 After World War II, Lionel Mead took up a career with the Department of Labor and National Service before moving on to the Department of Immigration and taking up a post in London. Working with migration officers Ron Metcalf and Harold Grant, along with Morris Finnis, who was the first advisor on professions to be posted to London. I was called Executive Office of Professions and my job was to set up this small unit within the Immigration Administration in London to interview council applicants who had professional background. And yes, indeed, we had to relate that to the opportunities in Australia as to whether people would be likely to succeed or not. And this is important that both Morris and I, who would be interviewing together, sometimes he might be visiting the university, sometimes I might be, but we'd both be carrying out interviews nearly every morning or every day. We made it plain, we adopted a counselling approach that if we thought somebody would not make it in Australia, we would tell them frankly. We felt there was an obligation on us to be frank and upfront with them. And that was always appreciated. Most cases you could be positive because some of the, a lot of these people might be seeking an opportunity in Australia within their own profession directly, but quite often they had a second choice. It might be an engineer, production engineer, who might want to go to a particular part of Australia where there was not a lot of production engineering, but he might have a second string where he'd be willing or had some capital to set up a business. There are all sorts of variations on the theme. In the first place, we were, part of our responsibility was to know what the criteria were in Australia. And it was our responsibility to convey that to the applicant in London. In many cases it was very clear cut because there was this common ground between training, say in Britain and in Australia, it was almost automatic recognition. But where there was any ambiguity or uncertainty, we would point that out and make it clear to the person concerned they would have to supply further documentation or submit before they even took them out of any photos. If you look at the professions of those that are registrable, there must be, you must be registered or licensed by the official authorities in Australia. There are others where it depended or did depend essentially on the professional organisation. It could make its own decision. Then there was a third sort of not so clear category where it might depend on a person's work experiences, but they might still be regarded as some sort of professional level and there'd be a flexibility there. In the registrable professions, the shining light I suppose at the time, the clear cut one, was the engineers. By virtue of an industrial decision in Australia, I think it was 1961, the engineers' award. The engineers' role and qualification in the industry were very clearly defined, but also their responsibilities. And they as a professional body accepted that responsibility very seriously and they very quickly would show that they were willing to consider persons from most unusual backgrounds. Give you an example, we're talking now about the time the Iron Curtain's still there. They could tell you, even then, if a person presented who was say Polish and had been trying in a Polish engineering institution, generally the institution, the engineers, could tell you whether that was up to the standard or not to be professional Australia. So that was very positive. It's quite well known in those days that the medical profession was the most conservative. And was limiting its automatic recognition to two or three countries. Now, there were other groups such as the social workers, be teachers, secondary school teachers. If you had the university lecturers, it might depend essentially on a particular bit of research they'd done. As you know, it could be very flexible. So it did vary from one profession to another. But I suppose the two examples, the most conservative was medicine and the most enlightened in my view, the most flexible and a good exemplar of the others were the engineers. I was senior migration officer in Washington with just a secretary, but all of my staff were outposted in New York and San Francisco. And while I was there, we opened Los Angeles and Chicago, which is not only immigration, but was trade as well. But the immigration function developed in both, in all four of those places and the Australian officers were based in those consulates general, but they were under my management. It was fairly common knowledge that we'd been inhibited about operating in the United States because of the White Australia policy. But there was very clear evidence that the Department had gathered that there was a great interest amongst Americans in coming to Australia. From what I saw subsequently, and I'm sure it was accurate, it was a troubled time in the United States. Probably the first time when in the land of migration, people were contemplating, migrating to another country. And it was probably the Vietnam War, the moratorium, the urban violence problems in the United States. A mixture of all these things, I think, were troubling a lot of Americans. And we knew from prior to my time, we knew from the researchers have been done that there was a lot of interest in Australia. And then by the time that I went there, we'd got free of the White Australia policy. But until we did, we could not operate publicly in the United States. We'd have to just principally supply advice through the consular. And they couldn't countenance a country operating publicly, advertising and encouraging migration, yet knowing that if you were a black American, you couldn't come. It was that sort of black and, literally black and white problem. But once it was clear to the American authorities that we were clear of that policy, which we could see diminishing, I could see diminishing in Australia and within the department, then we were free to operate publicly. By the time I joined immigration in 1965 and went to London, one could see that the problem was diminishing. There were still limitations. But I didn't meet any particular problems in London and certainly none in Germany. Nobody presented there. But if there had presented, I think the way the situation was changing, we may have been able to accommodate a lot of people. But I personally did not encounter any individual problem in relation to white Australia in London or in Germany.