Oral-History:Anthony Gascoigne
About Anthony Gascoigne
Born in East Malvern, Australia, Anthony E. Gascoigne, graduated BE (Hons.) from the University of Melbourne in 1962 and has a Graduate Diploma in Business Administration (Swinburne, 1987). He has more than fifty years professional experience in the design, development, evaluation and proving of electrical and electronics equipment for a range of defense, automotive and Industrial applications. He has held Engineering Management positions in both Australia and Canada (where he lived for several years).
During his youth, Gascogne was a “boy experimenter,” subscriber to Radio and Hobbies, and he played football in the winter and cricket in the summer. After he completed a diploma course at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), he spent one year with the Commonwealth Department of the Army and then enrolled at the University of Melbourne. After graduation, he worked for the Commonwealth and then in Canada for GE Canada and Robbins & Myers before returning to Australia. In 1971, he joined IEEE while working for GE Canada, recalling: where we were using the old AIEE now IEEE standards. I reckoned, after a short time using all these things, that perhaps I ought to get more involved…”
An active IEEE volunteer, in 1983, Gascoigne was a founding member of the IEEE Victorian Section (formed 12 August 1983) as one of the IEEE members signing the petition to organize the Section, formerly the Victorian Sub-section. In the IEEE Victorian Section, he has been the first newsletter editor, Vice-Chair for six years (1985-1990, and Chair for four years (1993, 1994, 2014, and 2015). His volunteer activities also include work for many IEEE conferences, including, Finance Chair, IEEE PES Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Asia Conference (Melbourne, Australia, 2016). In addition, he published “Towards a new paradigm of systems safety with special reference to advanced electrotechnologies,” in the Proceedings of IEEE TENCON ’98 (Region 10 International Conference on Global Connectivity in Energy, Computer, Communication and Control).
About the Interview
ANTHONY GASCOIGNE: An Interview Conducted by John Vardalas, IEEE History Center, 21 October 2013
Interview #646 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
Copyright Statement
This manuscript is being made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the IEEE History Center. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of IEEE History Center.
Request for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the IEEE History Center Oral History Program, IEEE History Center, 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA or ieee-history@ieee.org. It should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Anthony Gascoigne, an oral history conducted in 2013 by John Vardalas, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
Interview
INTERVIEWEE: Anthony Gascoigne
INTERVIEWER: John Vardalas
DATE: 21 October 2013
PLACE: Melbourne, Australia
Vardalas:
It's now October 21st, [2013], Monday. I'm here in Melbourne, Australia, interviewing Anthony Gascoigne. Thank you so much for agreeing to do this oral history,
Gascoigne:
Pleasure.
Vardalas:
Let's start with, at the beginning. Where were you born, where were you raised?
Gascoigne:
Yes, I was born in East Malvern, which is a southeastern suburb of Melbourne. From a very early age, I was interested in things electrical, anything electrical. Of course, radio, telephones or any such things seemed to fascinate me, and I was a boy experimenter from a very early age. At one stage sure, perhaps I was only eight or nine years old, I took an old box Brownie camera case, stuffed full of wires, and pretended that that was my portable radio. Soon after that, I was making crystal sets. I was able to do that with a certain degree of success. A few years later again, I was building my own vacuum tube radios and that continued until I was about twenty.
Vardalas:
Now were you self-taught? How did you learn all these things?
Gascoigne:
There was a national hobby magazine called Radio and Hobbies in Australia, first published in 1939. By the time I was a boy experimenter, it was pretty well-established, and the standard reference for home dabblers and experimenters. So, working from their instructions and the very imperfect treatment of theoretical aspects, you were able to do all sorts of things.
Vardalas:
How did this magazine come into your possession?
Gascoigne:
I discovered this first, I think, by knowing that my cousin was studying to become a radio engineer. I probably found copies in his bedroom when I went to visit. But anyway, shortly thereafter, I got myself on the list of subscribers of the local news agents. It appeared that no one else in the whole district was a subscriber to this magazine, so they always had it for me under the counter. I had to go and ask for it by name under my name.
Vardalas:
Did this interest in all things electrical translate into being a good student in grade school?
Gascoigne:
No, no. I wouldn't say so. I'd say at this stage, there's very little connection between my primary school studies and home experimenting. I would think the scientific base and understanding for what I was doing, apart from reading hobby magazines, had to wait until secondary school where we started to study a little bit of science and gradually some of the theoretical aspects.
Vardalas:
Where did you go to secondary school?
Gascoigne:
The secondary school was a private school called Scotts College, which wasn't very far away from home. That was six years of course, in secondary school.
Vardalas:
How did you find that education?
Gascoigne:
It was, I suppose, fairly sound. Not quite as magnificent as some people would have you believe. The main benefit that I got out of my secondary schooling, I think, was being able to play a bit of sport. The school was a very large one, and there were also always sufficient teams around, having space for someone.
Vardalas:
What was your sport?
Gascoigne:
Football in winter and cricket in summer.
Vardalas:
Oh, very Australian.
Gascoigne:
Very Australian, yes. In the springtime, we had a short athletic season. I was a pretty hopeless athlete, but I always tried extremely hard. It used to distress me when I looked at my classmates and saw how good they were. I was rarely as good, but at least I was good enough to get in some team or other. I used to feel a little bit sorry for some who were even worse than me and couldn't even get into one of our many teams. Vardalas: How did the education in your secondary school education supplement your interest in electricity? Did you start to learn about physics and chemistry and math?
