ABSTRACT
From 1914 to 1918 George Elton Mayo was lecturer in charge of the Department of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts. Early in 1918 Mayo, too, was dissatisfied with his career. In 1914 and 1915 Mayo’s teaching load was heavy, but after 1916 it eased. Mayo’s letters to Dorothea reveal the organization of his emotional life and his image of himself. When first in Brisbane he had been lonely because he was without family or close friends; and he had worked hard to help himself through recurrent periods of sadness. Mayo’s most rewarding friendship was with Bronislaw Malinowski, the anthropologist, whom he met in July 1914. Mayo and Malinowski did not meet again until 1926 in the United States, when the warmth of their friendship seemed as genuine to Mayo as it had been at their first meeting.
