woman of the Year!

I’m an electrical engineer and director of an electronics company, Mosaic Electronics, which I established with a colleague in 1986. With a staff of twelve we design and manufacture specialist data communications products, and provide consulting in data communications, contract manufacturing and service. We don’t try to compete with the large national and multinational companies in the lucrative communications field with me-too products, but by identifying niches and using the very latest design techniques, we can provide a unique service. This has been recognised by Telecom, OTC and electricity authorities from whom we develop and manufacture new products, investigate future possibilities and present training courses.

My role in the company is changing. Like all the classic high-tech companies we started under my colleague’s house where I designed printed circuit boards, ordered components, soldered, tested, wrote manuals, chased debtors, kept the books, did the cleaning and tried to keep up with the latest design techniques. Soon we moved to a small office which we painted ourselves, employed another designer and a part-time bookkeeper, and started to learn from trial and error about the tough business world.

Now we’ve graduated to smarter premises with more staff, a manufacturing area and a general manager, which allows me to go back to being an engineer for a large part of the time. We tend to employ fresh young graduates straight out of University, still full of energy, who think they know everything and make me feel old, but who don’t realise how much guidance they need. I despair sometimes at the lack of responsibility of otherwise very intelligent young people. Even if wisdom doesn’t always come with age, a systems viewpoint and a sense of responsibility comes with the experience of years, and an insistence on doing the job properly the first time comes with having your own money on the line.

Apart from jointly running a business, I’m a part-time senior lecturer at the University of Queensland, and a member of: the Faculty Advisory Committee for Electrical Engineering at the Queensland University of Technology, the Engineering School Assessment Committee for the University of Southern Queensland, and the Advisory Board of the Technology Management Centre at the University of Queensland.

Sometimes I think all these committees just need the token woman and as there aren’t too many older female engineers around, I’m the one they ask. Wherever their agenda may or may not be I have my own unique perceptions and insights to offer and a genuine desire to contribute meaningfully to engineering education and to the development of excellence in universities. I suspect I’m not nearly as token as people might sometimes hope I will be.

Teaching has always been a special love and my business partner and I both try to have a teaching assignment each year. Nothing keeps you up to date more efficiently than having to satisfy a class of some of our best brains who may well know more than you do! At times I kick myself for taking on so much work, especially the night before an 8am lecture, but there is no doubt the close ties with universities give us fresh viewpoints and continuous exposure to the most appropriate new technology.

Last year I was appointed for a three year term to the Board of South East Queensland Electricity. I know Premier Goss was pushing for more women on boards, but his time I can’t claim to be the token woman because two women were appointed. I feel very honoured by the appointment and wonder how anyone can be expected to have adequate qualifications and experience for such a tough assignment. With corporatisation looming and talk of eventual privatisation of the electricity industry, this is proving to be extremely challenging.

These days I can happily admit to being an engineer without expecting an adverse reaction. How things have changed in the last 30 years! I used to shrink from telling casual enquirers what I do because it was likely to embarrass them. Dinner parties were certain to produce hurting wisecracks and worried wives with thoughtless discussions on the evils of feminism.

Back in 1962 when I entered the Queensland University as a first year engineering student, female engineers were virtually unheard of in Australia. With the benefit of a year’s schooling in Denmark (where female engineers were more common), supportive parents and just sufficient faith in my own academic abilities, I weathered the awful first year and went on to graduate with Honours. But the sheltered environment of a friendly University did nothing to prepare me for the hostile attitudes in North Queensland where I went to work after graduating.

Marrying a Mackay local made married life comfortable and easy. Working in my profession was more difficult as I was expected very quickly to settle down and become a home-maker. “You’ll soon stop all that working nonsense”, said my father-in-law very early in the piece.

But of course I didn’t stop all that nonsense and continued to work, full time until the first of my two children was born and then part time for some years.

Working when I didn’t need to financially, was bad enough, but being an engineer was beyond the pale. I can remember my surprise when a man attacked me at a party one evening, asking, “Aren’t you sorry for your husband?” Sorry for him because he had some sort of freak for a wife. For years I found it disconcerting to be considered by so many to be slightly strange or weird, when in fact I felt entirely ordinary. One year I was asked to give a talk on Women in Industry at a TAFE speech night. Preparing for the talk, I interviewed many people including a number of sugar mill managers. One instated he couldn’t have women working in his mill at night. I said, “I often work in your mill at night.” His reply, “You’re different.” So often this is the case, is it not, that black is called white to support what must be so? How uncomfortable and inconvenient to have our inbuilt prejudices questioned.

