Arthur Dunton: UNE's most remarkable distance teacher

Abstract

Arthur Fielding Dunton (1915-2007) was born in Bundaberg, Queensland, on 21 March, 1915, a month before the Gallipoli landings in World War I. One of his cousins would be born after his father was killed on the Western Front, so that Arthur's own immediate generation grew up in the shadow of the tragic personal costs of the Great War. The next major event for them was the Great Depression, Arthur being fourteen when it began. His acceptance into teacher training, aged sixteen, would have been a great relief to the family given that he was the eldest, and the only boy. His first teaching appointment was to a small school in outback Queensland. It served a nearby fettler's camp, and he had then boarded in the local pub. Unfortunately, one night it was burned down, and so he had to live - and further educate himself - on the verandah of the tiny schoolhouse. Remarkably, during those fraught early teaching years, he had still been able to study externally for his BA degree with the University of Queensland. This empowering instruction was provided by special lecturers who were not in the actual teaching departments of the main university in Brisbane. This type of splitting the teaching of the academic staff between two categories of mentors was one against which Arthur would long fight, which he resisted in New England, and which he and so many of the foundation staff at Macquarie University - many of whom were recruited from New England - ensured could never happen there.