Martin Dolan

A history of public service

In his lyric poetry today, Martin Dolan draws deeply from a well of personal experiences to express strong emotions. With a medieval historian and archaeologist for parents - both once employed as lecturers at UNE - he grew up in a household that valued understanding the past.

Studying French and English at UNE was, he says, a deliberate choice not to follow in their footsteps. However, during a 36-year career in the Commonwealth public service, Martin has accumulated a wealth of experiences sufficient to rival the most fascinating of historical narratives.

Realising he was not ideally suited to the teaching for which he had trained, and engaged to be married, Martin secured a graduate position managing aid projects for the Australian Development Assistance Bureau (later AusAid). It took him to Dhaka in Bangladesh for two years with his young family.

"It was only 10 years after Henry Kissinger [then the US's National Security Advisor] had called Bangladesh an international basket case, which was unfair but encapsulated the struggles the new country was facing," Martin says. "From Canberra, you knew the challenges of development, but actually going there and seeing Bangladesh working through the challenges of poverty, primary health care, population management, the rural to urban shift, and so on, taught me what foreign aid was all about."

The post also afforded Martin his first exposure to aviation, which was to feature prominently later in his career. Along the way he held various corporate management roles, including as chief finance officer and then head of management in the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.

"I suppose I had a talent or capability for running corporate teams - financial services, HR - then, with a very poor sense of timing, I became executive director of Aviation and Airports in 2001, and 9/11 happened," Martin says. "By the end of that year I was running aviation security and trying to rebuild transport security in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. Aviation safety and security underwent a fundamental shift. It was an interesting time."

Martin concluded his career with the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, the independent government body charged with investigating transport accidents. He was its first chief commissioner when another major international incident - the mysterious disappearance of Malaysian aircraft MH370, in March 2014- again put him in the spotlight.

"The formal investigation was run by the Malaysians, but Australia was asked to lead the search and I was its public face," Martin says. "The most challenging thing, emotionally, was working with the families. But there were also all the technical complexities of the search, and trying to explain that in a way that was understandable to the public, so it could have some confidence in what we were doing.

"We had to work through questions about why we aren't able to track aircraft over the ocean and the very real possibility that the plane had been brought down deliberately. There was just no parallel and you couldn't learn from past experience."

The Boeing 777 disappeared with 239 people on board en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and the search zone in the deep waters of the southern Indian Ocean, off the coast of Perth, covered some 60,000 square kilometres. Wreckage washed up on distant coastlines in 2015 and 2016, but the aircraft has never been recovered and the search was suspended, after three years, in January 2017.

"Until the aircraft is found, we cannot know beyond doubt what happened and we can't give a definitive answer to the grieving families," Martin says. "However, we have now put in place processes that give us a greater capacity to track aircraft in flight outside of normal radar coverage and we also know what we can do in terms of underwater searches."

At the same time as they were investigating flight MH370, Martin's team was also running about 100 other aviation, marine and rail investigations. He says he learnt a great deal from what remains one of aviation's greatest mysteries. "I learnt that if you give a team of good people a difficult target and support them as best you can, they will surprise you. In challenging circumstances, people invariably step up and do things above and beyond what you could reasonably expect of them."

It's a philosophy that Martin takes into his current role, as chair of the UNE Foundation, which administers donations that fund student scholarships and contribute to the university's teaching and research. And he is often reminded of the true value of his arts degree.

"I'm a good example of what a generalist arts degree can position you for - how it helps you to learn to absorb, structure and analyse information, and make sense of it through critical thinking," Martin says. "That was a valuable set of skills that my arts degree gave me, and the French, the translation part, was also key; I was often taking complex technical subjects and translating them into something that others could understand and act upon."

Having written "awful poetry" as a student, Martin put his passion aside until his 40s, when he began publishing in earnest. Now retired, Martin is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Canberra and his third collection has just been released. "Poetry engages me on an emotional and intellectual level; it's a bit like music in that it takes me to a different place," he says. "I've had this other world that I can go to to seek respite from the cares of my day job."

Perhaps not so surprisingly, his current volume has taken Martin back in time, trying to imagine himself in the heads of his forebears. "The focus is on how autobiographical memory works, how we remember things about what has happened to us," he says. "In poetry you can find proxies and deal with some complicated things at arm's length. Then, the challenge is to make your experience relevant to other people."