Gascoigne:
Physics and chemistry always fascinated me. I was moderately good at those. Mathematics confused me terribly. I think that was very largely due to the quality of the instruction. I can't take all the blame away from myself because at that stage there didn’t seem to be much sense in what was being taught. There was no obvious linkage between the mathematics we were being taught and what I would later need to know. But of course, in retrospect, you can see that there was, but the teachers didn't seem to be very well-versed in the applied aspects anyway.
Vardalas:
Were there any teachers that influenced you and further helped your development in the technical areas of high school? Your physics teacher?
Gascoigne:
On the contrary, I think most of our physics and chemistry teachers were pretty hopeless in terms of practical things like engineering.
Vardalas:
Really?
Gascoigne:
Yes.
Vardalas:
So, you liked these subjects in spite of them?
Gascoigne:
To some extent, I suppose it was in spite of them, yes.
Vardalas:
How then did you prepare for university? Was there anyone telling you, “If you want to get into university you, better do well in secondary school.”
Gascoigne:
The choice of subjects [and] the course requisites were fairly well-defined, so even without anyone being terribly interested in your career choice, it was pretty obvious that you had to take choice A, as it were, whereas those who were going to study arts or something non-technical, or medicine, would have other choices.
Vardalas:
Which university did you attend?
Gascoigne:
University of Melbourne.
Vardalas:
Was that an obvious choice for you?
Gascoigne:
It was the only university operating in the city when I was due to go to university. As late as 1961, it was the only choice available for engineering courses. We already had the second university in the state of Victoria, which was Monash. At that stage, they didn't have their engineering program fully operational, so there was no chance of doing the electrical course that I needed.
Well, I had already done a diploma course at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), which is now a university too, before going to Melbourne. I first did a diploma in electrical engineering at RMIT, and that qualified you for a two-year exemption at the University of Melbourne. I then joined the university course midstream.
Vardalas:
RMIT, and then you transferred to Melbourne.
Gascoigne:
No, I actually worked for a year in between. This work was part of my engineering cadetship. I had been, in my second year at RMIT, recruited by the Commonwealth Department of the Army to a Commonwealth government department, which was obviously concerned with the development and testing of military equipment. They were quite pleased with my efforts at RMIT, as a cadet engineer. At that stage, they asked me to work for a year in between the diploma course and the degree course.
Vardalas:
Was this part of the training to have a practical year?
Gascoigne:
Oh, no. It was very useful actually to have a year's experience.
Vardalas:
Oh, okay, but it wasn't required?
Gascoigne:
[It] wasn't required by university, but it set me apart from those who had no practice.
Vardalas:
What do you recall of the quality and variety of the electrical engineering training at [the University of] Melbourne?
Gascoigne:
I think in worldwide terms, it was well above average. It was recognized such that later when I wanted to go to Canada, the Canadian engineering institutions had no quibble about University of Melbourne. In fact, I was surprised how little argument I had having a Melbourne degree. Part of that might be brand recognition in that Melbourne is a fairly old university. It was founded in the 1850s. It certainly helped that it had been on people's list overseas for a long time.
Vardalas:
How did you fare?
Gascoigne:
I graduated with a very undistinguished honours degree, Second Class Honours.
Vardalas:
Thinking back, do you think that your university education prepared you for what you would encounter when you went out in the workforce in engineering?
Gascoigne:
Those two separate qualifications, RMIT plus University of Melbourne, combined very well. RMIT was renowned for being much more practical than a university course at that stage. The two, in combination, put me in very good stead with Australian employers, including my existing employer.
Vardalas:
Had you already decided what area of electrical engineering you wanted to specialize in at this point?
Gascoigne:
No, that was up to me entirely, but I was required to work with the Commonwealth government under a bonded cadetship scheme. The terms of this cadetship were that you would work for a certain time for the Commonwealth government department that had recruited you, which was the Department of the Army, so for four years after graduation, I was bonded. Actually, the formal bond was with my father because at the time I was a legal minor, and that was the case with most candidates.
Vardalas:
Tell me more about this cadetship.
Gascoigne:
It was a distinctive Australian initiative, I think. Things vaguely like it were found overseas. Very many of our Commonwealth government and our state government departments found that the best way to recruit professional people was to go to universities and technical colleges separately and look at people after they had passed their first year. [They would] interview them, if they thought they were worth interviewing, select what they considered to be promising candidates, and sign them on as cadet engineers on the basis that they, or their fathers on their behalf, had a formal agreement with the department. They would continue their studies and on completion of their studies, they would work for a certain time with that department.
Vardalas:
What did they give you in return? It sounds like it's bondage, but without any…
Gascoigne:
Oh, no, no. The return was that as a cadet engineer, you immediately started receiving a salary, and as soon as you graduated, you then became a professional engineer grade whatever it was, grade one. Then you received a higher salary. So, having graduated the first time from RMIT, at University of Melbourne I was a comparatively well-off student because I was receiving a professional engineering salary.
Vardalas:
Is that system still in place today in Australia?
