Toowoomba in the Darling Downs region of southern Queensland, the Australian community education and lifelong learning movement, and the global adult education and lifelong learning community, have lost a great leader and quiet achiever with the death this month of Glen Postle.

Glen made a huge and lasting contribution to our understanding of people living together across social groups, roles and especially generations, within the academic and locality-based communities, and across disciplinary and managerial boundaries and levels. His communications are peppered with wisdom drawn from many eras and cultures; yet his work evolved, was tested and applied on the ground, in the community, through conversation and joint action.

C4C, that is community for community, linked his University of Southern Queensland with diverse Toowoomba people and organisations. Connecting alienated youngsters with retired oldsters was an elegant and truly innovative way of turning two kinds of lonely lost souls from problems to purposeful connection back into place.

In many ways Glen’s work has grown roots and continues, fed by the same values of community mutuality. Glen is outstanding among my many friends many places: a person utterly without self-regard, self-interest and self-seeking, and a modesty of humility. He was self-effacingly generous: not from shyness or a wish to please, but as a way of living and being. The love and regard in which he was and is held in and far beyond every corner of Toowoomba bear witness to a model of how life can be.

Glen Postle and family

Glen died on Monday 10 September. He was a long-time collaborator with many in the PASCAL family. His first association with our colleagues was in the early 1990s when he visited the UK to explore the field of widening access to higher education, a field of endeavour that was of high profile in Australia at the same time. His collaborators at that time, and for many years beyond then in this area, were PASCAL Associates, Pat Davies, Jim Gallacher, Kate Sankey and Mireille Pouget as well as PASCAL Director in Europe, Mike Osborne.

He also established long-term academic and personal relationships with other UK figures, eminent in the field of access, including Geoff Layer, now Vice-Chancellor of Wolverhampton University, and Gareth Parry of Sheffield University. He published a number of excellent articles comparing Australia’s and the UK’s policies and practices. He made many visits in succeeding years, including stays as a visiting professor at the University of Stirling with accommodation at Kate’s organic farm and spins in the PASCAL webmaster, Steve Rubin’s Porsche.  He also engaged in many adventures further afield in Europe. He was delighted to be able to spend time in Barcelona at the European Summer School for Continuing Education in 1996, where he made great friends with another colleague well-known to PASCAL, Ettore Ruggiero from Bari.

Glen was also a leader in the field of distance education and a driving force behind USQ’s developments as a dual-mode university and its eventual recognition by the International Council for Distance Education as the world’s best such university. This inspired a collaboration between Mike and Glen to establish a completely online joint Master’s Degree in Technology-enhanced learning in the late 1990s during the infancy of the internet. The relationships that Glen created with colleagues in Europe and particularly in the UK endured over a 25 year period, and he facilitated many exchanges between his colleagues and academics in UK universities, particularly at the University of Stirling, all of whom remember him fondly.

In his role at USQ, Glen provided supervision for a great many doctoral candidates across a variety of education topics. The consistent theme in the various topics of study related to ways of enhancing quality in student provision, as well as accessibility and the effectiveness of online communication. He was widely known in the University as a great, unassuming colleague, but even more so in the community for his quiet yet persistent support for initiatives which focused on inclusion and providing learning opportunities which brought out the best in people. It is a mark of his character that these activities encompassed both new life for disengaged students and meaningful engagement for older men.

Flexischool and TOMNET were two extremely important ventures which were not only very successful in their own objectives, but were linked. In a manner that was deeply representative of Glen’s own qualities, he brought the warmth and experience of older men together with vulnerable yet courageous young people in Flexischool.  Flexischool in particular came to be highly regarded nationally and was rewarded with a significant national prize. It is no surprise that Glen himself was awarded the Vice-Chancellor’s Prize for Engagement. He was also won Queensland’s Miller-Grassie Award for Outstanding Leadership in Education.

Glen was committed to institutional innovation, and was a very active force in bringing USQ and the wider Darling Downs region into the Pascal Universities and Regional Engagement (PURE). Project.  In turn, he contributed as a member of the team which visited Melbourne as part of its engagement in the PURE process.

Glen was exceedingly modest about his achievements, which were immense. He genuinely cared about people. Even when retired for over a decade he never stopped using education as a vehicle to promote social justice. He had a wonderful capacity to see the best in people, particularly the young, and knew that education could liberate them.

Chris Duke, Mike Osborne, Bruce Wilson, co-founders of the PASCAL Observatory