Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today I want to put on record my appreciation of a life that was tragically lost on Black Saturday. I do not mean to single out this one individual as somebody more noteworthy than the others of the 210 who have died, but he was a member of my constituency and I had the sad privilege of attending his funeral. Whilst I knew this constituent to wave to and say hello to, I did not know him well, and I feel that I have missed out on knowing a terrific human being—a great man whose loss will be felt by many. Indeed, many in this place knew Dr Ken Rowe. I want to give my appreciation to the member for Bradfield, who came and spoke so eloquently at Ken’s funeral, and to the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, who was also there on the day.

Dr Ken Rowe was an extraordinary human being—a great community leader; a phenomenal educationalist; a terrific father, husband and brother; and an all-round beaut bloke. He was very involved in the local community and will be sadly missed by the small but very active community at the Wattle Park Chalet in my electorate. Indeed, he was spoken of very lovingly as one of those characters whom everybody knew. His typical goodbye usually ended with, ‘How’s your love life?’ He was one of those larger-than-life characters whom I think we will all sadly miss.

Ken’s great contribution to our community was through his work as an educationalist. Ken was fervently of the view that education needed to be grounded in basic research and methodology. He railed against many things. He was admonished by many in his industry for being a bit too much of a straight talker, and he often sparked controversy, especially with his position on literacy and for speaking out against ‘postmodern claptrap’. He believed that quantitative methods should inform how we teach and how we instil education in our younger generation. Quantitative methods, quality teaching and the teaching of phonetics were among Dr Rowe’s passions. He was also a great researcher and expert on the differences between single-sex and co-educational education and schools, and he made a great contribution to the parliamentary inquiry in this place on the education of boys. He probably had a great life experience of that, having had three sons.

Ken Rowe’s last position was as a senior researcher with the Australian Council for Educational Research. He was also Principal Research Fellow and Associate Professor in the Centre for Applied Educational Research at the University of Melbourne and Senior Research Officer in the Victorian Department of Education. He was experienced as a teacher and principal in Victoria. Indeed, just about every principal I spoke to recently in Victoria knew him, having previously been to one of his lectures or read one of his papers. He was a visiting research fellow in the Netherlands, London and Canada. Ken’s substantive and methodological research interests included: ‘authentic’ educational and psychological assessment; multilevel, ‘value-added’ performance indicators and benchmarking; teacher and school effectiveness; and the differential gender effects in the context of teaching and learning at schools.

Ken was at his holiday home in Marysville—a place that he dearly loved—on Black Saturday. He said that it was a wilderness that many people did not know. He said it was a paradise on earth, and he spent many hours there researching and writing. Indeed, Ken often said it was a place that he wanted to die in. I do not think that he wanted to die in the tragic circumstances in which he did.

Ken leaves behind his phenomenal wife, Kathy Rowe, who is an outstanding contributor to our community as well through her work as a paediatrician. He leaves behind his sons, David, Andrew and Iain, and his grandchildren. He leaves behind a community who mourn his loss. I am terribly sorry that I did not get to know him better. One of the interesting things that I found out on the day of his funeral was that he was also a Vietnam vet—something he never spoke about. So he gave so much to this community.

We all will miss him, most particularly his family and those who worked with him. If it is not too unparliamentary, I thought it was great that at the end of the day he was often admonished for being a bit irreverent. When, in one of the last things he did, he talked about education in the media, his administrator said to him that saying ‘pissing in the wind’ about educational research was probably not the way to go about getting his message across. But that was the sort of character he was, and we will miss him greatly.