Gascoigne:
No, it's not. They've stopped doing that. They found it too hard to keep up with the times. I think many other things have also changed. The old technical college system that we once had was quite a binary technical educational system in Victoria, you see.
Vardalas:
In what way?
Gascoigne:
Technical education and university education. That difference has disappeared, and now we just have universities.
Vardalas:
The two functions have merged into one institution.
Gascoigne:
The old technical colleges have almost all gone highfaluting and become universities, so that part of it has disappeared and the Commonwealth departments and state departments themselves have decided that it's no longer the most effective way to recruit professionals. There has also been quite a dumbing-down in many of our public institutions. Whereas before they were very much engineering institutions, these days many of the top executives are not engineers and they wouldn't know anything about engineering.
Vardalas:
But it was different in those days?
Gascoigne:
In the old days, it was traditional for engineers to find their way up to quite high levels of supervision [and] management, and even the top executive was very often an engineer, more often than not.
Vardalas:
Why do think that's changed? The engineering students aren't up to the task, or their education isn't up to the task?
Gascoigne:
Oh, no. We have waves of trendiness in some of these departmental organizations, and for various reasons, people have decided that engineers ought to be pushed aside in favor of those with business qualifications or accounting qualifications or whatever. It's part of our general industrial development, rather than just engineering.
Vardalas:
When I've interviewed engineers, there are some who say I want no part of management, I just want to work on the bench, leave me alone. And there are others, you know, who are not prepared to move up.
Gascoigne:
Yes, yes. It's still the case. But just the same, I think there was something of an anti-engineering movement, not explicit, but effectively.
Vardalas:
Before moving on let’s talk about your parents. You mentioned to me that your father’s background was not technical at all.
Gascoigne:
He had an accounting background. He was born in the country, actually, in Bonella, which is a sizeable city to the northeast of Melbourne. He came down to Melbourne as a young man, about late twenties. He got accounting jobs here. That took him up to World War II when he enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force. He spent three years overseas in Britain, flying in bomber command.
Vardalas:
Oh, he was a bomber.
Gascoigne:
No, flying boats. He was doing coastal patrol work in a Sunderland, [the Royal Air Force’s] flying boat, actually as a navigator. Then he came back on a short stint of leave, and then they sent him up to Papua, New Guinea as an airman in the last stages of the Pacific war. After the war, he was able to come back to his old company. They gave him quite a senior job with a listed investment company, which was associated with one of the stock brokering firms. Thereafter he was a financial manager, until his retirement many years later.
Vardalas:
Being a navigator, that's pretty technical stuff. I mean he—
Gascoigne:
He was decorated for valor, so we're very proud of that. Not many navigators get awards,
Vardalas:
Did he encourage you to go into your technical pursuits?
Gascoigne:
He was very supportive. I think that he often bemoaned his own lack of technical knowledge. But he would love to have been able understand some of this engineering stuff himself.
Vardalas:
Oh, I see. So, he was supportive of you going on to engineering.
Gascoigne:
Yes.
Vardalas:
Let's jump ahead now to your four years, when you get out from Melbourne University.
Gascoigne:
Actually, it was more than four years that I continued to work with this department. During that stage, I had moved up the ladder a couple of rungs, so I became an engineer class three, or senior engineer, at about age twenty-seven.
Vardalas:
What kind of work you did do in that department?
Gascoigne:
At the end of the 1960s, I decided I had enough of the Commonwealth government service, I had itchy feet, as many Australian people do, and [I] decided to immigrate to Canada.
Vardalas:
Let's go back to the Commonwealth service for a moment. Do you remember what kind of work you did in the Commonwealth service? What was the nature of the engineering you did for them?
Gascoigne:
It was equipment design, testing, and evaluation, but some of it was fairly original. I was able to contribute some pretty original stuff. Now, it involved both electronics and electrical power. The power stuff was fairly small, by power system standards, mainly to do with transportable generator sets and vehicle generators. The electronics side was very varied, and one of their equipment I worked on was to do with the proof testing of high explosive shells. They wanted something that could test quite precisely the timing device which was built into the projectile of these armaments.
Vardalas:
Fuses?
Gascoigne:
Time-delay fuses. They want to test them by firing, and they want to know that when they set it to so many seconds delay, that it actually did go off in so many seconds. This was the so-called timer stop, first time.
Vardalas:
And so that was about four years of service in the Commonwealth?
Gascoigne:
No, it was a total of twelve years, counting my cadetship, but as a fully-fledged engineer, I suppose it was eight years.
Vardalas:
Any other memories of those eight years?
Gascoigne:
I was a very energetic youngster, busy breaking all sorts of organizational rules, and taking shortcuts. Again, I was very fortunate in that my bosses, although unremarkable in many respects, were very supportive, even when I did quite silly things, and took shortcuts, which upset all sorts of people in the organization. I got occasional raps on the hand, and kicks in the pants, but not nearly as severely as I may have been treated by other people.
Vardalas:
It was then a good learning opportunity for you?
Gascoigne:
Oh, very good, yes. Excellent.
Vardalas:
Was there good mentoring going on?
Gascoigne:
Yes. Yes, I was encouraged rather than retarded in my enthusiasm. When I would say to someone, I think I've got an idea, they'd say well go and show us. Other people in my same department, the same section even, would be told “Oh, I don't know whether you can do that.” Their bosses were quite different.
