Conclusion
This History of the first decade of Mount Lawley Campus has been a labour of love. Three of us in particular (John Renner, Sybe Jongeling and Glen Phillips) supported by a long list of other ex-Mount Lawley Teachers College staff and students, have spent almost 15 years writing this story of an emerging tertiary institution because we believe it to be deserved.
Moreover, we want to commemorate the founding genius of the College, a World War II bomber pilot hero who set out to change the course of teacher education, in Western Australia at least. He was Robert G Peter, the founding Principal of Mount Lawley Teachers College (and later Director of Mount Lawley College of Advanced Education).
In our own ways and in shared ways we loved Bob Peter. He changed our professional lives and in some cases our private lives. As a psychologist he understood human aspiration and human needs, especially of those who aspired to take up the profession of primary school teaching. Therefore, to write the history of the tertiary institution he helped to found here in Western Australia and to highlight its profoundly innovative nature has sometimes been laborious. Yet it has also been a pleasure and an honour.
Glen Phillips was a partner at Graylands College under Bob Peter and in the planning of the whole concept (including buildings and grounds) of the Mount Lawley Teachers College-to-be. Once the College was established, he served as Head of English, Speech and Drama as well as being part of the Executive administering the College.
As the senior member of the initiating trio of this history, John Renner brought an awareness of the higher-level decision-making in the Education Department which was responsible for setting up Mount Lawley Teachers College. He also was privy to the operations of the Post-Secondary Education Commission, created to succeed the Education Department when the Federal Government created colleges of advanced education. Mount Lawley College of Advanced Education was one of the first so created.
John also had the benefit of working with Sybe Jongeling on two previous campus histories, viz. Joondalup CAE and Nedlands Secondary Teachers College (finally Nedlands CAE). John’s particular responsibility and interest has been to document the story of student representation in the planning and development of the Mount Lawley Campus in its various forms as a College training primary teachers.
On the other hand, Sybe Jongeling’s contribution was not only as a co-author of the above two campus histories shared with John Renner but also as one of the initiating staff members recruited from the Education Department to lecture at the new campus and share the development of the courses in Education and Psychology.
Sybe has been a powerhouse of energy and expertise in structuring the Campus history, particularly since the book was conceived from the outset to be a non-print volume, existing in one of the new E-Book forms, rather than a traditional ‘hard copy’ history. It was anticipated that using a digital medium would allow much less emphasis on printing costs determining the historical facts which could be included but would also allow for the ‘story’ to be ever-ongoing. There should be no need to stop the contributions to the story from flowing in from ex-students and staff.
We trust that our 15 years of archival and document research, as well as interviews with ex-staff and students, reflects Bob Peter’s visions of the significance of a radical, new direction in teacher education, particularly since Mount Lawley Teachers College was built as the first new primary teacher training institution in Australia since World War II.
Glen Phillips, John Renner, Sybe Jongeling