Researchers

DR TONY MCDONALDDr Tony McDonald

Adjunct
Institute for Land, Water and Society

A quick read through Dr Tony McDonald’s resume and it quickly becomes apparent that Tony has worked extensively in many of the world’s developing countries.

“Basically I choose work I find interesting and where I feel I can contribute to improving people’s lives,” says Tony who has collaborated in projects dealing with subsistence agriculture, environmental protection, and/or natural resource management issues in rural and urban contexts. His work ranges from capacity building to project design, monitoring and evaluation.

Tony comes across as an intense man, able to break into a smile every now and then but “driven” when it comes to helping his fellow human beings wherever he can, and doing whatever he does as well as he can. This drive has led him to a life where he has worked in 17 countries over the last 18 years. He chuckles when he muses that “for over 20 years either a personal computer or a trusty laptop have seldom been more than two and a half metres from my head” when he sleeps, and you know he isn’t exaggerating for the sake of the story.

Tony has worked for such organisations as the World Bank, AusAID, Asia Development Bank, CARE, the ACF and World Vision Australia, professional consultancy companies, and “NGOs from every colour and complexity including environmental organizations like Greening Australia, the politically correct and the Christian humanitarian organisations” in development and emergency situations. Development work has predominantly been one of short-term contracts with a high turn-over in staff,” he says.

The real “turning point” for Tony was in 1983 after he worked as a horticulturalist in Saudi Arabia. It was long hours and as Tony says, he made a “fistful of dollars”. “But I never quite before had seen how bad the conditions were for third world people working in that situation,” he says. “It was a real struggle for me to understand how an overtly religious country like Saudi, could tolerate such extraordinary inequities and a hierarchy of brutality towards people, most particularly the unskilled at the bottom of an explicit pile.”

On his return to Australia from Saudi Arabia, Tony did a Bachelor of Social Science (Socio-Environmental Assessment & Policy) at RMIT and then a Masters of Landscape Architecture (Environmental Planning) at the University of Melbourne. After completing his Masters he took on a position in 1990 as an environmental planner working with 16 Aboriginal communities in Central Australia “doing the very same things every new Government trumpets, building housing for Aboriginal people, with myself and the team asking how can how can we make this more environmentally and culturally appropriate.”

When that contract ended, he “started the regional office of GreeningAustralia in Central Australia.” The biggest project he worked on in his three years with Greening Australia was a management plan for a 60ha remnant Coolibah Swamp within the urban area of Alice Springs. This was the impetus for his doing a PhD with Charles Sturt University which, after he took up a two year position as an environmental program planner with the Eritrean Environmental Agency in Eritrea, evolved to research that focused on desertification issues. For various reasons, including consultancy work he undertook in various countries and in Australia, renovating two houses, and seeing his son through school, Tony says his PhD, on the Development of the National Action Plan to Address Desertification in Eritrea “dragged out for seven years;” a victim of the civil war on one hand and his own shortage of time on the other.

Since September 2005, Tony’s principal deployment has been  as consultant advising to the Asia Development Bank’s recovery work post-tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia. The objective of the Aceh activities has been to identify, recommend on and support issues associated with environmentally sensitive areas, with particular attention on minimising the impact of proposed projects undertaken to restore people’s livelihoods and settlement. In the last three months, for example he has produced a “hands on” action plan for local decision makers at local government level in Aceh to promote the reestablishment of mangroves. Another project in Aceh was an urban satellite development plan that looked at ways to manage, as a whole, 16 villages that were either new or that had been rebuilt after the tsunami by various NGOs.

“The frustrating thing is you can only give advice, people don’t have to take it,” says Tony. “I’m a very practically orientated person. Indeed my link with the University is awkward because I’m not a born academic. I’m much more fascinated with how to make ideas work on the ground. I’m always quietly impressed and enthusiastic about the sort of activities that go on within the Institute, but I’ve always got a keen eye that looks for the ‘so what, what’s making a
difference’ not to the research organisation but to people’s lives.”

Last year Tony spent two months on Kiritimati Island, in the Republic of Kiribati just south of Hawaii working on a project design for a water supply and sanitation project for the island. “It is a fascinating place - one of the epicentres for trans-migratory birds that travel from Alaska to Tasmania and the South Pole; a stunning seasonal bird colony,” says Tony. “James Cook landed there in 1777 and it’s also where the atom and hydrogen bombs were tested in the 1950s and 1960s.” Also in 2007 he spent two months on a World Bank project in Vietnam as a member of a team designing an agricultural diversification project covering 12 different provinces in the south and centre of the country, looking at the second phase of a five year project.

But in between his work in Indonesia and other countries, he has managed some collaborative work with ILWS researchers. In 2006 he completed the field work on a climate change project with Dr Rik Thwaites - “Climate change impacts and adaptation in North Central Victoria: Landholders’ Perspective” and with Dr Digby Race in Bali last year on an ACIAR project - “Delivery of Social and Community Training Workshops in PNG and Indonesia.”

At 53 years of age, Tony says he is constantly looking for more balance in his life and possibly less travel. He is keen to do more work with the Institute and ultimately relocate to around Albury- Wodonga because he enjoys the “richness of the [the Institute] environment…the breadth and the ideas.” “Charles Sturt University, from what I understand, is one the universities that is locked into the regional community’s needs, probably because of its location,” says Tony. He describes his work overseas as “challenging but very draining and disorientating from the society I live in, so I have to work at maintaining balance in my life.” One way he does that is by playing golf. “I’m a golf tragic,” he laughs.

Article appeared in Connections #14, August 2008