Vardalas:
So, you were fortunate.
Gascoigne:
Extremely fortunate.
Vardalas:
You said you got itchy feet.
Gascoigne:
Yes, as I got into my late twenties, I said to myself “I can't stay here forever.” And I was a little bit jealous actually about some of my colleagues who had been sent overseas on assignment with the department. I really missed out on that sort of dispatch. I said “oh, well if I'm not going to be sent, I'll have to send myself.”
Vardalas:
Where did you go?
Gascoigne:
To Canada. To Ontario, Canada.
Vardalas:
What did you do when you went there?
Gascoigne:
First, I went to GE Canada. There I was concerned with very large rotating machines. Whereas in the Department of the Army, I was talking about kilowatts and tens of kilowatts, here we're talking about thousands of kilowatts, up to about 20 or 30,000. I was a design engineer there for a little over a year. That taught me all the things that I would've loved to have known when I was trying to design things back in Malvern, Victoria.
Vardalas:
Was this for power stations?
Gascoigne:
No, not power stations; mainly industrial equipment, large motors driving log chippers, bull mills, autogenous mills [and] compressors in basic industry, just like pulp and paper, oil, and gas
Vardalas:
You stayed there for three or four years with GE Canada.
Gascoigne:
Three years.
Vardalas:
Three years. Then you got itchy feet again?
Gascoigne:
I had a second job, and that was with a much smaller company, dealing with much smaller motors. There I was actually a manager of engineering, so I was running my own department.
Vardalas:
Which company was that?
Gascoigne:
Robbins & Myers company of Canada, which was an offshoot of a fairly middle-size American company.
Vardalas:
What was it like managing people?
Gascoigne:
Oh, well, I had to smarten up a lot there, of course. I remember when I told my father by telephone. He said, "But you don't know anything about management. You'll have to do a course." I was quite put out, actually, but I think in retrospect he was quite right.
Vardalas:
So, what happened? Did you learn on the job?
Gascoigne:
It was on-the-job learning for me. Later on, I did do the formal studies in management, but it was quite a bit later on.
Vardalas:
What products did Robbins produce?
Gascoigne:
Electric motors, quite small sizes of things that you pick up in your hand and all the way up to about 400 horsepower. One of the smallest products we developed was the motor for the IBM Selectric typewriter. We were one of the major suppliers of the, the drive motor for Selectrics built in Canada.
Vardalas:
Then you returned back to Australia?
Gascoigne:
Yes.
Vardalas:
What brought you back?
Gascoigne:
Oh, I think it was just homesickness, which was possibly premature. I often wonder whether I should've stayed longer in Canada.
Vardalas:
What kind of work did you come back to?
Gascoigne:
The first job when I came back was dealing with automotive electrics. So, something rather different again, although there were rotating machines there, in the form of starter motors and alternators.
Vardalas:
Was there any R&D (research and development)?
Gascoigne:
I was still heavily involved with R&D.
Vardalas:
What would the R&D for small automotive motors be?
Gascoigne:
Well, starter motors. Another example, something we developed very early on after I joined the company was a new type of windscreen wiper. One of the fashionable things in those days was to have a depressed parking windscreen wiper. The jazzy way to style the front windscreen of vehicles in the late 1960s and 1970s was to have a very large, very tall windscreen. And of course, it was difficult to have windscreen wipers sweeping the field of view and also park out of the way because the windscreen was so big.
The General Motors subsidiary that developed these things, I forget the name for the moment, had developed a windscreen wiper that when you turned it off, it stopped wiping. Then there was a separate motion to park it down, hidden under the edge of the hood. For styling reasons, we reckoned that we could do better. Of course, we didn't want to infringe patents anyway, so I led a small team that developed such a thing.
Vardalas:
What did it do that was different?
Gascoigne:
It had a little mechanism which was engaged by a solenoid inside the windscreen wiper, and it changed the mechanism such that instead of moving forward, it moved backwards. It parked first to the bottom of the stroke, but still well in the field of view, so then this separate motion pushed it right down. We took a patent on that.
Vardalas:
Oh, who would think? How long did you stay then?
Gascoigne:
Two years. They're no longer in existence. They were an English firm. They were having trouble then from a commercial point of view, and since then I think they've packed up completely, in terms of these products. I think they might still have some presence in other product areas.
Vardalas:
What was your next [move]?
Gascoigne:
Then I went into academia. I was a lecturer at Swinburne University, as it now styles itself, for a bit over four years
Vardalas:
How did you find that in contrast to being a working engineer?
Gascoigne:
Quite good. I'm quite interested in the pedagogical side of things. I'm not so keen on the organizational side of university life. It was a bit slow and dull, from the point of view of someone who had been in a fairly lively series of industries. After four years, I got a bit tired of that, and decided to go out on my own as a consultant
Vardalas:
In what year did you join the university?
Gascoigne:
I joined Swinburne in 1975 and left part way through 1979. From the 1980s on, I've been a consulting engineer. From the mid-1990s, 1997, actually, I've also been CEO of my own small electronics design, development, and manufacturing firm.
Vardalas:
What kind of products does your firm make?
Gascoigne:
Oh, quite a range of products. I'll give you an example. I've got photos to show you in a moment.
Vardalas:
When did you first become an IEEE member?
