Vale Brian Robson

I met John Brian Robson (known as Brian) at a Non-Smokers Movement of Australia (NSMA) meeting in 1980.

NSMA had been started by Brian McBride in 1976 when he sued a bus driver for deliberately blowing smoke in his face some time after smoking was banned on buses. No one wanted to be a witness in the case, so he delivered the subpoenas to the bus passengers in person, as usually the same people sat in the same seats every day. To his pleasant surprise they turned up as witnesses in Court and the bus driver was convicted of assault and fined $1. A precedent had been set. In those days everyone’s name and address were available in big phone books, so Brian McBride had some abusive phone calls and had set up the Non-Smokers’ Movement of Australia (NSMA) as a support group and to further the cause of smoke-free indoor air. Brian Robson was there before I had joined.

Some of the Non-Smokers movement members were in BUGA UP (Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions), which was a smaller group who used to spray satirical messages on billboards (mainly but not exclusively tobacco) to draw attention to the harm the products did. BUGA UP also protested in shopping malls and performed street theatre to draw adverse attention to tobacco promotions. The BUGA UP folk never mentioned their other activities at NSMA meetings, so it took a while to realise that Brian was a ‘member’ of this group. ‘Member’ is perhaps the wrong word for being part of BUGA UP, as legal advice was that since many of their actions were illegal, being a ‘member’ would have made one part of a criminal conspiracy. So no ‘members’; t just had people who were willing to act and came along when contacted. Brian was one of them. He was short in stature and quite shy at a personal level, but a good photographer and extremely good at his work, which was the emerging discipline of computer programming and database management.

He used to come to the NSMA demonstrations, but was rarely in the photographs, mainly because he took them. Some demonstrations were at the airport to try to achieve smoke-free air travel. He had a sign that said ‘Sorry Okker the Fokker is Chokker’, a reference to the Fokker Friendship aircraft. I asked him what it meant and he said, ‘Well it really doesn’t mean anything, but people like it’. He was right, of course, and his sign made the public more likely to see the protest in a positive light. It was typical of him; gentle, kind and understated.

He tended to work behind the scenes collecting and processing the photos and slides of both the NSMA and BUGA UP activities for newsletter or pamphlets or reproducing slides for when BUGA UP ‘members’ were asked to speak at meetings or courses on the issue that they had raised, the effect, responsibility and regulation of advertising. He was something of an archivist, but his main contribution was the development of websites and databases which allowed NSMA to be far more effective than it would have been otherwise. He helped a large number of worthy causes with their databases and websites, usually for free.

As a professional engineer at Telecom Brian rose to the position of Computer Coordination Manager. Arguably, he could have qualified for the epithet ‘computer nerd’ as he knew his professional subject really well, but gave no attention to issues of fashion, wearing clothes long after they had seen their best years. He was promoted on the merit of his knowledge, but admitted Computer Coordination was a hopeless task. Every department in Telecom had been allowed to purchase and develop whatever software it chose, so there were a myriad of incompatible programs. Meetings to resolve this usually involved managers much higher up than Brian trying to convince everyone else that their system was the best and everyone else should change to it. It was desirable to move to a new system for everyone and technology was changing. Telecom set up a group called ‘TIME- (Technical Innovation Management Environment) to see what technology was proven and should be adopted. Brian despaired. He said that by the time something was ‘proved’ it was obsolete. Telecom had to ask its IT experts and buy what they suggested. ‘We won’t be right all the time, but we will mostly and TIME merely guarantees that we will be way behind the times’, (especially as membership of TIME related to one’s position in the hierarchy rather than one’s IT knowledge).

Naturally Brian normally kept his BUGA UP work well separated from his Telecom duties. But Brian had a lot of phone extensions in his little section, so had agreed to host a BUGA UP answering machine. Unsurprisingly, there was a complaint to Telecom about this phone number’s ‘illegal activities’. Telecom vowed to trace the call and take all measures to stop it. Eventually the dedicated sleuths arrived at Brian’s section and he asked them what they were looking for. They told him of their mission to trace where the answering machine was. “Oh” said Brian. “It would be embarrassing for Telecom if it were found on one of our own extensions, wouldn’t it?” The sleuths suddenly realised that their mission had to change its focus. “Why don’t I find the problem and deal with it?’ offered Brian. “Yes, that sounds like the best solution,” the sleuths agreed. Brian took the answering machine home.

BUGA UP was tackling tobacco sponsorship of culture and sport. The Winfield Cup for Rugby League had a bronze statue of a large and a small footballer caked in mud walking off after a grand final. BUGA UP devised the ‘Windfailed Cup’, which had a large doll putting a cigarette into the mouth of a small doll. Brian made and photographed it. It was publicised on the ABC with Roy and HG. Many posters of the cup were made and sold by BUGA UP.

Telecom became Telstra and management decided to downsize. Big payouts were offered as redundancy. The longer you had been there and the more you knew, the more you were paid to leave. Brian qualified for a big payout and got ready to go. Then management decided it was losing all its expertise, so devised a knowledge questionnaire for employees seeking redundancy.  If you passed it, you couldn’t leave.  Brian reckoned he could do it all, so spent his last few weeks dodging the questionnaire.  He left and was immediately re-hired by a private computer firm who had, you guessed it, a contract with Telstra.  They were amazed at his knowledge and paid him as much in 2 days as he had been paid in a week and he had totally flexible hours, doing part of what he had done before.

Brian’s working career transitioned over the years from programming on mainframe punched cards to desktop database programming. It was in the late 1980s when Brian created a successful job tracking database system for photographic services at the Australian Museum.

Around this time, Brian, Ric Bolzan and Denise Greig, a plant photographer, formed “Diversity Media” to produce multimedia interactives on CD-ROM. It was one of the first Australian companies to do so, producing Plants of Australia, which was technically and financially successful. Unfortunately the newly emerging “internet” quickly killed off the CD-ROM multimedia market which made Diversity Media unable to capitalise on the investment in Brian’s core programming infrastructure to produce subsequent products.

He also worked for the newly created NSW Heritage Office in the late 1990s where he designed and developed a database for the State Heritage Register. When the database went online, it was one of the first in the world to use the new “internet” technology and it won a NSW Premier Public Sector award for technology. Brian is still fondly remembered by staff of the formative years of at the Heritage Office and much of the data and structure developed by Brian is still in use today.

As a true eccentric in that he had a few unusual interests, he continued to develop databases and websites either for money or for worthy causes such as the Bondi Beach website www.bondibeachvillage.com, which provided both historical and current information on venues and activities. He personally checked out all the coffee shops.

He had particular interest in the abuse of apostrophes. He felt that grammar was completely going to pieces so called himself ‘Apostrophe Man’ and wrote to any supposedly reputable publication that dared to commit an error. It was a losing battle. He had a website www.sharoncolon.com where more egregious mistakes were photographed and documented, and scoured pulp magazines for absurd headlines; a happy hunting ground.

Originally a Grafton boy, he loved country music and went each year to the Tamworth Festival. Sharon Colon branched out into his other interests ‘The Fifties Fair’ and Rockabilly music, documented from 2003-2014 with lots of photos, but only two with him in them in 11 years.

He lived alone with 2 cats, and was found dead in bed at home when he uncharacteristically did not turn up for a lunch date. He will be missed by a number of his groups, locals in Bondi, Country music and 1950 rockabillies, his old Telecom and Heritage office friends, BUGA UP and the non-smokers, those concerned about grammatical errors, some software and database developers and those who respect consistent but respectable eccentricity. He is survived by his brother, David and his wider family.