The Past
Delys Sargeant AM (née Ludemann)
BSc (Hons), MEd (La Trobe)
My early experience of being a student of science as a boarder at Perth College (secondary school) was interfered with in March 1942 when Japanese bombers were seen over Geraldton and we were all evacuated back home (in my case, to a farm at Wattening, North of Toodyay in the Wheatbelt). Being thrust into WA Education Department correspondence classes I found they did not include Biology – which fascinated me - Foreign languages or Chemistry. I “taught myself ” Intermediate (Junior) Biology and successfully obtained a Junior certificate, which enabled me to enrol at Northam High School. We were entranced by the scientific passion of Vincent Serventy who certainly made biology and geology lively sciences and who created in me, a lifelong love of the science of LIFE!
Although being really unqualified to enter science, the flexible procedures of enrolment at UWA in the post war years enabled me to switch over to science from arts after passing the science German test and showing good results in biology and psychology, to proceed to a co-major in Psychology and Zoology. I was a farm girl with no family experience of tertiary study and no great goals to be a scientist: it was all a bit amazing to even be at the university! Harry Waring, the new Professor of Zoology galvanized the whole field from looking at specimens, to understanding living biological systems. Comparative Zoology became an enthralling and enticing area of study. Concurrently we were privileged to be taught by another new comer to UWA, who also brought completely different views… on the understanding of contemporary Psychology. Dr Elwyn Morey challenged the theories being argued for the science of psychology and opened up new procedures for us to test. We practised on ourselves and staff volunteers, and I decided I had not had enough life experience to become a clinical psychologist, and elected to do my honours in zoology. I have not ever regretted that decision which altered my scientific life, my occupation and later life development. But I found those foundation learnings in human behaviour and early methods of behaviour and “talking” therapies absolutely invaluable throughout my professional career.
The Western Australian liberal scientific thinking and open discussions across faculties and with CSIRO was a valuable education and preparation for my entry in 1950 into being a Senior Demonstrator in the Department of Physiology of the Medical Faculty at Melbourne University. Here I came in direct contact with some wonderful scientific minds. I did not continue with bench-based research from 1956, as it did not combine well with child bearing, certainly at that time. I decided to throw myself into tertiary teaching and research different methods of teaching about human and social biology. This DID combine with my life as a mother and as a wife in those somewhat less female focussed societies. With my longest scientific thinking colleague, Dr Lena Thomas, I fully developed the integration of science in a “CP Snow” type of subject, Social Biology, an extraordinarily well valued course which ran for nearly 40 years at Melbourne University.
In 1973 the University of Melbourne received funding from the ARC for me to develop an innovation in continuing education and for the next 21 years I directed the remarkably successful (AND influential) Social Biology Resources Centre. Several thousand professionals attended in-service courses each year where basic principles of biology, sociology and psychology were explored to elucidate complex practices in the field…in health, in education and in rehabilitative practices.
Since my retirement in 1992 I basically continue to be an advocate. I spend much time in public speaking about memory changes and its strategic management in healthy older ageing and in using my basic biological understandings to assess and propose policies pertaining to the well being of older people. My life work of enabling people to understand their own selves, behaviour and life meaning has been strongly based on those early and good beginnings of scientific mentoring and encouragement, by people who curious, and were passionate about and sharing of their understandings.