Gascoigne:
It was in 1971, when I was still in Canada. The impetus was my employment at GE Canada, where we were using the old AIEE now IEEE standards. I reckoned, after a short time using all these things, that perhaps I ought to get more involved with this IEEE thing.
Vardalas:
Before that, had you ever joined any engineering associations?
Gascoigne:
Yes. At RMIT, during my first engineering course, one of our lecturers got up one day, one lunchtime, actually, and said now all of you people should consider joining a professional organization. The lecturer [said], I for instance, am a member of the Institution of Engineers of Australia. He gave us a bit of a sales pitch, and it sounded okay to me, so I joined the Institution of Engineers as a student member. Thereafter I've been a member; a student member for several years and then a corporate member since shortly after I graduated from university. I’ve continued that membership ever since. In 1971, while in Canada, I joined IEEE and continued my membership ever since.
Vardalas:
When did you encounter IEEE when you returned to Australia?
Gascoigne:
There was already a single IEEE Section set up in Australia, in 1972 actually, just before I returned. The very first IEEE Section set up in Australia. That Section went about producing a certain degree of publicity material for members in Australia. The whole of Australia was thereafter a member of this single Section based in Sydney. Of course, the early communication of those days was via mail. Shortly after it was formed in 1972, we started to receive occasional copies of the newsletter called “Circuit.” I remember getting this publication, “Circuit,” during the 1970s.
I noticed, very early on, that they were talking about setting up a subsection in Victoria, and shortly thereafter again, a petition arrived, which I duly signed. That was in 1981. We were assured that this petition had gone to IEEE headquarters, that it had been approved, that everything was going to happen, and that, very shortly, an inaugural meeting of the new subsection would take place. That did not happen. There was a stunning silence concerning the Victoria Subsection for several years thereafter. I myself don’t know why, but for some reason the people who had agreed to drive the new subsection here in Victoria, despite careful preparations and very careful planning, had suddenly withdrawn or lost their interest or whatever.
For five years, that condition of limbo existed, but finally, in 1981, we had a Melbourne-born person who had been working in Sydney return to Melbourne. He had been involved in the Section committee in Sydney. He knew all about this attempt to set up a Victorian Subsection. He had promised the office bearers, at the time he left to come back to Melbourne, that he would see what he could do about getting this going again. His name was Brian Love, and he, as it turns out, was an outstanding person for the task. I think very highly of him as I think all his colleagues at that time did. His efforts involved very careful planning, very astute contact with people, locally, and his management of people and their recruitment. Step by step, we proceeded to revisit the old efforts to find out what went wrong, retrace the steps and do everything properly this time.
Vardalas:
How were you drawn into this?
Gascoigne:
I was drawn into this by a strange telephone call I got one morning from Brian Love. He got my name from the local engineering institution who knew me from my involvement with that institution. He had decided that he wanted such people on his committee so that there was no conflict with the Institution of Engineers of Australia.
Vardalas:
Can you elaborate on that, about “no conflict with” [the Institution of Engineers of Australia].
Gascoigne:
Yes. He was pretty astute, and he knew very well that what he was going to do could've been construed by the Institution of Engineers as a threat to their existence. So, he wanted someone who was involved with them as well with IEEE.
Vardalas:
Why would they have perceived it as a threat?
Gascoigne:
Both of us were nominally interested in exactly the same thing. That's the promotion and the advancement of theory and practice of electrical, electronics, communications, and computer engineering. It so happens that IEEE has many more specialties in all these fields, but nominally the Institution of Engineers was always involved in many of these areas.
Vardalas:
How was the relationship between them worked out?
Gascoigne:
Well, for the first couple of years, it was just an uneasy competitive environment. We were just catering for a certain degree of market appeal. Our people knew very well that we handled the electronics side of things very well, and only too glad to have IEEE here, but we had other competitors in the Institution of Radio and Electronics Engineers. This continued for the first couple of years, but at that stage, we, as the IEEE Victorian Subsection, took an initiative to invite these people to confer and to consider whether we could have some sort of gentlemen's agreement as to whether we could have a certain degree of cooperation. That actually struck quite a chord of sympathy with the other parties, and we did agree that to some extent we should try and collaborate and have a partly common program.
Vardalas:
When did it become a Section?
Gascoigne:
It continued as a Subsection for the first couple of years. We were very keen to have everything under our own control because Sydney is quite a long way away. At that stage, we didn't have any email, and we didn’t have any cellphones, so you can imagine that just because of imperfect communications, it was often hard to see eye-to-eye with everything the parent section was doing or what they were saying to us. We were in the situation of impatient teenagers. I suppose that we wanted to do everything ourselves, rather than be told what to do.
Vardalas:
How did Sydney feel about this?
Gascoigne:
I think that they were probably mature enough to know that it was inevitable. Anyway, we announced that we considered ourselves capable of running our own Section and that we intended to petition for that purpose. Of course, we needed to get certain support from our local membership. They were quite accepting of that.
Vardalas:
They were?
Gascoigne:
Oh, quite [supportive], yes, and from then on, they saw it was inevitable. In fact, I think they were fairly impressed with the way that we handled our own affairs for the first couple of years.
Vardalas:
Who was the first Chair of the Section?
Gascoigne:
Brian Love was the Founding Chair. He continued from the Subsection into chairing the Section for another eighteen months, I guess.
