I’m Heather…

…until the business closed in August of 2020, I was managing Artisan Office Services, having had to take over on an emergency basis at the beginning of 2019, to support family. I moved to Bowen as a child in 1980; this is our family’s 41st year on the island.

From the early 2000s, Artisan published The Bulletin, mailed out to every home on Bowen. The Bulletin featured an extended editorial, often on the hot-button Bowen topic of the day, and more generally, on the civic and political life of this community. I am now the custodian of that archive.

This new bulletin, online this time, was intended to be both a home for that archive, but more than that, to carry on a tradition I fear we’re losing; those long-form editorials were part of a vibrant, open, connected, occasionally spirited, informed, and engaged political community on the island.

I had plans to bring those voices onto this platform, and to explore topics that matter to me. I wanted to include interviews, maybe podcasts and video, as well as written opinion pieces, by a range of people. Among the things I’ve been thinking about for a long time:

• the gentrification of Bowen

• diversity and inclusion on Bowen

• supporting local businesses, artists, thinkers, dreamers and misfits

• protecting and caring for our land and our people

• public transportation and ferries

• the ideas, thinkers, books and stories that can enrich how we understand where we are and who we could be

• island history

BUT – events have changed those plans. I’m not at all sure anymore that this is a place I want to be, or one where I can see a future for me.

What is this project and who am I?

I discuss what this blog project is elsewhere. Here, I’ve added some further notes on who I am:

a historian…

I am more than anything else a historian, by training and instinct.

I graduated with an Honours BA in History from UBC, and was awarded a fellowship to Oriel College, Oxford; I was in Oxford for more years than I sometimes like to recall, and progressed through the idiosyncratic Oxford system as a postgraduate student. I ended up as a D.Phil (Ph.D) student, but am what they call ABD – all but dissertation. I reached a point where I’d had enough of academia.

My area of study was late medieval and ecclesiastical history, with a particular focus on female mysticism. I was (am!) interested in systems of power, the ways in which the marginalised navigate those systems, how people construct stories and their own experience of selfhood from the cultural materials at hand, the emergence of proto-bourgeois forms of life and thought, the intersections between material conditions and ideologies, to mention a few.

History as my grounding also gives me the inclination, and the stamina, to face sources such as 400 pages of VCH FOI records, redacted and partial, to find the themes and continuities, as well as the revealing ellipses, and to watch more hours of meetings, read more minutes, bylaws and Acts, than any sensible person ever would.

My years in Oxford also gives me a fairly unique, and global, view of the ways in which elites, self-defined as much as anything, perpetuate themselves, how they protect before and above anything else their own privilege, and their own self-serving mythologies.

I am, in Oxbridge speak, an Orielensis – my college was Oriel. When I started there, it had only recently admitted women (it was the last college in Oxford or Cambridge to do so).

More recently, in the storm of BLM, it was the focus of a campaign to take down the statue of Cecil Rhodes that sits high on a College building, looking down on everyone who comes through the College gates; this was part of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign that had started in South Africa in 2015. A very long story, which I won’t rehearse here, except to say that throughout the period I am describing on Bowen, I was also part of a long, political, complex process of discussion around decolonisation, the legacy of empire, and the politics of philanthropy. Topics that also interest me greatly.

a bureacrat…

But as well as historical training, I’m also someone who has for years worked in information management of many types, in public service roles, and in related public service administration roles. I’ve worked for

• two municipal governments
• the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
• the BC Provincial Government
• the University of British Columbia

I know

• how governments and public sector organisations work, or don’t work
• how bureaucracies work
• how they handle and massage information
• how public servants behave
• how leadership plays out in public service environments
• how accountability does and doesn’t happen
• how intricate and really very, very destructive blame avoidance and denial are

At some very concrete levels, I know experientially how hiring, personnel management, budget pressures, political pressures, record keeping practices, internal and external auditing, procurement, contracting, data protection, work, or don’t, what best practices are, versus actual on the ground applications.

I’ve seen the good, the bad, the ugly, and the truly mediocre. A number of the roles I’ve filled have been ones where I was essentially parachuted in to fill gaps in departments or other organisational units which were, in one way or another, in crisis.

I have tremendous respect for very many in public service, and I know just how much they contribute and give. I have met and worked with people whose integrity and commitment to service is profound. I am also entirely familiar with how easy and reflexive it is to criticise bureaucracies and bureaucrats.

The actual regard I have for the very necessary and often difficult work done by public servants is one reason why I am so offended by so much of what I’ve experienced in the last few years, on Bowen, but also at the provincial level.

I not only don’t think it’s good enough, I know it’s not good enough.

And, finally,

I am (now) an exile from Bowen Island

but that is a topic I will save for another day.