ABSTRACT
In the golden 1960s, the world was one’s oyster. Where next to head when the PhD was wrapped up? Africa? Makerere (now Uganda) still was highly regarded, and Unity’s legacy was a lust for African adventures; or maybe Canada, or the United States? I never even thought of New Zealand until I chanced upon an ad for the University of Otago deep down in remote South Island – but in fact it was New Zealand’s best, and is still a world ranker. Interviews were held in the High Commission offices in London, a city with which after a year there I was fairly familiar. I took the unusual (in those days) step of checking up on the Head of Department’s credentials, research interests and publications (before Google, there was a very useful printed compendium, published annually). I soon found myself interviewing him, always a profitable move. The position was offered, Judy and I celebrated with apple crumble and custard at the local pub, for which it then was famous – we always resorted to the East End for this sweet, whenever rejoicing or seeking solace – and I went into top gear writing up my thesis. My supervisor and Head of Department, a nice, busy and vague gentleman of the old Cambridge school, knew little and frankly cared even less about what I had been doing, as long as I kept out from under his feet – how very different from today’s graduate supervision which manages every stage of the student’s progress, often, I fear, stultifying initiative. After checking some recently successful Sheffield theses for format, I asked the Professor’s secretary to type it up for me (nowadays secretaries are anyway an extinct breed – you do your own typing unless very senior, and therefore almost certainly a keyboard incompetent), and duly presented him with a copy. ‘Oh, a thesis, how VERY interesting’ was his initial comment, ‘What is it all about?’ I patiently told him, and how to my immense chagrin, a very, very recent paper in the journal Science, after its rival Nature, the world’s second most prestigious journal, had stolen my thunder. He then made one of the two most useful suggestions he, or indeed anyone else, could ever have made: ‘Oh, that’s no problem, send 93something to Nature.’ I did, and it, my very first paper, was duly accepted, and was published by the world’s top journal after all, to my surprise and delight. Pretty good for anyone, let alone a graduate student just starting off in the research rat race! His second suggestion was that he would ask a friend of his to act as external examiner in a viva voce examination; the internal examiner was to be the departmental statistician who had come on my most recent archaeological expedition by Land Rover – the only academic among a mob of students. That just left the need to pack up our meagre possessions, and to arrange a flight to New Zealand, paid for by the University of Otago. My supervisor’s final comment, on learning my destination, was an aghast ‘New Zealand! That’s just academic suicide!’ from a man, nice as he was, whose academic horizons barely stretched beyond Oxbridge. I just had to prove him wrong, and I did.