Vardalas:
What do you recall were the Section’s challenges in the first four or five years? Do you recall those issues?
Gascoigne:
Oh, yes. All sorts of quite ambitious things we did. This inter-society collaboration that I mentioned, we gave it the name EEEVIC, Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Victoria, Triple E VIC. Another initiative was a “women in engineering symposium” on a technical subject held in 1993
Vardalas:
That's fairly early.
Gascoigne:
It was very early, and some of my female colleagues don’t like hearing this now, but it was ten years before WIE Global [IEEE Women in Engineering] set up, so we were quite pioneers here.
Vardalas:
What prompted this initiative?
Gascoigne:
For reasons that I can't explain in detail, a women in engineering initiative emerged in the Institution of Engineers Sydney division. That's a colleague organization. We heard news of that and got some information about that in our Institution magazine. It was quite obvious that the local women probably had some similar idea in mind. So, we invited expressions of interest locally for a local activity which would be not only be the networking idea that they had in Sydney but would also have fully-fledged technical meeting. We invited local females who were employed in various places to express interest, and we got plenty of interest. At that stage, we set up an organizing committee which, a full twelve months later, managed to bring off quite a successful symposium, a one-day symposium.
Vardalas:
Was there any pushback or resistance from your male colleagues, saying why spend this energy?
Gascoigne:
No, but there was a great deal of head scratching and wonderment. And some of them, seeing this group of women, were wondering, you know, what on earth's going on in there?
Vardalas:
In addition to EEEIVI and the women in engineering symposium, what else was accomplished in those early years?
Gascoigne:
Well, certainly the end of that decade, it had only been running ten years, and we decided that we were due for an [IEEE] Region 10 Technical Conference, which was quite a major conference in the Asia Pacific Region. TENCON, we call it. We bid successfully for that conference, and it was the first in Australia. Even though the Sydney people had been going many years more than we us, we were years ahead of them in getting our major conference here.
Vardalas:
Was it difficult to swing it, to get that conference there?
Gascoigne:
Not to swing it, but to bring it off [laughter]. We survived. We didn’t make much money, but we made a small surplus.
Vardalas:
Did you have a challenge in getting members to join and…
Gascoigne:
The pattern early on, our membership growth was very encouraging. Going back to the very first inaugural general meeting of IEEE members in Victoria, we were overwhelmed with support. We had 114 people attend this special general meeting, when the membership in Victoria was probably 300 or so. That was a pretty fair turnout for our general meeting, and it shows a lot of people just said this is something we've got to get going.
Vardalas:
What is the composition of the membership; was it academic or industrial? How did it change over time?
Gascoigne:
It was a mix. We’ve always had a heavy involvement by the academic sphere. But at that stage, we had a quite a lot from outside academia, particularly from our major telecom supplier, which was called Telecom Australia. At that stage, they had a very large research lab. Actually, they were one of the mainstays of our committee and our organization in the early days. We also had a state-run electricity commission, electricity supply which was exclusively public-owned, and once again, many engineers there were IEEE members
Gascoigne:
It' has always been easy to promote the idea that we've got very many more specialties covered, as specialties, in IEEE, than almost anyone else. IEEE was far ahead in the depths and the breadth of specialty, so that has always appealed to quite a range of prospective members. The membership went up very steeply in the first years, but since then, the growth has been pretty modest.
Vardalas:
I see that you are running for Section Chair again. You have a list of issues that you state are important and that have to be faced.
Gascoigne:
[Laughter] Ah, yes.
Vardalas:
Have these issues always been in existence, or have they manifested themselves recently? Allow me to elaborate on them for the record and then you can comment on them. First, “we have minimal engagement with the local industry, and very few active members from that sector. The imbalance is not only undesirable, but also completely unnecessary.” That's the first one. The second one you state “we must better serve our regional non-metropolitan membership, which at the moment is treated as something of an underclass. Number three is “as a learned society, we need new approaches to whole of career professional development” for which “we would develop/structure programs to achieve these objectives.” The fourth one is “we need a new sense of purpose in our involvement in IEEE affairs in Australia and more generally in Region 10.” The fifth issue that you point out is “the business and administrative systems of our Section are in continual need of renewal and updating.” I'm sure all those are very clear in your mind. You remember them all.
Gascoigne:
Yes.
Vardalas:
Can you start on the first one, “We have minimal engagement with local industry, and very few active members from that sector.” Is that a recent trend?
Gascoigne:
A progressive change, over many years. Now part of that has been due to the quite significant change in the structure of many of our large utilities. Public utilities were publicly run utilities, but almost all privately-owned. The distribution of professional engineering within those utilities has gradually changed over the years, so to some extent it has gotten less, and therefore, we have fewer numbers of prospective members. The academic bias has probably increased over the years because of the changes in various industries.
Vardalas:
All right. How does that change the complexion of what the organization is? Is it for the better, or for the worse?
Gascoigne:
It depends on your point of view. Of course, the academics are very happy to just have themselves, but I think it's for the worse. The whole purpose of a learned institution is to have somebody who's at the sharp end of applications as well as at the ivory tower end of theory and development. Many of the industries I have in mind would have people who naturally get involved, probably because of hierarchical influence, that you'd have senior people involved. Whether they said so explicitly or not, it was just assumed that other people would at least show some interest in and perhaps attend meetings, or at least know all about what was going on in the various learned societies. That has changed to a large extent. We've lost that sort of appeal, and that sort of influence from inside industry.