Working as a research engineer at the Sugar Research Institute for ten years and then as a consultant to the sugar industry with the Brisbane – based Batstone Hendry and Associates, I travelled extensively in North Queensland, looking at transport systems and installing computer systems in sugar mills. In 1972 I won an industry prize for my work on the scheduling of sugar cane railways which saved mills hundreds of thousands of dollars when first introduced.

Fortunately I had otherwise unavailable skills and knowledge badly needed which gave me entry to areas barred to women under normal circumstances. At times the reactions were hostile from professional engineers, but more usually people were simply mystified and worried about how to deal with me. Many is the cup of tea or meal I have had with mill workers’ families to allay the unfounded fears of their wives.

Things have changed over the years. I can now chit-chat happily about my work with strangers without feeling like an alien being. I can now be outwardly proud of being an engineer. For the odd fleeting moment I occasionally fell marginally put out that I’m no longer special. But don’t worry, the moment passes very quickly and I’m thankful that it’s easier for new graduates today.

I can honestly claim to have done my bit for change in the Institution of Engineers. Can you imagine it? The Mackay branch used to have men-only Christmas parties and the annual dinner was held at the men’s club. The first year they sneaked me like a thief into the function room by the kitchen door so the club patrons wouldn’t be scandalised by the presence of a woman on the premises. The next year sanity prevailed and the dinner was held in a hotel with husbands and wives invited. In International Women’s Year, 1975, they voted me in as President of the Mackay Branch.

The format for branch meetings had always been a lecture by a local engineer or guest on a learned topic, followed by supper. I managed to introduce some variations, in particular a series of forums where the group debated topical issues. This seemed to be extremely important to me because very often engineers plan in isolation, as a result inflicting unnecessary stupidities on the general public. As a result of these forums the city council provided smaller trees for the footpath and consulted with the electricity board on where to position the trees, rather than plant forest giants directly under the overhead lines.

When Queensland Rail built a new railway line through an outlying suburb, so many children could no long walk to their old school that virtually overnight the population of one school dropped by some hundreds, while at another tiny school with no facilities the population exploded. It wasn’t until the railway, main roads and consulting civil engineers were jointly made to realise what was happening than a footbridge over the railway was built.

As I mentioned earlier, I love teaching and have always looked for part-time opportunities. One of my most pleasant assignments was to be invited by the Mackay High School to give a series of lessons to some problem Grade 8 children who were very intelligent buy failing. As an experiment, the group of boys and girls was taken out of normal classes for some weeks and three or four outsiders like myself, were invited to spend time with the kids in any way we pleased. I chose to introduce them to formal logic and some of the classic problems which have puzzled philosophers and engineers for thousands of years. They responded incredibly to the challenge and for a short time stopped being problems exhibiting instead their natural intelligence and superior abilities.

For many years I taught part-time at the Mackay College of TAFE, in particular at the Sugar School where shift engineers and shift chemists are trained for the sugar industry. Although girls were accepted for the shift chemist’s course, the school’s prospectus stated that they would find employment only as laboratory assistants, not as shift chemists. To my surprise, the battle I fought to change the prospectus was long and bitter, even though the wording in it was illegal. Eventually the discriminatory language was removed, but to my knowledge the industry still shies away from female chemists and engineers in positions of authority.

Again it was quite acceptable for me to be in the team setting up the engineers’ course for the Sugar School and for me to teach the future male shift engineers, but girls were not permitted to enter the engineering course.

I rarely become involved in women’s issues and I am wary of some of the excesses of the feminist movement. For myself, I have managed to do anything I pleased simply by going ahead and doing it and take no notice of anyone who said I couldn’t. If I have any influence, it will be from example, not from oratory or from joining movements.

However I will fight tooth and nail to keep all doors open for both men and women, especially educational door. Once there is no bar on women entering a course or profession, I feel no further need for artificial encouragement, for affirmative action or for redressing the balance. From personal experience I know that thumbing your nose at the prevailing attitudes of the society in which you live is very likely to lead to loneliness and unhappiness. How silly and potentially dangerous to push young girls into engineering courses as many universities do, simply because the government wants to improve the statistics (and provides funds to do so), without some accompanying discussion on the realities of engineering working environments.

