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Column Centimetres

with Olav Muurlink

As I get older I’m learning to avoid the situations I wish I had avoided in the past. I’ve been to precious few weddings in the last decades, weddings where one is expected to be lighthearted and talk a lot, and drink a lot with people you don’t really know—that’s a complicated combination. I’m not a man of few words. I’m not a big talker by trade, but to turn a Yellow Pages slogan upside down, I let my fingers do the talking.

My perfect number of talking companions is one, which makes much of what I do very difficult for me. As chair of Co-operation in Development, the local charity that has built over 60 schools and kindergartens in Bangladesh to date, I have to manage a room of people united in having a good heart, but diverse in religion, gender, and even time zones, and I have an unfortunately accurate radar that tells me when people are not entirely happy with me—which, when you are dealing with such diversity, is very often.

I concede I am a strange one. When I was 24, at St. Andrews—yes the same St. Andrews of golf and where Prince William met Kate—I was asked to give a speech on animal ethics to The Laboratory, as the psychology department was known then, on the ethics of animal experimentation. The department had multiple floors, and top floor was devoted to animal experimentation. Perfectly nice gentlemen were doing beastly deeds to other animals on the top floor behind heavy security, and I had been stirring up some concern—to the point of being threatened with expulsion—for my activism… Which surprised me, because I wasn’t particularly active. Curious and concerned would be a good description.

So one Friday, just before drinks (a Laboratory tradition), I gave the very first speech I’ve ever given to a packed little arena. The lights were on me, and the audience was seated largely in the dark, and that may have helped, but I remember going into an almost opiate dream as I gave that speech. I realised then something I’d never known about myself: while I am nervous at tea and dinner parties, and panic at weddings to the point my clothes get washed with sweat, I’m cool as a chilled cucumber when it comes to public speaking. I put it down to years spent in the orchards and grapes in winter, practicing public speaking as I snipped away.

The practice comes in handy these days. I give a speech of sorts every second day these days—sometimes in very difficult conditions— once in a concrete bunkerlike hall, slow-cooked at 40 degrees in the statistics department in Dhaka, once on windy verandah squinting into a screen and running low on battery, even with my laptop perched on a bale of straw in Bhola Island.

In a few hours I’ll be giving a lecture to about 60 masters students spread across the eastern states and overseas… on the subject of research in business. It’s a topic I enjoy, but not a format. Whereas I would pay good money to avoid chit chat at a wedding, I really enjoy being in a room with students and being able to read their reactions. Zoom classes, such as the one coming up, are really hard in one regard: where do I get the energy, the enthusiasm from? Try as I might the students don’t turn their cameras on, so I can’t see them; don’t speak, so I can’t hear them… In my mind I take myself back to the Waltham Cross and the Muscatels in July, silent as I snipped away and imagined myself to be Winston Churchill. That tends to work.

Olav Muurlink is associate professor in social innovation at Central Queensland University and chair of the management committee of local charity Co-operation in Development, www.fredhyde.org or The Daily Journal. All art and editorial content remains the property of the relevant copyright holder and may not be reproduced without permission. If we have got something wrong, get in touch, and we will print a correction in our next edition...and apologies in advance!