Vardalas:
Does that follow because of what you pointed out earlier? There are less and less engineers in management now.
Gascoigne:
The turmoil of reorganization, and the politics behind this reorganization, has driven much of that change.
Vardalas:
The second issue is about better serve the regional, non-metropolitan membership.
Gascoigne:
Yes.
Vardalas:
You use the word “underclass” which is an interesting term. What do you mean by that?
Gascoigne:
We have for many years operated as if we're the Melbourne Section of the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Of course, our territory is the whole of the state of Victoria and Tasmania, two Australian states.
Vardalas:
I see. And has this surfaced because the engineers from these areas complain that they’re not getting…
Gascoigne:
No, they haven't. I'm complaining on their behalf, and in fact to some extent, people have a right to say well show us the influence of non-metropolitan engineers, and we'll take some notice. To some extent I'm saying that where we don’t have members, we should be strategically interested in creating membership, outside the metropolitan area, so, we shouldn't be sitting on our tails waiting for a reactive response. We should, to some extent, be proactive. Of course, Melbourne has grown as a population center in relation to Victoria and continues to do so. Urbanization, as they call it, is continuing in Australia everywhere, and the way we're going, two-thirds of the population will be living in Melbourne, maybe more. But that doesn't mean that we can reasonably neglect the engineering taking place outside Melbourne, and even existing IEEE members outside Melbourne
Vardalas:
I see. So, that's only a consequence of the fact that over the years the Melbourne component to the Victoria Section has grown, too. It's always been centered around Melbourne. Now you also speak about a “whole of career professional development” What do you mean by this term?
Gascoigne:
Yes. Our friendly competitor, the Institution of Engineers Australia, some years ago, introduced what they call continuing professional development, as a structured program. They now require whole of career and professional development. I believe very strongly that professionals these days, if not always, should be quite interested in having some sort of determination to keep up to date with their own specialty and their own interest. And also, to continue some sort of structured learning, whether it's their own field or not, for as long as their cognitive integrity allows. This has already got as far as structured programs within the Institution of Engineers Australia. They now make it mandatory for their members to have so many hours of approved learning or inquiry, every year. It's subject to audit, so they have to be able to certify that they've done this or done that, and this or that can be as heavy as writing papers or as informal as just attending technical meetings.
Vardalas:
Now you said outside your own area, in other areas, learning - -.
Gascoigne:
Well, that’s my opinion.
Vardalas:
That's your opinion, right.
Gascoigne:
Yes.
Vardalas:
But the institute doesn't run it that way, does it?
Gascoigne:
CPD, I think, is only concerned with technical areas.
Vardalas:
How do they enforce this?
Gascoigne:
It's an honor system, and they have an audit to which I was subjected the last year or the year before, as a member. It's an honor system that you certify that you've done this and that.
Vardalas:
What is the penalty for not doing this?
Gascoigne:
Oh, then you're no longer eligible to call yourself CP Eng., which means chartered engineer.
Vardalas:
Does lack of CP Eng. limit one’s job choices?
Gascoigne:
Depends on the job. It may. It may.
Vardalas:
You'd like to see something like that implemented in the Victoria Section?
Gascoigne:
I don't have anything in mind as a structured program. I think that perhaps IES [unclear acronym] shoots themselves in the foot a little bit by the way they run their program. They have gotten so heavy and so institutionalized with it that I’m not sure that people are doing what they really need to do.
What I have in mind is just trying to engender some sort of serious interest of organizing committees at the section level and in the general membership of ongoing education, if you want to call it that; but ongoing learning.
Vardalas:
Yes, because you don’t have the carrot of the CP. You don't have that carrot to offer.
Gascoigne:
Yes, we don't have that carrot.
Vardalas:
So, you have to find something.
Gascoigne:
That's right. But on the other hand, you see, some of our lecture series, and some of our programs have had appeal only on a technical basis in the past. What we'd like people to understand is that this sort of thing oughtn't just to be left to impulse. It ought to be something that you do on a considered basis.
Vardalas:
In Australia, how are the, the non-technical aspects of a person's profession handled? Like salaries, benefits, and all these other things that go with being an engineer, who is the spokesperson? What organization? Are there any organizations that deal with these kinds of issues in Australia?
Gascoigne:
We have a professional trade union-type of organization, which is not one that runs technical meetings. The Institution of Engineers doesn't directly get involved in salary and wage negotiations. There's an association that does lobby for and on behalf of engineers, the Association of Professional Engineers. They used to be known as just that, but now they have joined with architects, managers, and some others.
Vardalas:
The other thing you pointed out was we need a more of a sense of purpose in our involvement in IEEE affairs in Australia and more generally in Region 10. Is this a recent issue or one that has been around?
Gascoigne:
It is part of an evolution. What I'm trying to say is that we have now evolved into being a fairly mature IEEE entity, but many of our plans and many of our strategies and programs don't reflect that maturity. The idea of us actually becoming more self-conscious as leaders in Region10 perhaps doesn't enter anyone's thinking just because we've been going longer than many of the Sections which we find in our Region and because we've got resources which are not sneezed at. We in Sydney, of course, are by far the most senior in terms of years of operation, but there's always been Sydney-Melbourne rivalry, so you can interpret this in those terms if you like. We consider ourselves to be a cut above them in terms of our ability to take on something original.