Simply open the doors. If girls want to walk in, they will. If they don’t want to walk in, they must not be pushed.

In early 1985 I sought an appointment with the Dean of Engineering at the Queensland Institute of Technology because I wanted to tackle him about his newspaper advertisements trying to attract women into engineering courses. Advertisements for male students always show male engineers in white shirts and ties in clean offices, but the new advertisements showed a girl in a hard hat. Why? We argued for some time and then I ended up with a job as tutor which later extended to lecturing in electrical engineering. Towards the end of the following years left to found Mosaic Electronics. Since then I’ve lectured part-time at QUT in 1990 and at Griffith University in 1991.

Now I have an appointment as fractional senior lecturer in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Queensland and expect to stay with this department for some time.

Although small towns are wonderful for bringing up young children, the lack of facilities can be very frustrating. No public library, no book shops, very little music or theatre. But there were many like us not prepared to sit and wait for the town to grow before the good things happen. If you wait until they or the Government do something about it, you miss out. Our family became very involved with the local branch of the Arts Council and I took my turn as Treasurer, Secretary, and President as necessary. I could never describe adequately the amount of pleasure my family derived over the years from the concerts, school performances, opera, ballet, and art shows brought to town by the Arts Council. The number of shows we could pack into a year was limited solely by the energy of our local branch committee.

More than anything else I love music and have played the piano and sung in choirs all my life. It worried me that our children had no music at school and no opportunities to enjoy the pleasures of singing in a choir. The battle was already on to get instrumental teaching in schools, and to stimulate the growth of music in the town, our Arts Council branch was putting pressure on the councils to employ a music coordinator. Eventually Mary Lyons, now Manager of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, was appointed and slowly exciting things started to happen.

In the meanwhile, I started a choir at my children’s school so that they could sing, but as so often happens in these cases, my daughter wasn’t interested and my son marginally so. But I struggled on with the North Mackay High School choir at the same time forming a second choir for primary school children, both of which are still going. Mary Lyons started a youth orchestra and together we worked on establishing a music school. My husband bought the old butter factory and partially did it up so that we could let most of it, keeping separate areas for a drama school and music school. We begged for Australia Council funds, imported teachers and with a shoestring budget and much community good will and assistance, tarted the Mackay Community Music Centre.

Meanwhile being worried that I was conducting choirs with no knowledge of what I was doing, we invited an American choral conductor to come and run some workshops in North Queensland. The following year he returned with the Michigan Master Singers, a sixteen-voice choir of music teacher, who spent several weeks in North Queensland sharing their expertise. Since then some members of that choir have returned many times to teach throughout Australia. We also invited Dr Roy Wales from the Queensland Conservatorium of Music to come and give us workshops on conducting. Over the years his involvement with Mackay grew, and now there is a branch or the Conservatorium well established in Mackay.

When I go back and see all the musical activities now taken so much for granted in Mackay, I feel good that I made the effort to change things so that my own children wouldn’t miss out. (My son is now a professional musician.)

In 1984, when my family and I moved to Brisbane, I took a year off engineering to study conducting full time at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music. I received a Graduate Diploma in Music and was awarded the Director’s Prize. The opportunities for professional choral conducting are just about non-existent and my strength lies more in getting the best out of amateur groups. As a hobby, music is a wonderful contrast from engineering.

Several years ago there was little training available for choral conductors and no-one knew the extent of choral music in Australia. I applied for a grant from the Australian Council to go and see what was happening in the United States and attend a national convention of the American Choral Directors association. There was enough money left over when I came back for postage and telephone calls, so that a small group of us could start the Australian Choral Conductors Association. That was in early 1985. Now the Association has grown to about 800 members and choral music is alive and well in Australia. In July 1993, I convened a national conference on the Gold Coast.

I like to make things happen. All my life I’ve had a strong interest in technology and technology education balanced by a passion for the arts, especially music. I like to throw my energies full time into making changes for the better, in improving the world about me. It’s not for the sake of power or for possible rewards. In fact I often find it most effective to be an influential associate rather than the leader, yet I know I can contribute useful ideas and driving enthusiasm for any project in which I’m interested. The rewards always come from achieving a more enriching environment for myself, my family and my associates.