Prof. Coleman O'Flaherty

Practical approach has served Coleman O'Flaherty well in efforts to build up Tasmanian tertiary education Culinary skill just one more challengeexaminer.com.au : Practical approach has served Coleman O'Flaherty well in efforts to build up Tasmanian tertiary education
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Practical approach has served Coleman O'Flaherty well in efforts to build up Tasmanian tertiary education
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So Coleman O'Flaherty finally relents and opens the sliding glass doors on to the patio, and out dashes Pepper like a thunderbolt to race up and down the fence-line barking with the volume and ferociousness of a doberman four times her size.

Unusually, Coleman hasn't been paying much attention to his feisty canine mate.

He has been concentrating on the preparation of afternoon tea.

This in itself is a rare event, the significance of which the average caller might not grasp.

The house has been tidied and cleaned in honour of the visitors, and the teapot and china cups and saucers have been dusted down.A beautifully colourful, hand-knitted tea cosy sits resplendent on the pot beside a covered cake stand proudly displaying a round, iced and buttered boston bun.

Until the former university chief's dear wife Nuala died five years ago, Coleman had not been involved in domestic detail.

"She took care of me," he says simply of his life partner, his eyes shiny with tears.

Since then, he has taught himself to cook, applying the same practical, scientific approach to the problem that has made him a sought-after civil engineer and academic during a long and distinguished professional career.

But he has found it more challenging than working out the correct camber for the latest national highway.

"I learned how to scramble eggs the other day," he tells the photographer with satisfaction.
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It doesn't explain why an Irish Catholic from County Galway, the youngest of six children who all went to university except one sister - "and that was her choice because she wanted to go nursing instead", says Coleman - decided to stay put in Tasmania, of all the places where he has worked in the world, when he retired.

"At the time, the answer was that we didn't see the need to go (away from Tasmania)," replies Coleman.

"We liked it here; we were both very happy.I wanted to do some writing, and this is a good place to do writing - then I got involved in quite a few local activities."

Still, it's a curious choice for someone who came for the job, not the place, and took nearly two years to notice the beauty outside the university empire that he became impassioned about developing.

Professor Coleman O'Flaherty's professional life had been interesting before he successfully applied for the position as head of the emerging Tasmanian College of Advanced Education, based in Launceston, in 1978, and moved with Nuala to the State from Canberra.

The couple had been in Canberra for five years after Coleman was appointed as chief engineer for the National Capital Development Committee.

If you have the time, there are dozens of O'Flaherty-style stories about the national capital that include the experiences of one of Tasmania's few early federal ministers, the West Coast pioneer King O'Malley, whose job it was to select the site for construction of the national capital, which had to be at least 100 miles from either Melbourne or Sydney and out of gunshot range of the coast.

Before that, the O'Flahertys had been at Leeds University, where Coleman had been a senior lecturer and completed his Ph. D., and before that at Iowa State University, in the US.

But Coleman O'Flaherty's professional life really became interesting after he came to Tasmania.

The O'Flahertys came for five years - "you need that much time to properly develop a job", says Coleman.

That was more than 25 years and three academic institutions ago.

The first was to run the young Tasmanian College of Advanced Education, which became the Tasmanian State Institute of Technology under Prof. O'Flaherty's guidance, then the University of Tasmania's first fully fledged Northern campus, which came amid much stormy public and internal university political protest.

Eighteen months after Coleman arrived, the TCAE had 300 full- time equivalent students at both campuses.

Eighteen months after that, the TCAE campu, at Mt Nelson in Hobart was closed and the campus was absorbed into the Hobart site of the university with 1100 full- time equivalent students.

"We had 1100 students, 830 of whom were teacher education students - the answer was quite clear, broaden it out," says the pragmatic academic.

A modest man, Coleman is not one for self-praise.

"I was lucky that when I was trying to establish the university up here, it was an era of great change from a time when everybody had a job to one where it was often too hard to get a job so people started staying at school longer and going on to university," he said.
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Coleman has written two books since he retired from the university of Tasmania - respected volumes for civil engineers.

He thinks that will be enough now.

He has others things to do - such as being involved in groups like Independent Retirees, of which he was president for three years, as a member of the former Jack Fotheringham's 30-year-old bridge club, the Tasmanian Library Advisory Board and the Tasmania Museum in Hobart and as a trustee and a member of the Friends of Launceston's Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery.

And his curiosity keeps him reading and pondering the meaning of life.

He considers carefully what he would choose as the most important quality in a person.

"I think decency," he says finally.