Vardalas:
How do you feel about the changing role of other Sections in Region 10, like China? What do you think that's going to do to Australia’s leadership role in Region 10?
Gascoigne:
Inevitably, they're going to play a larger and larger role in the IEEE membership in Region 10. No doubt about that. Now as to whether they are yet emerging as leaders in our profession, I think that is so far lying in the future, to a large extent. For instance, India, which has got quite a large IEEE membership, still relies very heavily on student memberships.
Vardalas:
Is that right?
Gascoigne:
They have quite an imbalance. They're so heavily loaded with students. The fully fledged corporate members are a minority. It's not the way IEEE envisaged operating, and it doesn't happen in any other Region 10 country. I'm not disparaging India for the very rapid development they are making in their industry and so on. I'm saying that so far, they haven't emerged as fully fledged leaders in IEEE, in the sense that people like Singapore and Hong Kong
Vardalas:
Is it easy to retain those student members and make them professional members when they graduate?
Gascoigne:
Retention is always a worry, of course. After graduation, the retention rates plunge.
Vardalas:
That seems to be a worldwide problem.
Gascoigne:
It's a worldwide problem and it's a historical problem. Even before IEEE, I'm quite sure IRE and AIEE had the same problem.
Vardalas:
I would like to share your general view on the development of the engineering profession in Australia, over the years. What is the Australian society's view of engineers? Do you have views on this matter?
Gascoigne:
Yes. I'm not sure that we're bounding ahead in terms of public acclaim. I think to some extent, we're slipping. One of our troubles is that it was widely known in the past that many of these public authorities that I've mentioned several times, institutional authorities, had engineers at the top or near the top. A certain proportion of professional engineers would take on management and be quite successful at it and rise up sometimes, right to the very top. That was widely known, so the fact that the chairman of XYZ board was also a professional engineer, would be no secret. These days it's much less common for that to happen, and where it does happen, it probably isn't nearly as visible. To some extent I think we're losing ground there. Although as I often say to my colleagues when we discuss this, many of these things go in cycles over a long period, and where we’ve now bottomed out. This disappearance of engineers from public jobs, I don't know, it's conceivable that it might recycle in the future.
Vardalas:
Do you care to speculate as to how this leadership role was lost? Why have engineers fallen from these positions?
Gascoigne:
Yes. I think it's part of the turmoil of organizational change, which is driven by political change. For instance, the saying got around that governments don’t run utilities. After more than a century of successful operation of all sorts of public enterprise, it suddenly became politically correct that governments don’t have government railways or electricity authorities or telecom providers. This took a very strong hold, and little by little, many of these old authorities have been privatized. In the process, which has been quite a disruptive business process of floating what was previously 100 percent government owned into part private owned and then fully private owned with progressive shareholder acceptance, which has been quite a tumultuous thing. Financial markets have been affected, and politics have been active all the time. Iin that process, some of these other things have been byproducts.
Vardalas:
Could engineering education have changed, or is that not the issue here, how engineers are trained?
Gascoigne:
It's part of the issue because the more we have academics who have never seen anything of industry, then the more likely we have a self-perpetuating situation where academics are only interested in their own internal work, and not interested in what's going on in the outside world.
Vardalas:
The management, you mean.
Gascoigne:
That generalization needs to be retracted to some extent. Obviously, there are exceptions.
Vardalas:
Have the number of young people going into engineering in Australia risen, decreased, or stayed pretty steady? Is there a challenge to get young people into engineering in Australia? In the United States, they complain that we're not getting enough engineers, young people into engineering.
Gascoigne:
You say you're short of engineers?
Vardalas:
Yes, we're not getting enough.
Gascoigne:
Yes, there are great arguments here as to who's got the best analysis. Some people say we're short; others say you're not short of engineers. But of course, it depends very much on your method of analysis and the timeframe in which you're speaking. I think that we're probably not oversupplied. But perhaps we don't identify real areas of need as well as we might.
Vardalas:
To conclude this interview, you are currently to be Chair in—
Gascoigne:
Yes.
Vardalas:
Yes, so when does the election take place?
Gascoigne:
It's taking place now.
Vardalas:
Oh.
Gascoigne:
It's in progress.
Vardalas:
Oh, so very exciting to see what happens.
Gascoigne:
So that’s why I look so miserable today. The outcome won't be known until early next month.
Vardalas:
I wish you all the best, and Tony, thank you so much for agreeing to this oral history. Is there anything else that you would like to mention about engineering, [and the] electrical engineering profession Australia, that we haven't touched, that's of personal interest to you?
Gascoigne:
I think we have spoken about quite a few things, and there are lots of things I can talk on and about, but it's not necessarily constructive. Perhaps I can just summarize by saying I've been extremely fortunate in my career several times over. One is my very first area of employment, my first period of employment, with the Commonwealth government. It was a most un-government like experience, by comparison with so many other people. I had the opportunity there that a lot of people were denied, and the encouragement and the opportunity there to really form views and opinions which very often would not have been formed
Vardalas:
On that note then, thank you so much for agreeing to do this oral history.
