With a yearning for freedom that dates back to an early escape from an unsecured front yard at the age of three, Ray Gore (BA ’79) endured, rather than enjoyed, his school years. The eldest of seven children in a ‘typical “battler” household’, Ray was keen to ‘get a job, get a car, get a girlfriend, get a house, get on with it’ and start paying his own way. Going to university was not on his radar.
‘Neither of my parents had much formal schooling. Dad started a hair-dressing apprenticeship aged 13 and Mum started work on a farm at 16 years old. None of my ancestors, aunts, uncles or my older cousins had ever set foot on a university campus,’ Ray says.
Finishing high school in 1971, Ray immediately found work in a bank. By the time he turned 21, he was a husband, father and homeowner. He was also beginning to rethink his stance on not going to university.
‘The catalyst for this was my beloved, late brother, Chris,’ Ray shares. ‘Ever since kindergarten, Chris wanted to be a medical doctor. He finished Year 12 two years after me and achieved a university entrance score that allowed him to study medicine at Monash University. Seeing how Chris’s uni experience was nothing like my previous educational experience got me thinking, “Perhaps I should go to uni after all?”’
The road to a degree
Other things were happening at the time that Ray says helped ‘align the stars’ for him to go to university. Under Australia’s Whitlam Government in the 1970s, tertiary education was free and the Tertiary Education Allowance Scheme (TEAS) enabled independent adults to receive a living allowance. Then there was the announcement that Ray’s hometown of Geelong was to have its own university, meaning he wouldn’t have to move to Melbourne or commute.
With his customary pragmatic approach, Ray mapped out a plan to make university studies possible around his family and financial commitments, beginning with quitting his low-paying bank job and working for two years at Geelong’s local aluminum smelter, Alcoa.
‘Doing seven-day rotating shifts, plus almost unlimited overtime, meant I could earn as much as $500 a week. Believe me, in the 1970s, $500 a week was a huge salary,’ Ray says.
‘I ploughed money into getting well ahead on the mortgage and banked more to set up a fund that could be drawn on to support the family and me through three years of uni study.’
To make sure studying was actually what he wanted, and to help with the transition from workforce to university, Ray also undertook two first-year Bachelor of Arts units part-time at Deakin’s temporary Gordon campus.
Thanks to his hard work, the plan worked. In early 1976, Ray left his job at Alcoa and began full-time study at Deakin. By the time he graduated three years later, Bachelor of Arts degree in hand, he’d decided he wanted to be a full-time uni student for as long as he could, so he enrolled in a one-year Diploma of Education at the University of Melbourne. As a qualified teacher, he was appointed an officer in the Royal Australian Army Educational Corps, where he spent the rest of his career until retiring in 2002.
A family affair
Ray’s brother Chris may have been the first in his immediate and extended family to attend university, but he and Ray were not the last. Ray’s four younger brothers are also Deakin alumni and his niece, Bree Bateman, is just the most-recent of several nieces and nephews who have also completed degrees at Deakin.
‘They are all using their qualifications to contribute to making the world a better place,’ Rays says proudly.
‘Unlike me, my four children grew up knowing that going to university was a real option for them. That awareness has passed down to my nine grandchildren and in time will pass to my five great-grandchildren (and counting).’
Finding freedom
All these years later, Ray is still proud of passing all his units and exams without ever requesting an assignment deadline extension, despite his family responsibilities and working two, and sometimes three, part-time jobs to pay the bills.
‘I had “one bite of the cherry’ and I couldn’t ruin it all by letting my discipline slip,’ he says.
‘I needed the certificate and the accompanying post-nominals. I was married with two children and a mortgage at the start of my degree and had four children and a bigger house, meaning an even bigger mortgage, by the time I finished.’
Despite all this, Ray still counts his three years at Deakin as among the most enjoyable and rewarding of his life.
‘The predominant experience for me was a kind of freedom I’d never known before. I learned and grew to become the captain of my destiny,’ he explains.
‘Half a century after commencing study at Deakin, I’ve come to learn that the freedom I sought isn’t achieved through escaping from the confines of classrooms or servitude in onerous employment. It’s a state of mind, characterised by the freedom to imagine, to be creative, to dream. Deakin taught me that.’