The South Australian who helped change the face of the Top End
Local
Minutes before I met with Richard Ryan to discuss his life story, which is now in print as 'Northern Territory Reflections 1970s and Beyond', I had been researching the renowned South Australian anti landmine campaigner Sr Patricia Pok Poy who had died a few days earlier.
“I went to Rostrevor College with her younger brother Doug,” Richard told me. “He was my best friend. The family ran a grocer’s shop on Magill Road.”
It should have been no surprise. There are not many people that Richard Ryan, OAM, a founder and inaugural chancellor of Charles Darwin University and a (twice) chair of the Menzies School of Health Research, doesn’t know.
He wrote the book as part of a PhD centred on finance but found he was effectively teaching the tutors given he had lived, and pioneered, much of the creation of the modern Northern Territory. It is perhaps the one project from a most colourful and accomplished life that will go unfinished.
Rostrevor, where he studied from the age of 12 to 16, was clearly of another other era, where Richard said “only one teacher had a degree”, a stat wholly in sync with teaching at the time.
Despite this, the famous school gave the boy from a ‘mixed marriage’ (his father Vin was of Irish Catholic ancestry and his mother Stella was a German Methodist) a solid grounding and posse of friends who would also prove great achievers later on, the acclaimed Adelaide surgeon David David and Justice of the Supreme Court, Kevin Duggan, among them.
There was also a relative who headed the Dominican Order in New Zealand, but it was an uncle (Ron) who became the defining figure in Richard’s life.
His father, who fought in Tobruk and across north Africa and the middle east during World War Two, died when Richard was just 10-years-old and Ron took over the paternal role.
It so nearly never happened. Ron had been a soldier in New Guinea in WW2 and was carrying a badly wounded digger to safety when he came across a passing Japanese patrol. Pretending to be dead, he lay beneath his colleague who was killed by an enemy soldier, the bayonet failing to reach Ron who duly escaped.
Upon discharge, he moved to the Northern Territory to spend his life giving back as best he could and to atone, of sorts, for his fortuitous escape.
“He was a genuinely good man,” said Richard. “Ron became an inspiration to me.”
Richard, as an indirect beneficiary of Ron’s good nature also, took up the baton and after military service at Duntroon and qualifying as an accountant, set out to change the face of the top end in his late 20s.
Northern Reflections is an account of an Australia that has evolved beyond comprehension almost in the last half century yet one whose challenges and outlook remain as firmly rooted as ever.
Richard in his younger days as a trailblazer in frontier Australia
Early on Richard helped, and then joined, an engineering outfit called Henry and Walker which was instrumental in the rebuild of Darwin after Cyclone Tracey (where Richard lay over his children as a flying metal beam came through the window) and became the first company from the NT to be listed on the stock exchange. He said it has not had the recognition it deserves.
It too, boasted the first indigenous board member, a fact of which Richard (by now a co-director) remains immensely proud and the theme of helping courses throughout the book which he wrote in a year and was edited by former ABC journalist (and South Australia’s first ever female TV newsreader) Paula Nagel.
More than $15 million has been raised for Charles Darwin University by Richard’s philanthropic endeavours but a much smaller story relating to his alma mater in Adelaide is perhaps most telling.
“About 20 years ago” (he can’t recall exactly when) he set up a scholarship to fund an indigenous boy from the NT to be schooled, and boarded, at Rostrevor.
“He wrote to me to say thank you very much and told me he had become a school teacher,” said Richard.
This last gem was from our chat and goes unmentioned in the book but is symptomatic of a crusader and ridiculously under-the-radar achiever.
For anyone who has ever lived in the Northern Territory, and Darwin in particular, Northern Refections will fill in the gaps about how and why it has grown and what draws people like Richard, back to it time and again.
Rostrevor College may not have thought much about Richard ever since he left more than six decades ago but in terms of its acclaimed alumni, he has to be pretty much as good as it gets.
Northern Territory Reflections 1970s and Beyond is published by Wakefield Press in Adelaide. $59.95/hardback, wakefieldpress.com.au
